Photo by ThisisEngineering RAEng on Unsplash -Cover Photo

Photo by Gardie Design & Social Media Marketing on Unsplash Title Photo

Give it your best...

you never know who's watching

To keep this short, I'm leaving out almost all of the details, but I don't want to understate how awesome of a person this young lady continues to be.

Working at a local sandwich shop, a young woman takes helm of the lunch crowd. Feverishly working both the register and the food counter, she builds sandwiches for her customers and sends them on her way with polite, yet rapid flow. For reasons never asked, a laboratory director takes note of how well she handles the stress of the job. From complex orders to difficult customers, she stays focused and manages every situation almost flawlessly. He approaches her one day with a job offer: come and work as a lab technician with us, we'll pay you more than whatever you're making now. Without little hesitation, she accepts. A couple of years later, she's one of the most valued microbiologist on the bench. If she's gone, the lab suffers a quick and attentive worker. When she's assigned to a specific area, her coworkers breathe easy knowing that behind there back, she's got them covered. Self-taught in areas she didn't understand and not afraid to ask "why does this work" or "what is that for", she took to the laboratory life brilliantly.

This story isn't meant to say that changing jobs will make life better or worse. This isn't meant to say take every risk because you never know. I feel the moral of this story is not just that whole "you never know who's watching", but more along the lines of being able to do anything you put your mind and heart towards. I remember talking with her one day and asking her what was it like coming into the lab knowing very little about what to expect and how much more different work life could be. She said she was a bit intimidated by not knowing what all the job entailed. Her main focus was to take whatever task was presented to her and make the best of it. If she didn't know what something was or how something worked, she'd observe it in use, ask questions of how and why something was done a particular way, and eventually, she just started getting the hang of how certain devices worked. It was like, knowing what buttons to push and when at first and then understanding the how's and why's as she grew more comfortable.

That is not always going to be the case, but I think there's something there in being able to take that first little motion, step by step, until all those motions start to come together to form leaps and bounds. Don't be afraid to ask and don't be afraid to try. Press forward little by little and you've got this.

-Dallas