Start with what, not why
How to choose what's next
It’s December in Dubai which means the weather is glorious, the beaches are packed, and the sun beds are booked out. It’s the time of year when everyone has a friend in town, including me. I’ve been lucky enough to have had a multitude of friends from different parts of my life visit over the past few weeks and what’s really struck me is how many of them are on the brink of transition.
Our conversations have been filled with the weighing up of choices. Should they take time out of work to do an MBA, or move across the world in the hopes of finding love? Should they take the ‘stable’ government job or make the leap and become an entrepreneur? Should they completely retrain in a new field that might be more fulfilling or go for the promotion where they are? Having recently been laid off, should they apply for another job or take the chance to go freelance and become a consultant? Should they take the job with the lower salary that has the inspirational manager, or the one with the higher salary but the less interesting team.
The deeper we go into our careers the stakes of each decision can feel so high and the trade-offs more costly. Moving across the world for a job might mean being further away from your kids or your aging parents, or into a more limited dating pool while you’re still looking for your long term boo. One choice could be great for your career on paper, but terrible for your mental health or for your quality of life.
So, how do you choose?
In his book ‘Love + Work’, Marcus Buckingham describes that the things that make people feel the most successful at work are roles where they had a strong why, they worked with people who they enjoyed, and they enjoyed what they were doing on a day to day.
The holy grail.
“But,” he writes, “be mindful that of the three, the ‘what’ is the most significant. In study after study, those people who reported that they had a chance to do something they loved each and every day were far more likely to be high performers and to stay in the role than those who reported that they believed in the mission of the company or liked their teammates.”
That might sound obvious, but I’ve noticed that most people don’t actually prioritise the what when making career decisions. Think about times where you took a role because you believed in the mission of the company, or because you liked the team you’d be working with, or the other element that I think Marcus left out which is the ‘where’ - the company environment you’re operating in. Maybe you took the role because of the prestige of the company name or the free lunches.
An immediate red flag for me is when I hear someone who’s looking at potential job posts say, “I looked through the job description and yeah, I can do that.”
Sure you can, but do you want to?
Why the what matters the most
In the same way that we know that who we choose to love is no accident, whether romantically or platonically, what we love doing is no coincidence either.
“We now know that your patterns of loves and loathes are created by the clash of your chromosome - the genes of your parents coming together to produce a network of synapses in your brain that is massively different from anyone else’s. The idiosyncratic pattern of your brain is so complex, so minutely filigreed, and so massively extensive that its uniqueness dwarfs anything you might have in common with someone of your same gender, race, or even your family. You have one hundred million neurons in your brain but the true source of your individuality comes from the connections between these neurons,” writes Marcus in Love + Work.
In other words, the things we love doing signal us in the direction of how we are uniquely designed to contribute to the world around us.
As social creatures, we’re designed to contribute. As much as we usually think of our jobs and careers as being about ourselves and providing for our individual families, on a biological level and I’d argue spiritual one, we have an innate desire to contribute to the tribe. The way we contribute is through our unique gifts, which is why we all have different ones. The tribe ends up with everything it needs. In our current social structure one of the main ways, although of course not the only way, is through our work.
I think this is why one of the things that as humans we find the most awe inspiring to watch, is witnessing other people in their element. Think of a moment where you got to watch someone so clearly in full expression of their gifts. Perhaps it was watching Usain Bolt crossing the finish line, or watching Bey on her Renaissance tour, or your friend at work crushing their presentation with their mastery of storytelling. It gives us goosebumps. Watching someone doing what they were born to do feels significant, and when we’re the ones in a moment of true expression, we know it too. We feel alive.
While an increasing number of people are saying they don’t dream of labour in response to the disillusionment around “dream jobs”, I do think we dream of self-expression, of fulfilment and of contribution.
When we’re feeling frustrated and dissatisfied with our jobs, what we’re dreaming of is having the freedom to spend our time doing the things we love. Yet we continue to think of the things we love as belonging to our free time - our evenings and weekends. Or we think it’s only for the Beyonce’s of the world, or the Instagram models with the ‘sprinkle sprinkle’ boyfriends.
Choose love
According to Marcus in Love + Work, “Where there’s no love, the activity is a weakness - even if you excel at it.”
Precisely because the things we love doing are our patterns of unique contribution, they are our strengths - our zone of genius. The activities that you are uniquely good at in the world, and that you love to do, so much so, that time and space likely disappear to you when you do them.
So if you’re feeling lost, and don’t know where to start, start here, with your loves.
If you’re weighing up multiple options and not sure which to choose, consider this:
Which one gives you the greatest opportunity to be in your zone of genius?
PS. If you’re not sure what your gifts are and would benefit from a thought partner to guide you through identifying your strengths and how to optimise around them, let’s chat. My next 1:1 coaching cycle opens in Jan!
PPS. Have a question about your zone of genius? Let me know by reply to this email or in the comments.
Journal Prompts
How well do you know what your zone of genius is?
How much time on average are you currently spending in your zone of genius per week?
What fears or limiting beliefs come up when you imagine spending more time in your zone of genius?
Such a great nuance you've articulated here Kiran. Overindexing on the meaning/story of the work can be a big distraction from the day to day of what you're actually doing. Loving the idea is great to activate passion and willingness, but loving the grind is what sustains over time.