passion as fuel

I lost the spirit there for a week. I think the spirit was taken from me by some angry clients. The clients have the right to get angry but it doesn't do any good to get emotional about it. In fact when you are dealing with some one like me who is passionate about his work it can be very diminishing. Crafts people are sometimes fragile because our work is out their in the open to be examined and criticized. Look at the leaning tower of Pisa. Did any one notice how many straight towers where built, no people just focus in the bad one. For me there is no back up plan, pioneers didn't go east I can't turn back I have to press on and go forward, when you work from passion you know that there is nothing else for you to do on this earth but fulfill your destiny. When the angry clients rain on me I have to revert back into the shop and work on infrastructure. I make lean material tags, or work on the next kaizen event, or try to analyze the value stream in the shop. Those types of things make it all seem worth while. Angry emotional clients are the worst, the make me want to leave the business and I know I can't. This industry chose me, it is how I have always felt. And so I serve the cause and the cause serves me.

We are not perfect. We will make mistakes, we know we are going to make mistakes, and we work on being able to fix them right away. How we handle problems is more important than the problem itself.

Dealing with the negative. It is what I heard about the blog before I started. How will I address the negative. My answer to that was "well dealing with the negative says something about the kind of company I am". So far it hasn't really been an issue because no one has ever commented on this blog before. My answer to that is "Learn". What can I learn from my angry emotional clients, what can I take from the experience and use in the future.

One last comment about working over 40 hours a week. I was talking to a friend of mine and he said that there is a diminishing return on working over 40 hours a week, you actually become less productive. I was telling someone the other day that I dream about my work at night in my sleep, they said ughh you must hate that. Actually I like that. It is my unconscious at work. I get answers to my work dilemmas at night it is like a free resource. That unconsciousness only come from working lots of hours for long stretches of time and working so passionately.