Also, during the day, while you are working, keep checking your attitude. It’s not enough simply to leave home in the morning with this attitude. At work, check your motivation again and again, and repeatedly transform your attitude in this way. Keep generating the good heart; keep feeling responsible for all sentient beings’ happiness, that it’s up to you to cause it. Maintain a constant attitude of compassion, bodhicitta.
Examine your motivation again and again: ‘‘For whom am I doing this job? Am I doing it for myself or others?’’ If deep in your heart there’s no continuity of the feeling that you are doing your job for others, if your attitude has changed, if you find that you’redoing it for your own happiness, for yourself, then discard this attitude and replace it with the attitude that you are doing your job for the benefit of others, with compassion, the good heart, bodhicitta. Put as much effort as you possibly can into generating and maintaining the feeling that you’re doing your job for the benefit others, not only for yourself.
Just because you’re working for money doesn’t mean that you’re not benefiting others. If you use the money you earn to help others—for example, to help the sick or the poor, to spread Dharma or to help sentient beings in any other way—that’s certainly for the benefit of others. If you are doing your job to save money so that you can do retreat or practice or study Dharma for the benefit other sentient beings, that’s the right attitude; that’s the attitude you should have. If you work and study so that you can live, but you live your life for the benefit of others; if you take care of yourself so that you can serve other sentient beings; if you feel, ‘‘I’m the servant of all sentient beings, serving to free them from suffering and bring them all happiness,’’ you might be working in a regular job, but the work that you do is for others.