Purpose and Meaning

totally unrelated photo from my former work-life when hardware was more glamorous...

Last week, I had an aha moment at work. No, let me rephrase this. Even though I already believed in the theory that I had been teaching in workshops at my old job, i.e. that one important "ingredient" for successful teams was that everyone derives purpose and meaning from the work they are doing, I experienced it myself again and it felt really good.
It was an aha moment, because for the longest time, I really was lacking that. Yes, I liked what I was doing, but I was not deluding myself that it created much of an impact. Recently, however, I became involved in a rather high profile project and all of a sudden not only do people know my name, but I can see that I am making an impact if only in baby steps. One side-effect is that I am much busier with back to back meetings on some days, but I actually much prefer that (as long as this is not the case every single day of the week) to having this "Whatevs" cloud looming over everything I do Monday to Friday.
Well, that only took a year...