This beats ‘follow your passion’

Good Morning. For the next 5 minutes, your career is the most important thing.

In today’s email:

• ‘Follow your passion’ is risky. Instead, build a career with these 3 things

• Walk and talk to escape your desk and energize your work

• How pulsing keeps you productive across the year

• Focus on value to control your emotions and lower your stress

• Know what really motivates us at work

ON YOUR CAREER

This beats ‘follow your passion’

We often hear ‘follow your passion’ as well-intentioned career advice. However, this is a risky career strategy for most people. Passions, industries, and technologies change. Instead, build a career that integrates the following three things:

❤️ Pursue something you like. Like is realistic and helps you persist when you have setbacks at work.

✅ Seek jobs where you can use your strengths. Progress is faster and sustainable when you are in a job aligned with your strengths.

💲 Choose a career that can provide the income you want across your life. A good income makes it easier to invest in lifelong learning.

Liking a career can turn to loving it when we master our craft and are well-paid.

COMMUNICATION

Walk and talk

Aristotle, Darwin, and Nietzsche understood walking helps us to think. Steve Jobs preferred to walk while he had significant conversations. Most of us have too many meetings seated indoors, under artificial light, in air-conditioning. We can change this.

Whenever you can, walk while you have telephone or face-to-face meetings. Walking with a colleague or client means being side-by-side, with less direct eye gaze.  This can make it easier to explore difficult topics. Sunlight and fresh air energize us. Walk and talk.

PRODUCTIVITY

Pulse your energy

Nobody wants to be known as a ‘low energy’ person. High energy people complete projects and ship product. They have hustle. And they get promoted faster and paid more across their careers. We want high energy people on our teams.

Pulsing is a way we can maintain high energy across a day, month, and career. Pulsing involves being focused on a task and working hard. Then taking a break. Not taking breaks within workdays, nor taking holidays within work years, is counterproductive at work and in broader life. Winners pulse their energy.

1 MINUTE TO LOWER STRESS

Focus on the value you can create today

We can worry and catastrophize about things over which we have little control – ruminating and going in circles. We can stack problems that are not our job to fix. This means increased stress at work and home.

You take power over your emotional state when you focus on the value you can create today. Delivering value to customers and colleagues increases a sense of control and confidence. We can keep moving forward. More value, less stress.

GET SMARTER

What really motivates us at work?

In addition to money, nearly all of us are motivated in our jobs to experience competence, autonomy, relatedness, and meaning (CARM).

• Competence: Using strengths, completing tasks, and feeling confident we are doing a good job.

• Autonomy: Not being micro-managed and having some choice in how we complete tasks and projects.

• Relatedness: Collaborating with colleagues and feeling a sense of belonging, friendship, and even playfulness.

• Meaning: Appreciating the value we create for colleagues, customers, and broader communities.

Sometimes we need to seek more CARM in our jobs. Sometimes we could better appreciate the CARM we already have.

If you want to go deeper, look at Ryan and Deci’s Self-Determination Theory

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