How much would you say getting a paycheck influences your want or need to stay at a job? Would you be as motivated to wake up in the morning, get dressed, and haul it into work, and do an excellent job, if you knew at the end of the day there was no paycheck and no perceived reward for your hard work? Let's just alter the question a bit to say, if someone else were funding your room and board, meaning, you had no concerns over living arrangements and getting food, would you, again, given no paycheck, still report in to work?
You really have to sit and think for a moment what it is that motivates you to do the job you do. For a lot of us it is all about the money at the end of the day. We obviously need it to live and so many would argue, how could I possibly not work for money without the aid of someone funding my room and board, but given this hypothetical, that has been done for you and now the question looms. Is your want, need, and desire to work, solely based on money or do you have some other drive, beyond the need for say food and housing, that gives you satisfaction enough at your job to want to work for free.
I would have to say for myself, I used to work for a non-profit a long time ago which barely paid me enough to put gas in my car to get there. Not only that, for a lot of the activities we did with at risk youth, it was out of pocket. They weren't forcing us to go out of pocket, but in my view, there was no other choice if we wanted certain programming or to actually serve as vehicles to enrich the experiences of the children we worked with. My motivation there quickly became so much less about making a paycheck considering I was barely doing that, and more about seeing the kids faces, and giving them experiences they wouldn't ordinarily have, and making an actual meaningful impact on their lives. That motivated my heart, more than my wallet and made me really and truly want to come to work everyday, and I did in fact, do a lot of work outside of the workplace and for free.
Obviously when you have love for your job and what you do, that can motivate you, but what about if you hate your job because of the circumstances within it...long hours, bad boss, crazy employees, but you are good at what you do. Are you then solely there for the paycheck or would you do it for the love of what you do or what your job means for others. Most of us in modern times, don't actually work jobs that have any real importance like retail, IT specialists, lawyers, executive secretaries...these jobs do not help us sustain life as our jobs used to do centuries ago. They are time fillers. They are jobs that do serve a purpose to help someone or something, but we could, if all the lights went out and society crumbled, survive without them. No one needs someone to help them pick out a dress or schedule a meeting in an apocalypse.
What do you think? Does your job and your purpose there, just boil down to getting a paycheck?
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