Get Out There and Embrace Your Wyrd

I came across an amazing term (and homophone!) today in the wild and I just had to share it.

“Wyrd” is a word from Anglo-Saxon culture. I’m certainly no expert on it, but from what I’ve read it has a meaning that revolves around the idea of “fate”, or even “personal destiny”. It’s also just wonderfully serendipitous that it sounds just like the English word “weird”.

The connection that popped into my brain just cannot be understated here.

I’ve said for many years now that everyone should “embrace their weirdness”. My closest friends are all wonderfully weird in their own way. I have friends who can talk to you for hours about their plants. I have friends who could give you a 2-hour lecture on the WWF term “jabroni” with all the connections and roots of where it came from. I have a friend of mine who constantly is researching fluid dynamics so that he can more efficiently transfer heat from his bitcoin mining operation in his garage in order to heat his house.

The longer I am blessed to be in the business world, the more I’ve just learned to embrace the odd things that I like. I’m a data analyst, and yes, I do enjoy a good spreadsheet. I love picking apart numbers. I love putting them together in novel ways and pondering what the output could possibly mean. I know it’s not a common thing, but hey, that’s where job security comes from right?

But that’s where I love the intersection of this Norse term of “Wyrd”. I think it simply slots directly into my previous motto: “Find your Wyrd”. The idea is that there are tasks that need to be fulfilled in the business world that for some reason just hit you exactly right. All of the sudden something needs to get done and you just… do it. It’s like you start down a path but it already feels familiar. You may not have ever been exactly trained, but you’re just able to do it. It’s sort of like… a personal destiny (queue dramatic music).

I still remember the day that I found mine. I was at Loras College sitting in a Marketing Research class. The main project of the class was a business simulation program that included all kinds of decisions you have to make over the series of “months” in the game world. You had to manage a factory to maximize output by dictating rules on when to produce which product and when to switch over to something new. You had to try and predict future demand curves based on upcoming sales. You could invest in marketing dollars with rebates to try and incentivize sales. You had to match products and features with a steadily changing customer base that wanted innovation.

The moment I dove into that program, I absolutely loved it. It was a match made in heaven. At my fingertips were every answer I could ask for… I just had to crunch the numbers in the right way to solve this equation. We learned late in the year that the professor could actually track who spent the most time in the program monkeying with the controls or changing up their business plan. Anyone who knows me should know it wasn’t a surprise that I spent the most time in the class figuring out every in and out of the program.

I. Was. Fascinated. Absolutely fascinated immediately. I was running regressions, designing new products, writing new logic patterns for optimal production from our factory. It was amazing. Our group placed first and actually held over 70% of the market by the time we were done among the 5 companies that were competing, each with 3-6 products. We had a singular product that was so well matched it held over 50% on its own.

I was the absolute weirdo to my classmates who just went 10 layers deep in this business simulation… it was my Wyrd. It was the thing that just engaged my brain in an amazing way. Going through college as a marketing major I never really found my exact calling, but this just turned every data analyst dream up to 11. It was just an immediate match.

Now, as I’m growing more confident in my career, I find myself with a second Wyrd bubbling up inside of me. If you’ve read my recent articles, it shouldn’t be a surprise that I have a big new focus on Employee Listening and “Trust and Psychological Safety”. I’ve found a new fascination with the interplay of how business impacts our lives as humans, not just workers. Seeing how fulfilled people can be with work has been a brand-new infusion of energy into my daily work.

My biggest encouragement for everyone is to lean into that part of the job that gets them excited. I’ve found so many people that have these little moments in their job that they absolutely delight in, but somehow it’s so hard to get them to talk about it! When I ask people how work is, they usually state some projects they are working on, a client they are working with, or some new challenge. But it’s somehow actually rare that I get to identify what people LOVE when they talk about their job! I end up having to dig and dig and dig and dig. Why do you like that? What parts do you like? And there’s ALWAYS a moment that I both hate and love. The person will get embarrassed and have some admission about what they ACTUALLY like. My own wife did this when she finally admitted that she enjoys putting together training guides and documents. She gets great satisfaction about organizing them and putting them together in a logical way and guiding others through the best practices of how to do things. And, because she knew it was “weird”, she completely downplayed it. It was like, well the average person couldn’t possibly like this, so I don’t want to admit that I do either. But those are the reasons we love people. We love weird. Who would possibly want to be friends with or marry someone who was (*gulp*) normal?!

In writing this, what’s my real point here? Well I’m hoping you would be willing to share your Wyrd. What’s the thing that gets you out of bed in the morning? NOT "what do you do" or "what do you produce". Be like the Backstreet Boys in 1999 and TELL ME WHY. It doesn’t have to be your whole job, in fact I think quite often no one is blessed with doing the exact thing they absolutely love at all points in the day. But what’s your Wyrd? Why does it fill you? What’s the thing that makes you odd or different yet valuable in a business environment?

TELL ME YOUR WYRD!

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