S01E02: Finding work you love
How can you increase the chances that you'll love what you do?
Hi hi,
Big topic today on finding work you love! People have written entire books on this subject. Can I cover it in one (long) email? Let’s find out.
First, a story. The story, in fact, of how my career started.
My phone rang on a sunny day early in 2012. It was P&G’s Recruiting Manager calling with the news that I had succeeded at the internship interviews. I now needed to choose from two options: one in Purchasing and another in IT (GBS). Which would I like? My primary consideration was my desire to move to Lagos as quickly as possible, so I posed a question back to her. Which of them started first? She said it was the Purchasing one, so I chose it. And that was it. I have mostly enjoyed my career1 and love what I now do, but it all started with an offhand choice.
Was I just lucky? Were there other predictors of career happiness sub-consciously influencing my choice? Was the company more important than the role? These are valuable questions, but they’re too specific. I’ve since had other inflection points where I could not make an offhand choice, such as when changing roles or choosing a job after my MBA. What follows is a summary of years of studying and conversations. I also recommend two books that have shaped my thinking significantly at the end.
I want to address the elephant in the room. You have probably seen various “do what you love” quotes, such as “do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life”. I call bullshit (politely, of course – always politely). Any saying that implies you just need to introspect enough and you’ll uncover a passion that will translate into work you’ll love for the rest of your life is disingenuous. First, passions don’t often translate well into specific careers. Several surveys of students and job-seekers return arts and sports as top passions. I myself love reading and thinking. Great! Those fit into hundreds of potential careers, from studying ancient Yoruba civilisations to selling things online. Second, all work is work. Have you seen how much effort authors, musicians, and sportspeople put into their craft? I’d argue many of them actually ‘work’ more than the rest of us. I know this specific “never work a day in your life” quote is not to be taken literally, but this family of quotes create a wrong expectation about how easy it should be to build a rewarding career. Third, these sayings can create frustration as people continue to search inside for that ‘magical passion’ rather than develop their skills and build the career capital that results in more enjoyable work.
Now let’s get back to the question. How can we increase the chances of loving what we do?
1. Sort out the hygiene factors. The concept of hygiene (and motivation) factors comes from Frederick Herzberg’s work (original 2003 HBR article here). Hygiene factors include job security, work conditions, compensation, and company policies. Having good hygiene factors does not make you love your work, but not having them makes you dislike it. Take compensation, for example; getting paid ever-increasing amounts beyond a certain threshold will not make you love work even more, but not getting paid enough will result in disliking work pretty quickly.
2. Optimise for motivation factors. Motivation factors are measures of meaning. They correlate to whether we love work or not. These include whether work is meaningful and challenging and offers the right recognition, responsibility, and opportunities for personal growth. If work does not have motivation factors, you will not love it. You may not hate it, especially if the hygiene factors are there, but you will rarely wake up pumped about what you do. Except maybe on payday. Motivation factors can be challenging to crack because they rely on a subjective concept: what you think is meaningful. They also change. What motivated you at 20 may not motivate you at 35. “In order to really find [career] happiness, you need to continue looking for opportunities that you believe are meaningful, in which you will be able to learn new things, to succeed, and be given more and more responsibility to shoulder.” – Clayton Christensen.
3. Switch between a deliberate and emergent strategy as needed. Many young people spend too much time mapping out long-term career plans, say five-to-ten-year plans. In reality, such focused plans only make sense in certain circumstances. I think a great place to start is to find work that satisfies both hygiene and motivation factors and do it well. That’s your deliberate strategy. New opportunities and challenges will emerge as you continue to do that work. Maybe your definition of meaning will change as time passes. Or perhaps an entirely new industry will emerge that you’re interested in. These are emergent options. Assess them for hygiene and motivation factors. If you switch lanes to take advantage of an emergent option, your new lane becomes your new deliberate strategy. “As you go through your career, you will begin to find the areas of work you love and in which you will shine; you will, hopefully, find a field where you can maximize the motivators and satisfy the hygiene factors. But it’s rarely a case of sitting…and thinking…until the answer pops into your head… What’s important is to get out there and try stuff until you learn where your talents, interests, and priorities begin to pay off. When you find out what really works for you, then it’s time to flip from an emergent strategy to a deliberate one.” – Clayton Christensen.
4. Be “so good they can’t ignore you”. Responsibility, impact, and autonomy are motivation factors, but I think of them slightly differently. These tend to be earned and not given. And earning them requires that others trust you to own your space and get things done. For example, I had limited autonomy when I joined my current employer in 2020. For the first several weeks, my manager inspected every detail of my work, rigorously questioning my decisions and analyses. As time passed and she realised I could be trusted to self-organise and make good decisions, her involvement died down to a trickle. Three years later, I have gained a significant amount of autonomy and responsibility that contribute greatly to my enjoyment of my current role. These add up over the course of a career. “To construct work you love, you must first build career capital by mastering rare and valuable skills, and then cash in this capital for the type of traits that define compelling careers”. – Cal Newport.
Phew! Loud exhale. That got much longer than I was thinking, but this is a complex subject. And like I said at the start, several thousands of pages have been written on these subjects so it’s hard to cover it all in an email.
To keep the length reasonable, I’ve excluded “where to start” and instead gone off the assumption that most readers are young professionals and not new graduates. I’ve also spoken primarily to employment rather than entrepreneurship, as that’s what I have first-hand experience of. Check back in a few years for first-hand thoughts on applying these to entrepreneurship.
I recommend Clayton Christensen’s How Will You Measure Your Life and Cal Newport’s So Good They Can’t Ignore You. How Will You Measure Your Life addresses finding happiness in career and relationships. So Good They Can’t Ignore You offers a compelling argument for adopting a competency-based approach to building a career you’ll love.
That’s all for this week! Have a lovely week ahead!
PS:
I have mostly enjoyed my career except for twenty months in strategy consulting that satisfied the hygiene factors (paid more money than I’d earned before or since then) and gave me very useful skills that I still apply often, but failed at the motivation factors. Despite my best efforts, I could not bring myself to find meaning in the work I did. Meaning is very personal, and one man’s meaningful is another man’s meaningless.
Share if you found this useful. And write back if you have thoughts you’d like to share! See you next week.
S01E01 is here! Next week, we’ll consider the case for hard work.