Agatha Christie's detective Hercule Poirot's most famous shtick was a line about "...keeping the little grey cells active..." While cute on PBS Mystery Theater, it is also excellent advice to live by, especially as a work ethic for an IT Consultant (a.k.a., itinerant migrant worker of the Information Age). A transitioning economy generates dislocations, and skills growth (what the grey cells get stuffed with) is a constant requirement. Consider this activity as an evolutionary pressure.
Of course, the real question is the kind of activity, and how much of it. For a consultant, each new assignment is a stimulus barrage, analogous to carpet bombing. You change employer and job site at a minimum, locations (a new city perhaps) and time zones, and then there are the details of the job itself. Its schedule, its planning, the personalities of the people involved, the office and development environments, the hours and expectations, the project scope and its importance (or lack thereof).
All this can be stressful, or it can be challenging. I stated that skills growth is a form of evolutionary pressure. It is, because how you handle it determines whether the activity is positive and reinforcing, or a negative and it is time to search for other horizons. Attitude determines the outcome. Attitude determines how to interpret the environment's effects, and where the evolution takes you.
Stressful: enduring the situation.
Challenging: acquiring new experiences.
Stressful: away from friends, home and familiar surroundings.
Challenging: chances to forge new friends in new surroundings.
Stressful: deja vu because (it has happened before, and will happen again).
Challenging: breaking the mold/getting out of the rut.
Stressful: considering the gig as just that.
Challenging: considering the gig as opportunity.
Deciding which interpretation to use is an activity in and of itself. The grey cells fire like little gattling guns. Unlike Agatha's stories, where Hercule reasoned everything out and always got the murderer in the end, these decisions are a real mystery...
Just don't flip a coin. Think it out...
