Of late, I seem to be meeting quite a few people in India who are giving up jobs to start ventures. Am also meeting a very large number of people who are job-hopping or simply quitting and taking to art or craft to find themselves.

Which is great. It shows that the country is in an age when people are ready to take risks, and do different things.

But then, am also meeting a troublingly large number of people who, having quit jobs and having started ventures, are also trying to get back into jobs because things are not working out. There are also others who are just up and quitting job after job because ‘environment is not right’ or managers are incompetent’ or ‘there is no company culture’ or ‘benefits are not right’ or ‘there is no flexibility’, or ‘there is too much flexibility” or ‘there is not enough challenge.”

Having been a very adroit seeker and leaver of jobs for the first 6 years of my working life, I thought a few two-bits might help some others construct a method to the madness.

So here’s the secret: no one likes to work. Even people who say they like to work, don’t really like to work. Because? Well, because work is work. It is hard. It is repetitive. It becomes boring after the novelty wears off. And guess what? To become a rock star in anything requires a classical pianist’s equivalent of practice. Practice at all levels, all the time. And – here’s the performance elixir- once you learn to put in the hours, you can put in the hours come rain, shine, hell, or high-water. What is otherwise called ‘being in the zone’. If you don’t put in the hours, you will be playing air guitar all your life.

So: Work is work. It is hard.

Now, that we have that out of the way, it is important to decide whether you want to be good at something or great at something or are fine with doing enough to just get by. By the way, those are the three classic Performance Evaluators – HR terminology differs from place to place.

After you have picked what you want, take the first step and start working.

Along the way if you want to change to something else, remember, for every new endeavour: You go back to step 1. And also remember that: Work is work. It is hard.

So that was No 1 of the Secrets of An Engaged Work Life.

The remaining 1000 Secrets do not exist and while one can – and often we do – make them up, No 1 is the one from whence there is no escape and therefore that is from where all else flows.

So that’s my utterly useless two-bits, which in a different time was expressed by a single word that has been lost to us through time: Perseverance.