How to Love What You Do

We are back in action for another edition of my weekly newsletter! If you’ve been feeling down about your worklife lately, this week’s newsletter is just for you. And shortly, you can join me live for my weekly Newsweek interview series, Better, at 12 pm EDT / 9 am PDT/5 pm BST. I’ll be talking with Susan McPherson, the author of The Lost Art of Connecting ! We’ll discuss how to build real relationships in business and be true to ourselves while networking. Last week we had such a lively conversation with everyone contributing, I hope the trend continues today! Join us?here .

It can be hard to focus our efforts when there’s so much we want to do in our careers. I’ve created a course for LinkedIn Learning called How to Set Goals When Everything Feels Like a Priority, and LinkedIn has made the course free to everyone until April 29th. If you are looking to zero in on what you’d like to accomplish, you can take that course here .

To reach a level of loving everything we do in our worklife is an unreasonably tall order. Marcus Buckingham, the New York Times bestselling author, has a new book called Love and Work . The reality of Marcus’ premise, finding what we love and doing that for the rest of our lives, is actually rooted in self-reflection. You may actually be a lot closer than you realize to having a career that makes you happy. These were just a few offerings from our talk last week, and I’d urge you to watch the rest of our interview here .

Three clues to finding what you love

“There are more than three, but these are the three really powerful clues that any eleven-year-old can do. The first is in the course of a day, what do you find yourself instinctively looking forward to instinctively volunteering for? So your natural instincts towards something are a really good clue. You're the only one that knows what you lean into. The second clue is what Mike Csikszentmihalyi called flow. When you're doing some activities, time seems to fly by, and what feels like five minutes has been an hour. Whether it's a moment of confrontation with a guest, a moment of care for a patient, or it might be balancing the books. The third one is that feeling of mastery. When you're done with it, you don't feel depleted. You feel invigorated, you feel strengthened by it. You might not be quite ready to saddle up and do it again right away, but you feel up and full, not drained.”

Love at least twenty percent of what you do

“There's absolutely no data at all that says the most successful people only do what they love. It sounds good. ‘Find what you love and you'll never have to work a day in your life.’ There's no data backing that up at all. What you do find though, is that the most successful people in any role that you would care to study find certain aspects of what they do that they love. They don't love everything, but every day they find certain moments, situations, or people, where they find the love in what they do. That is a much more achievable and realistic aim than saying, ‘Find your passion and do all that you love.’ Research from the Mayo Clinic suggests that 20% is a really good threshold. When you actually look at what percentage of the data about how much people find things that they love, it's 20%. Above 20%, there's no actual increase in resilience. A little love every day goes an awfully long way.”

Finding your “red threads”

“All of us have things that we're really really good at that we hate. We've all got some stuff where, because we're diligent or organized or luck or intelligence, we're good at it, but we hate it. That’s not a strength. We should call that a weakness. The proper definition of a weakness is any activity that weakens you even if you’re good at it. So in a sense, these loves of yours, those thickest patterns of synaptic connection that lead you to pay attention or time flies by when you're doing them. I actually call them your red threads. If you think about the day, it’s a fabric of many, many different threads. Some are white, some black, some are gray, and some are brown. They lift you up a little down a little, but some of them are red. If you can look for these red threads, these are the building blocks for the things that you love to do. Those things that strengthen you, activities that lift you up. Those are your strengths. And if you want to grow in life, if you want to make a great contribution, you will grow most when you are playing to your particular strengths which are those red threads.”

Thank you as always for reading my newsletter! I hope you’ll join us soon for my conversation with Susan Mcpherson !

On a final note, if you’re looking to keep up with my spring travels, mastering of latte art, and searching for good Mediterranean food in Miami, follow my Instagram page .

Wishing you health and success -?

Dorie