Your Love + Work Career
How do you feel your career is going right now?
You might be just starting out, in that glorious and also overwhelming frame of mind where the entire world lies open before you. Or you might be twenty years into your career and feeling fabulous about it. Or at a dead end, or like maybe you bet on entirely the wrong path. Or perhaps you’re just marking time until your new side hustle blossoms into something that might actually pay the bills.
Wherever you are, how does it feel to you? Are you dragging? Are you super-excited? Are you a little bored? A little frightened? Or does it all just depend on the day, and your mood, or your boss’s mood?
Your career is a cornerstone of your life. Sometimes you feel like you are standing so tall and straight upon it. And at other times you feel its weight on you, and you double over, legs buckling. It can be difficult to bear. You want to be financially successful, to support yourself, your family, pay your debts. And yet you don’t want to sell out your soul. No matter what’s in your bank account, you don’t want to get to the end of your life and discover that you have been disconnected from your contribution to the world. Your job is one beautiful way—though far from the only one—in which you get to express the uniqueness inside of you. A series of jobs that cuts you off from yourself is a psychological mess, and, from all we’re learning about the mind/body connection, a physiological mess as well.
Careers are tricky though, aren’t they. We tend to think that the happy, healthy people are those who achieve a balance between work and life. And yet, as I touched on in chapter 15, balance is a false god. The healthy goal isn’t to be balanced, not really. In nature everything healthy is moving, and thus a healthy life is one that enables you to move, and to draw enough strength from that movement to allow you to keep moving.
A healthy career is also in motion. It is a constant work in progress, always in a state of becoming. Just when you think you’ve found the perfect job, life moves on, and you find you need to start over—a new team, a new company, a new career. So, in the face of this perpetual motion machine, how can you apply the principles of Love + Work to your ever-changing, starting-over career?
I’ve spent most of my own career studying this question. Beginning with my master’s thesis on the social and psychological issues of entrepreneurship, where we interviewed a hundred successful entrepreneurs and compared their choices with those of a hundred entrepreneurs whose businesses had failed. Then continuing with research projects at both Deloitte and Accenture, where we investigated how people had navigated their way up, around, and through these huge, labyrinthine organizations. And now on to our current Love + Work research project, where we are seeking to understand the nature of work through the lens of those who love it. My focus has always been: How do those who come to love their work as a full expression of themselves actually wind up in that sweet spot—and how do they keep moving that sweet spot right along with them?
Inevitably, I’ve looked at my own career to see what lessons, if any, can be drawn. After I graduated from university, why did I up and move from England to Lincoln, Nebraska? I could have gotten a job in London that would have kept me so much closer to home. Why the dramatic leap to a land I didn’t know, to a company that would pay me half as much as my other offers, to a job that I hadn’t studied for?
Why, ten years into my Nebraska sojourn, did I start to write? How hard-working, or skillful, or just plain lucky was I to emerge from my writing cave with books that people actually wanted to read? How the heck did that happen? Did I know it would play out this way? If so, what was the secret sauce?
And then I left Gallup to start my own company. Did I know this would work out? Why did I give up a seventeen-year career and start over from scratch? Did I have a playbook I was running, or was I just making it up as I went along?
And then, a pivot. I had begun my company as a content and coaching firm, but somewhere along the way I decided that we needed to become a software company, powered by subscriptions. Did I know much about software? No, I knew very little. So why the pivot? And why was I so sure that this was right, even in the face of strong resistance from within my own team? And how the heck was I to know how to lead a team of a hundred engineers and product developers? Good grief. Be careful what you wish for.
When SurveyMonkey offered to buy 25 percent of the company, why did I so trust the CEO, Dave Goldberg, that I agreed? Why, when ADP came calling two years later and offered to buy the company outright, did I accept this offer when I had turned down so many others? And why, after the sale, was I so excited to continue my work through the ADP Research Institute? I didn’t need to stay on, but there was no question in my mind that I would. And that I would do so with passion.
