Are You a Trucker, or a Truck Driver?

There are two ways to look at your calling in life: as what you do, or what you are. And therein is the secret to success and happiness.

Some people get behind the wheel of their trucks and grudgingly drive them down the road, getting a paycheque and waiting for the weekend. They hate the road, they just wish it were Friday night.

Others, though, take pride in keeping the country fed and supplied and moving, and see their rig as a key link in the economy. They keep their trucks shiny and glorious, they talk the talk, and they walk the walk. They love the road. They’re professionals– they’re truckers, not just drivers of trucks. They can’t imagine doing anything else.

That’s the difference between a job and joy. When you work for a paycheque, counting down the days to holidays or retirement, you’ve just got a job. But when you see each day as an adventure, each task as a challenge, and every client or customer as an opportunity to strut your stuff, you are a professional.

Maybe you’re a lawyer banging out routine real estate deals or five hundred dollar wills, wishing you could win the lottery and end your misery. You’re not a professional, you just have a job. Or perhaps you’re a realtor, ten years into the trade and still stuffing mailboxes and doing open houses, and hating every minute of it. You’re not a professional, you just have a job.

When I was seventeen I worked in a sawmill, where I saw guys in their fifties who lived for lunch break and end of day, because they hated shoving the same stupid piece of wood into the same stupid band saw, hour after hour, day after day. But they needed the paycheque and didn’t dare imagine another life. Most of us don’t need to be that kind of slave.

A dear friend spent some of his early years adrift, “back in the day”. And then one day somebody out of the blue asked him to help install a furnace. The planning, the airflow, the layout of the ducting, the air exchange, the poetry of air exchanges… grabbed him like an artform. “I just knew that’s what I wanted to do for the rest of my life!” And indeed, Don Swallow went on to become a name in Ottawa’s heating business.

We all have Giftings, abilities, aptitudes. Special and unique. Each of us can do something that few others can do. Each of us not only has value, but special value.

When we discover why we were put on this earth, what it is that we can do and offer which is unique, at that moment we become professionals, not just wage earners. That’s when we know we’re special, and we have a purpose.

Are you a trucker, or do you just drive a truck?

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