“Choose a job you love and you'll never have to work a day in your life.” - Confucius

Way back in the Pleistocene Era when dinosaurs roamed the halls of my high school, our intrepid maintenance man had a poster with this quote on the wall in his small office.

Whether he was setting up tables and booths in the gym for a career fair after school that afternoon, preparing the buses for a senior class trip to a local college, or just sitting at his cluttered desk answering phone messages, he was cheerful and energetic. His attitude was always can-do with no task too small and no project too big, his demeanor always calm, and his words never negative. In short, the guy just seemed to be having the time of his life every day at work. He was doing his dream job.

Is there potential in every job, to be a dream job? I think so.

Recognizing this, our home economics teacher used to have a speaker come and tell us about his or her job in order to give us an idea of what we might like to do upon finishing our educations. One week the maintenance man came and answered our questions and one really struck me as the key to work. When asked why he liked a job many would hate, he simply said, “Because it matters. I make a difference every day for hundreds of people. Not everyone can say that.”

Every person has a dream job, but it might not be what conventional wisdom says is a dream job. Convention says that a dream job is one where you work very little and face few challenges and thereby are able to avoid all stress; that a dream job is glamorous; that you get a lot of attention and appreciation for every single thing you do; that you are happy beyond words every day in a spacious, beautiful office, and that things are always neat, clean, orderly, and easy.

But the maintenance man enjoyed none of those attributes. In fact, I could easily think of a thousand ways in which his job was the Job From Hades: In wintertime, he had to be to work at dawn to turn on the boilers so the building would be warm, he had to clean up after people who were neither grateful nor polite about making the grossest messes, and he did not make that much money. But he still loved his job.

It seems the jobs we end up liking the most are not usually the easiest or glamorous, but rather those that make us feel fulfilled at the end of the day.

This feeling of accomplishment is why I loved being "just a cashier" at the local budget club in my early college days. I felt fulfilled in that low-paying job where I met interesting people all day long, worked with funny co-workers, and enjoyed a fair but tough boss. I’ve since had many other higher paying, more important jobs, but few that were as enjoyable.

“The supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between work and play,” historian Arnold Toynbee said. I like that quote because he did not say success, or wealth, or prestige were the accomplishment but rather enjoying your work, your job, was the accomplishment.

Listening to the maintenance man that day taught me that any job can be a dream job through attitude, gratitude, and choice. You can make a difference in any capacity, at any job, and that feeling of fulfillment can make any job you find yourself doing dignified and important.

What’s your dream job? Is it being a clerk at the bookstore? Is it driving a city garbage truck? Is it washing cars or fixing computers? Maybe you love to mow people’s lawns. If you’re not doing your dream job right now, why on earth aren't you?