#121: Finding Love In Work

It’s the middle of Cape Town’s winter, which means long nights and lots of rain. South Africa has also been experiencing significant power outages for the past few weeks, so life has been feeling a little meh.

Psychologist Stephen Grosz says in The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves, “The future is not some place we’re going to, but an idea in our mind now. It is something we’re creating, that in turn creates us. The future is a fantasy that shapes our present.”

With that in mind, I’ve been countering my bleak mood by dreaming of escaping to one of Pieter Brundyn’s gorgeous villas. His company, In Residence, manages a portfolio of beautiful houses in the most spectacular settings. In this fantasy universe, I would arrive for my getaway in this 1965 Maserati Mistral.

To add a bit more detail, I imagined that these works of Stellenbosch artist,  Shany van den Berg were hanging somewhere in my home.

With the fantasy image of art, beautifully sculpted homes and cars in place, I felt suitably invigorated and inspired to write about finding love in work.

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/strategy

We get told that we need to identify our true passion and then all will be rosy. The reality though, is that identifying our passion is as easy as catching salmon by hand.

Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall, in Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real World, give us a more pragmatic alternative.

They advise, “Twice a year, spend a week in love with your work. Select a regular week at work and take a pad around with you for the entire week…make two columns and write “Loved It” at the top of one column and “Loathed It” at the top of the other.

During the week, any time you find yourself feeling one of the signs of love—before you do something, you actively look forward to it; while you’re doing it, time speeds up and you find yourself in flow; after you’ve done it, there’s part of you looking forward to when you can do it again—scribble down exactly what that something was in the “Loved It” column.”

And when you find yourself feeling the opposite – time drags by, you procrastinate, you make a half-hearted effort, note that in the “Loathed It” column.”

The reason for their advice? Their research shows that if we spend 20% of our work week doing activities that we love, we’re substantially better off, we’re more engaged in our work and at less risk of burnout.

So, we can inject love into our work by identifying and doing the things that strengthen and energise us,

Look at that ‘loved it’ column and find ways to do more of it your week. It really does work.

This doesn’t mean that you stop trying to envisage your future. It’s both envisioning the future AND looking for what makes you feel better every day. Often, working in ways that we feel purposeful and powerful, helps us find our passion.

/self

Otis and Elizabeth Chandler’s story is a good exemplar of this principle.

They are the co-founder of Goodreads. With 125 million users, it is the world’s largest site for readers. In this How I Built This episode, they explain their journey to host, Guy Raz.

Otis’s grandfather owned the LA Times. When he was nearing the end of school, he went to his grandfather to ask if he should prepare to come into the family business. His answer was ‘no’, and so Otis went to study engineering at Stanford.

When he graduated, the Internet had started to explode, and so he did as every ambitious Californian in the early 2000s did, he moved into tech.

His first years of work were at a social networking company, called Tickle, structured around personality tests, some serious, some playful (like, what kind of dog are you?).

After a few years of working there, the business was sold for $100 million (to a company called Monster). This meant that he could now call himself a Tickle Monster. He also got a bonus. Double his salary, but still only $80,000 and he says he was reminded that ‘you have to be a founder to make life-changing money’.

Both his grandfathers had founded their own businesses. He knew that he also wanted to be a founder and, because he had the examples, he knew that it could be done.

In 2005 he started to tinker with the idea of building a recommendation site for books.

Raz says. “So, you were thinking about some social networking idea?” Otis responds “Well yeh, because I knew how to build one.”

He reflects that he had loved reading as a child, but that he had stopped reading with the pressure of Stanford studies and building a career in tech, and that he ‘didn’t like that about himself’. He muses that perhaps subliminally the idea appealed to him because then he could read books, which he loved doing.

Pause here. Yes, he loved books, but foremost he was a skilled and experienced developer who knew that social networks were taking off. And he knew that successful networks had to be structured around ‘social objects’ – things that people like to talk about. Books are one such object.

Starting out he didn’t have a clear vision to, for example, ‘get people reading again’. He was following an insight about what people gather around and using skills that he had gained. It is only with hindsight that he can see the link to his love of reading. Of course, it was always there, but it’s not what guided him in those early years of coding the site.

Their first office was above a liquor store, the lease agreement scrawled on a piece of cardboard torn from a beer carton. Their first email had spelling errors – not great for a site about books. But they kept moving and evolving.

The domain for his first-choice company name wasn’t available. The second option goodread.com was. For $50,000. His, third option was goodreads.com at 10% of the price. And so, for $5,000, goodreads.com was born.

There’re some great strategy insights in the interview which I’ll return to next week.

For today, the Chandlers’ story shows us that vision can emerge from intentional action. We can find love in work by doing what we’re good at and what energises us, without being 100% clear on where it might lead.

/soul

I was struggling with how to end this week’s letter when Dr Paddy Pampallis, founder of The Coaching Centre, sent me Rupert Spira’s reflection on The Highest Meditation.

Spira says “The highest meditation is not something we do. It is what we are. It is just to be. And, as we are already that, it requires no effort. There is no distance from ourselves. There is no distance from our being to our being.”

That was the perfect ending to today. Often, finding love in what we do means being who we are, doing that which requires no effort, where the actions come because they are us.

So often serendipity delivers big pieces of this letter. This was one of those magical and mysterious moments.

All the best

Karl

PS: You can learn more about my coaching practice here and you’ll also find me on Instagram and LinkedIn.