No matter what career you find yourself in, odds are, at the core, you are an educator.
You educate employees to your company’s process, or you educate staff when they need help, or you educate customers when they are trying to find the right product.
No matter what you do, education is likely at the core.
But it is marvelously thankless.
Some decide to pretend it is not their job—to educate. So instead of helping customers or taking ownership at work, they brush past that, allowing ignorance to remain.
But if we do, we may never write our Lord of the Rings.
For example, look at J. R. R. Tolkien. Before he wrote that marvelous trilogy, he was Professor of Anglo-Saxony at Oxford University, and it showed.
In a recently discovered letter he said, “All teaching is exhausting, and depressing and one is seldom comforted by knowing when one has had some effect.”
How many times have you poured out your time and effort to help someone understand something and had it thrown back in your face or simply forgotten?
But it is worthwhile.
Isn’t it?
Maybe you’ve had this debate.
Regardless of what you believe about that, if you stick with it and take education seriously, you may find something very surprising along the way.
For Tolkien, it was The Lord of the Rings trilogy.
In the summers he would mark School Certificate exams for extra income. One day he wrote a letter to W. H. Auden, explaining how he stumbled into writing the story of the Hobbit: “All I remember about the start of The Hobbit is sitting correcting School Certificate papers in the everlasting weariness of that annual task forced on impecunious academics with children. On the blank leaf I scrawled: ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.’ I did not and do not know why.”
Tolkien’s teaching was a great work, but thankless.
However, it was the very breeding ground for his research, imagination, and ingenuity, and it blossomed into a vision that has enchanted generations—a hobbit living in the ground.
And that hobbit has helped educate more people to the truth about life than Tolkien ever did in his 81 years on this earth.
It’s a theme throughout history, actually. Out of great boredom and plodding comes the greatest generative work—work that generates creativity, goodness, and the sharing of truth.
At the core of every vocation is a calling, and that calling probably involves serving other people. Not just meeting a need, but helping see the world in a different way.
It may take a long time to see that payoff, but whatever you do for work, wherever you find yourself, keep on grading.
After all, you may stumble upon a hobbit of your own!