Sunday Setup
A weekly newsletter to help get your mind set up for a positive workweek.
02.16.2025 — Make It Make Scents
Love Is In the Air
Or at least it was. This past Friday was Valentine's Day, and the marketing machines were in full effect. Everywhere you turned you saw TV commercials pushing diamonds, in-store displays hawking chocolate candy, and internet ads promoting couples massages. Not to be outdone, Domino's decided to sell atomized pepperoni pizza. Wait, what?!
For a limited time, between February 10-17, customers in the UK and Ireland can register to win a 30ml bottle of pepperoni-inspired perfume. The scent, Eau de Passion, which is said to have hints of spice, as well as a woody, warm base, is being marketed as "the perfect gift for passionate pizza-loving couples looking to spice things up." I guess nothing says “I love you” more than the smell of greasy cheese, burnt dough, and hot cured meat.
As much as I love a good meal, I don't wanna smell like what I ate hours after I ate it! I find it hard to believe there’s really a target market for pizza-puffed air, but what do I know? Maybe a market researcher found an under-served audience of lactose intolerant lovers looking for an eau de toilette that can help them enjoy their favorite meal without proclaiming "Oh, de toilet!" afterwards.
Do You Love What You Do?
You've probably heard the saying, "Do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life." While that cliché may be true, I can only assume it is because I feel like I've "worked" many days — if not every day. Don't get me wrong, I've enjoyed many aspects of the jobs I've held throughout my career, but I can't honestly say that I've loved every job I've had.
In spite of the fleeting infatuation with my previous employment, I always executed my responsibilities with profound professionalism, not only because I take pride in my work, but also because, like most of corporate America, I had financial obligations that I couldn't meet were it not for that "guaranteed" influx of cash every two weeks. But when you continue to trade your precious — and limited — time for someone else's money to do work that doesn't truly fulfill you, what begins as subtle resentment can morph into full-blown apathy that negatively affects your performance and jeopardizes your livelihood.
So, what can you do if you find yourself in such a conundrum? How do you slog through the upcoming week without losing the inspiration to do your job to the best of your ability? How do you maintain your sanity as you fight off the anxiety caused by so much uncertainty in corporate America? One approach would be to focus on what you can control.
Regardless of what you do for a living or how far up the flagpole you may be within your organization, your ability to truly control anything — other than yourself — is limited, if not non-existent.
You can't truly control the engagement rates of that marketing campaign to support an upcoming product launch. You can't truly control whether that uber-qualified young professional you recruited actually gets hired. You can't truly control how the board will receive your presentation on an expansion strategy — but you can control how you respond to the outcome of any of those situations.
As you navigate this work week, be mindful of the things that are truly outside of your control, and make a commitment to remain focused on the things you truly can control. Things like the level of effort you put into handling your responsibilities at work and the way you respond to the results, regardless of whether they are perceived as good or bad.
And if you're not currently getting paid to do work you truly love to do, while you may not have much control over that at this moment, you can control how to move yourself into such a position in the future. It may require a little bit of deep thought, extra work, and unshakeable determination, but it's not impossible.
Like Ted Lasso says, Believe.