Late last fall in a meeting with our CEO, she asked me what should have been a very simple question: “What gets you out of bed and into work in the morning?” Now, at the time I had been sick for several days (maybe weeks, I can’t remember) and my mind really wasn’t in a great place, and I didn’t have a good answer for her.

I didn’t really even have a bad answer.

Over Christmas, I became even more ill. By the new year, a major tragedy hit my family, something far worse than I ever imagined having to face. I then ended up needing surgery. All this to say, I was not feeling much better about how to answer this question.

Now, I am sure we have all been there at various times in our careers, times where we just weren’t quite sure why we work so hard. I have hit that point several times. Sometimes it is a signal that it is time to change (like when I left physics to work in the “real world”). Other times, it just means you have to remember the deeper purpose behind what you do.

As I often do when life threatens to become too much for me, I fall back on meditation as a way to cope. And as usually happens, through meditation I begin to see connections and patterns in my life.

Over the last month or so, I have been giving this question of purpose and motivation a lot of thought. In my career I have had the opportunity to work on a lot of interesting and just plain cool things, from astrophysics, to satellite operations and astrodynamics, to major military projects, to enterprise software start-ups. I am now at a point in my career, however, where working on things that matter is very important to me, more so than what is cool or just interesting.

So why does what I am doing now matter?

In conjunction with all of this introspection, at work the executive team (including me) was just finishing up on an extensive exercise to define (or at least articulate) the Vision, Mission, and Values of The Learning Bar. Very much the same “why are we here?” question I have been trying to answer personally.

As you will see if you follow the above link, our vision, mission, and values are all about helping children, specifically “giving all children the opportunity to thrive”. We do this through our values of inclusion, innovation, trustworthiness, social engagement, and leadership. We as an executive team worked very hard (and occasionally argued passionately!) to agree on these words, as these words represent who we are and why we are here.

As I meditated on life in general, it became more and more clear to me why I do what I do. It is so easy to get lost in the day-to-day details of your job, and lose site of the why. And whether you are an individual or an organization, it all has to start with why (yes, I know that is someone else’s phrase). When things are difficult, it becomes even more important to remember why.

In addition to being on the executive team and contributing in some small way to TLB’s strategy, as CTO I am of course very involved in the company’s technology (hence the title!). The problem with being on the technology side of a company like ours, is that it is easy feel somewhat removed from our end users, and even more so from the children those end users are helping. But it is important to remember the connection between what we do, and the children who are helped.

And this led me to my answer to the original question: “What gets you out of bed and in to work in the morning?” It was not until late last week (actually, driving home from Fredericton on Friday) that I was able to clearly articulate the answer in my mind, though I think it had been sort of congealing for some time. And here it is:

Any day where I do even one thing, whether it is strategy, execution, technological decision, or a casual conversation with a co-worker, that helps even one child improve their education and their life, it was worth getting out of bed that morning. And I am pretty sure that is true almost every day.

Of course, this is just for work, I have other reasons to get out of bed – first and foremost my family, but also just the fun of learning new things. But this is what gets me to the office.

So, what gets you out of bed and into work everyday?