My WHY is Not Because of My WHAT

"When WHAT you do is for public perception and money, your WHY will never lead to success which will reflect in HOW you perform."

Most people would think that because of WHAT I do is WHY I love my job. They couldn’t be more wrong and more correct at the same time. I think it is a combination of WHAT you do and HOW you do it that is driven by WHY you do it. To get done WHAT you want to accomplish you must figure out HOW you are going to accomplish it. But to do either you must understand WHY you want to do that to begin with.

I am a team leader who uses my past experiences both failures and successes that strives to pass that knowledge on to today's teammates and mentor them into tomorrow's leaders. I will take ownership of any project given to me learning every aspect of it to develop a plan for the team to succeed above all expectations. Because of my drive to be a strong leader and use individual strengths to develop a strong team is why I am able to be successful in project management.

Sometimes the WHY for people doing their job is money driven which doesn’t lead to true happiness and success because it’s not what they are passionate about. I also believe that the WHY for some people is based on a public perception that the job is cool because of what you have access to. When WHAT you do is for public perception and money, your WHY will never lead to success which will reflect in HOW you perform.

There are always exceptions to everything and for me my initial WHY was an exception. My initial WHY on the front end was the money factor with the visual cool factor but on the back end I used it as a platform to develop my goals and what I wanted in my career. My way in was to be a truck driver. This got me the money and the cool factor of what I was doing but driving a truck has never been my passion. I used this to reach for management and team leadership in an industry that I enjoyed with my ultimate goals of owning my own business. This was not my first career choice in life nor was it my first management position; it was the one that transformed my WHY to what it is today through key learnings and mentorship under strong leadership.

Public perception of a cool job cannot sustain your happiness and the passion that drives you. When you begin to question WHY you are doing something you no longer will care about HOW you continue to do WHAT you do.

For me, my WHY is because I want to be part of a team and lead the project that is at hand and help shape what happens. I want to be the one that recognizes individual strengths and helps put each team member in a position to succeed and through that the entire team succeeds. Passing on my knowledge and mentoring the way that I am mentored that shapes my WHY to guide their success. Through this mentorship I want to help somebody else realize their potential on the path to their goals or dreams. This is what drives me. I want to be that leader that is turned to when new projects are needing to be accomplished, when advice is needed, that leader that people know is willing to put the team first and make the tough decisions. Although I am still learning and evolving as a leader it is what drives WHY I do WHAT I do.

HOW I do this is no different in what the project is. I am completely invested in the project by taking ownership of the whole project. I cannot succeed if I don’t have the knowledge of every aspect of the task at hand so I research and ask questions. This goes from starting with what the end goal is and working backwards through the timeline to reach that. I need to understand what makes it work and how it works so that I can begin to understand how to effectively tackle the project to get the best out of the team using all of our strengths.  

WHAT I get to do earns me a good living but is not what drives me. Saying I get to go to a lot of baseball parks or go to NASCAR events is not what drives me because I am driven to be a successful leader to help mentor others, help them recognize their strengths on projects and put them in a position to be successful. HOW I’m able to completely invest in a project to learn every aspect of it allows me to develop a plan to help put the team in a position to succeed. The operational aspect of the final product being a success is the passion that reverts back to my WHY. WHAT I get to do for a living is because of my WHY and HOW I accomplish that.