Are You Useful to Your Work?
If you haven’t read The Little Prince by Antoine De Saint-Exupéry, I’d recommend it. There’s a lot of life lessons in this tiny book. The author tells the story of The Little Prince who lives on a planet by himself. He decides one day to visit others who also live on their own planets alone. The story, told as an allegory, is presented in a way that shows the reader what we look like when we make this world into a very self-focused place.
One day the Little Prince meets a man who laid claim to owning all the stars and spent his days counting and recounting them. This puzzles the Prince…
“I own a flower myself, which I water everyday. It’s useful to my flower that I own it, but you are not useful to the stars.”
The Prince saw his relationship with the product of his work, the flower, as a two-way street. He was useful to the flower by watering and caring for it, so that the flower could be useful to the world by bringing its beauty to our senses. The businessman was of no use to the stars to claim them as his own. He didn’t add value to their lives.
We spend our time tallying up the things we’ve achieved and our talents instead of cultivating them so they can be used for the important work of inspiring others. I believe we have all been made caretakers of our God-given gifts, but we haven’t been taught how to cultivate them–how to be useful to them. Here’s a couple practical ways to be useful to your work.
Learn a new way to grow your work.
The Little Prince found a better way to care for his flower through irrigation. In return, his flower grew. Sometimes we get stuck trying the same inefficient ways to grow our work and we plateau. Read a book, listen to a podcast, get in the habit of setting aside a time each week to learn better, faster, more efficient methods to growing your work.
Share your work even if it makes you sick to your stomach.
This doesn’t come natural to me. I often hate sharing my work. I tend to be hyper-critical and I don’t exclude myself. But this is the point of having talent and creating meaningful work. Many of us share this hesitation to share our work. A reader of my book, UNFINISHED, shared this with me after finishing the book:
“This is my nephew, Nathan; he is five and half years old. Nathan is a non-verbal Autistic child. Before I moved out of the state, I used to watch both him and his older brother (who has Asperger’s) every day. Nathan has his own language and would get so mad at us, because we didn’t understand him. He has been going to a specialty school for autism and is showing some major improvements, but still can’t talk. As a former pre-k teacher, I have had a few children with autism and I tried to work with them. But, I never have been able to be close to them like I am with Nathan.
This was my first poem that I have ever written; I shared it with my boyfriend, and he posted it to a few autism sites on Facebook. I was scared to see what people would think of the poem. I was told by a friend of mine that she saw my poem on one of the sites. So I decided to look at the two sites that reposted my poem. Between the two of them I had 19,871 likes, 480 comments, and it was shared 12,539 times all over the world. I read every one of the comments. So many parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, siblings, and friends shared their stories. A lot of them said that the poem has helped them to understand. Teachers asked permission to print it off to hang in their classrooms.
I started to sell the poem and all proceeds were going towards a service dog for Nathan. A service dog will help keep Nathan safe, because Nathan doesn’t understand boundaries.
Sharing my poem has brought so much awareness to the world. I have been encouraged to write more and possibly make a book out of them. Writing this poem is a reflection of how he communicates to us.”
Tina used her talents to create the work about Nathan, but her act of sharing made her a useful vehicle for her work to impact literally thousands of people. So are you useful to your work? Will you sit around and count up your talents and achievements, or will you choose to share them?
*If you are interested in donating to help Nathan pay for his service dog, you can email Tina at Tinabryant22@hotmail.com