Do it Anyway

I used to work at a company that claimed to value its people over its profits and their actions supported that for awhile. One example of this was the Cookie Meeting. Each month, my department held a birthday celebration for that month's celebrants. We'd buy cookies from the local bakery and all the staff would gather in a conference room. The birthdays were announced, the cookies were eaten and much merriment ensued for 15 or 20 minutes before heading back to our desks.

My job was to order the cookies, set up the Cookie Meeting (without checking anyone's schedule), and send out a reminder email. It was expected that everyone would show unless they had an important prior commitment. At first, everyone looked forward to this little event and would often stop me in the hall to ask "When is Cookie Day?" so that they could plan their day or their week around it.

Several years later, the company merged with another and became a corporation... and with that, came more work, more stress, more "Sorry, I'm too busy. Can't make Cookie Day this month." Sometimes there would only be 4 or 5 people in the conference room; some months Ken, the manager, would be the only one in the room at the start of the meeting and he'd ask me to walk around the office and grab people, reminding them that the celebration would only take 10 or 15 minutes.

Eventually I got tired of feeling like I was dragging lambs to the slaughter. I called Ken one day and asked him if he and I could have a chat. I told him that no one seemed to care about celebrating birthdays anymore, everyone seemed too busy, sometimes even *I* was too busy to stop what I was doing but I took the time anyway not only because it was my responsibility but because it had become a tradition. Still, I was frustrated with the lack of participation and wondered if maybe it was time to put the tradition to bed.

The manager listened intently and when I was done, he quoted an excerpt of a writing credited to Mother Theresa:

If you are honest and sincere people may deceive you. Be honest and sincere anyway.
What you spend years creating, others could destroy overnight. Create anyway.
If you find serenity and happiness, some may be jealous. Be happy anyway.
The good you do today, will often be forgotten. Do good anyway.

He said that with all of the corporate changes that had happened, scheduling the Cookie Meeting was more important than it had ever been; it should continue to be held monthly even if he and I were the only ones in the room. So I pressed on. I stopped walking around trying to coerce the staff, but I continued to order the cookies and I continued to send the reminder email each month until I left the department.

I've been thinking about this a lot recently. I've just started making the rounds on the craft show circuit again with uneven results. Crunching the numbers has revealed that so far, I've lost money doing shows. In addition, I've had to replenish some supplies and as it is for so many of us, money is tight, tight, tight. As I sat at my worktable yesterday, packing up for my shows this weekend and starting to work on new stuff, I wondered, "Will this ever actually become a viable business? I want this so badly but I can’t seem to make it happen and, I live in the real world. I can't maintain this financially forever if I don't see more return on my investment."

I have two shows to do this weekend and for a fleeting moment, I thought about not doing either of them. I thought, "if they go as badly as my last one, I'll really be discouraged, so what's the point?" The thing is, I don't remember what I was doing before I fell in love with jewelry making and I'm not sure what I'd do with myself if I stopped. It occurs to me that no matter how discouraged I become by slow sales, I would be even more melancholy if I couldn’t do this thing that I have come to love.

So. Do it anyway, right? And so I will. And before this gets too sappy....read on....

That company I used to work for? Six years ago, I was called into a conference room one morning and 30 minutes later I was laid off after 14 years of service. "Nothing personal. Corporate downsizing, you know."

Ouch.