Transforming your joy into a gift
Find something that gives you joy. Don’t be obsessed about monetizing it. Transform your joy into a gift that provides value to others. Those are the key elements that I identified when we discussed “The gift” chapter with Juan Pablo Manzuoli and what inspired my picture for today’s story.
This week I was lucky enough to receive a beautiful gift that explains this very well. In her last day of school, my daughter’s bus driver gave her a couple of presents including a book. I am not sure if this is normal in the US, but it was positively surprising for us from a couple of reasons. The money she spent on everything not just for our daughter but for the other kids as well, the time she spent choosing the presents and getting them and how personalized some of them were. As an example, it looks like the day before my daughter was talking to a friend and to the bus driver about how fun it would be to have an ice cream in the bus. One of the things she brought for her was an ice cream. But, we discovered the real gift only a couple of minutes after my daughter arrived home. It was when we open the book and we saw that there was a note for her from the bus driver. The note said “Frannie, It was such a pleasure getting to know you and watching you grow this year. You made the bus a happier place! I love your good manners, kindness to others and our conversations! Hope you have a wonderful summer! Can’t wait to see where life takes you, because I know it will be far!!!”
A few hours later in the day I was thinking of this and connecting it to “The gift” concept and how to become indispensable at work. You may be thinking what does this act of kindness have to do with that? Well, let me tell you that that evening I reached out to the school to share feedback about the bus driver and how kind she has been to the kids all year and what she did that last day. The school passed that along to the school bus company and said that I was not the only parent talking about it. This will definitely help the driver keep her job and who knows what else. She definitely finds joy in taking the children back and forth from school, she likes to connect with them, get to know them and think of their future as she sees them grow. And she has transformed that joy into a gift for the kids and for us parents. A gift that clearly makes her indispensable in her job and the bus driver every kid and every parent want to have.
Probably easier to say than done but this was a big lecture to me this week: If you want to become indispensable, find your joy and transform it into a gift that brings value to others.
