What Do You Love About What You Do?

What do you love about your job? I've heard that good advice is to do what you love. Easy to say. I've heard the question many times over the years that has given me thought: What do you love doing that you would do for free if you didn't need money? Is there anything in your job that you would feel that way about?

In 25 years with car dealerships, my favorite thing--the thing I loved to do was to manage inventory: order the cars, try to juggle the right inventory mix accounting for season and taste changes, dealer trade needs, color mix and much more. It is very complex if you get into it seriously, but I always thought it was fun and satisfying. I enjoyed it even more doing commercial trucks than the retail inventory. I thought I was pretty good at it and always striving to be better at it. The possibility of improvement was always a given.

The interesting part is that I was never really paid to manage inventory. It was somewhere in the job description I suppose, but even prior to becoming a manager, I asked to order the cars for free just for the experience and fun of it. It is my favorite thing still and I talk about it often in the blog. Of course, there were other things that I loved. I loved giving good sales meetings. I did not love giving bad ones and I have done my share of those, but I always strived to have really good, worthwhile meetings that were fun and interesting. As a result, there were a lot of them that met that objective. I loved encouraging and uplifting the sales team and creating synergy with them to hit objectives, sometimes just for the fun of it. I even loved desking deals and appraising cars, going in on the close, and satisfactorily handling a service issue. There was a lot that I loved about that position. I learned a great deal. Today I look back with a smile as the not so lovable things are now overshadowed by the things I loved then and still love today.

I hope as you think about your own travels that you find things that you really love about what you do and some that you might do for free--if you didn't need money, of course.