By Sherrie Funk

As I was thinking about what to write for this column, it dawned on me that it’s getting close to Valentine’s Day. And, we all know what that means. Hearts and flowers, chocolates and LOVE. We all love many things. I love my husband. I also love my daughter and grandchildren, but in a different way than I love my husband. I love my parents. Again, this is different than how I love my husband or my daughter.
I love our house. I know. That sounds silly. But I do. I really love our house. It’s comfortable. It’s great for entertaining. It’s on one-level. It has a big kitchen and great room. I truly love our house. I love music and the arts, and our house reflects that.
But, I also love my job. I do. I really love what I do each day. So much so that Charlie and I talk about work a lot at home. I have learned some things over the years regarding my work. To do something well, you have to like it. You even have to be passionate about it. This isn’t exactly novel. Let’s get it down to four words: Do what you love.
The very idea is foreign to what most of us learned as kids. When I was a kid, it seemed as if work and fun were opposites. Life had two sides: sometimes adults were making you do things, and that was called work; the rest of the time you could do what you wanted, and that was called play. Occasionally the things adults made you do were fun, just as occasionally, playing wasn’t (for example, if you fell and hurt yourself). Except for these few cases, work was pretty much defined as not fun.
When my daughter was in high school, Charlie and I sat on a panel of teachers, students and parents who were discussing issues within her school. She happened to attend the same high school that I had attended, and some of the same teachers I had were still there 25 years later. I really got frustrated with their “We have never done it that way” attitude about anything new and refreshing that the students wanted to see occur at the school. I finally had enough and told them that some of them who were there when I was in school didn’t like teaching then, and they still didn’t. Things were never going to change until they loved what they did. For some reason, they all seemed to believe that teaching was not fun. Which is not surprising: work wasn’t fun for most of them.
Before I went into business for myself, it used to puzzle me when I heard about people who liked what they did so much that there was nothing they’d rather do. There didn’t seem to be any sort of work I like that much. If I had a choice of (a) spending the next hour balancing the company checking account or (b) being transported to Florence, Italy, and spending the rest of the day wandering about, was there any sort of work I’d prefer? Honestly, no.
But the fact is, almost anyone would rather, at any given time, float about in the Caribbean, or eat some delicious food, than work on hard problems. The rule about doing what you love assumes a certain length of time. It doesn’t mean do what will make you the happiest this second, but what will make you happiest over some longer period of time.
Willie Stargell was a baseball player. One afternoon, after a game, he was being interviewed by the media. One of the reporters asked him, “Why do you seem to love what you do so much?” Willie’s reply was, “Because I do what the umpire says.” The reporter asked, “What do you mean you do what the umpire says?” Willie then said, “After the Star Spangled Banner is played, what does the umpire say?” The reporter said “Play ball!” “That’s right,” said Willie. “He says PLAY ball. He doesn’t say WORK ball.”
To be happy in your Home Based agency, I think you have to be doing something you not only enjoy, but also truly love and are passionate about. You have to be able to say at the end of the day, “Wow, that’s pretty cool. I helped someone make memories that they will cherish forever.”
So, my question to all of you is, Are you going to work each day or going to play? If you said work, go back to the beginning of this column and re-read it. It’s time to start loving what you do.

Sherrie Funk and husband Charlie own Just Cruisin! Plus, Nashville. They founded the Travel Agent Management Academy to educate owners and managers about the techniques that have been instrumental to their agency’s success.