In all the standard ways of measuring such things, my career has worked out. Did I know what I was doing when I first jumped on that Greyhound bus from the airport to Lincoln, Nebraska, forty years ago?
Many of these questions I can’t answer directly, other than to point to luck. Jim Collins, in his book Good to Great, says that leaders who stress the importance of luck are just revealing how deeply humble they are. But this isn’t humility. It’s realism. Those of us who’ve been blessed to have certain things in our lives play out the way we wanted them to know, on some deep level, that luck was on our side, and that, if things had slipped sideways even just a little, the outcomes could have been very different. There but for the grace of God go I. Or, to quote the poem “If—” by Rudyard Kipling, “If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat those two imposters just the same … yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it.”
Having said this, there are indeed insights and practices that can be gleaned from a study of successful careers. Here are some of the most powerful. Despite the well-intended advice, and pressure from those around you, think about how some of these might apply to you as you craft your own career.
Just Start
How do you know if you’ve started out right?
You don’t. Just start. A career is not a ladder, nor a lattice, nor a jungle gym. A career is a scavenger hunt for love.
Imagine yourself graduating from college and standing at the edge of a forest. There are many openings into the forest. Which one should you take? The “stay in school until you get a master’s degree” opening? The “break through the underbrush for a few years and see what you see” opening? The “go to medical school/law school/design school” opening?
Frankly, there’s no right answer to this question. So try not to worry about it too much. Just start. Walk into the forest. Any opening will do. And once you’re in the forest, keep your mind and heart open to the sight of a red thread—something you love, some activity, or person, or situation where you feel a pull.
After I graduated from college why did I up and leave the UK for Nebraska? Heck, I don’t know. All I knew at twenty-one was that there was something about that job and place that intrigued me more than any other job offers I was getting in the center of London.
“What about getting experience elsewhere?” I asked my dad. “Shouldn’t I go to some of the biggest companies in Europe and ply my trade there for a while?”
“It’s not about experience,” Dad said. “It’s about the quality of the experience. Do you think you’ll get something unique and distinct from heading over to Nebraska?”
“Yes,” I said.
So I went. Was it the right decision? Could I have experienced greater success and satisfaction by staying closer to home? Maybe. But I’ll never know, will I. All I’ll know is what occurred on the journey that began with me climbing on a bus to Lincoln.
The same will be true for you. Try not to put too much pressure on yourself to “start out right.” Because there is no right start. Or rather, there are a multitude of right starts.
Be generous with yourself. Don’t look for a sign to the perfect opening. Don’t wait until all the paths have been cut and freed from thick undergrowth and fallen trees. Just start moving. Listen to your instincts, try to find a role in which you might catch a glimpse of a red thread or two, then, as you move down the path, keep your eyes peeled for more red threads.
When you find one, grab hold and follow where it leads.
The “What” Always Trumps the “Who” and the “Why”
In all of my research, it has been crashingly obvious that the most successful people found roles that a) fulfilled their sense of purpose—they believed in the “why” of the role, b) allied them with colleagues they trusted and admired—they connected to the “who” of the role, and c) contained activities they loved—they enjoyed the role’s “what.”
Happy indeed is the person who finds the beautiful intersection of all three.
But be mindful that of the three, the “what” is the most significant. In study after study, those people who reported that they had a chance to do something they loved each and every day were far more likely to be high performers and to stay in the role than those who reported that they believed in the mission of the company or liked their teammates. It’s not that those other two things are unimportant; it’s just that what you are actually being paid to do is more important.
If you believe in the product you’re selling, but hate selling, you won’t succeed. Likewise, if you greatly admire the members of your team, but find yourself in the wrong role on the team, you will struggle.
So, before you take any job, discipline yourself to investigate exactly what sort of activities will be filling your working week. Find someone who’s actually in the role and ask them questions—not whether they love it, since their loves won’t necessarily jive with yours. But instead, ask about what specific activities they are doing at 10 a.m. on a regular day at work, or which activities take up the most time on the job. It is these activities that are emotionally charged—either positively or negatively—and if you land in a role where your hours and minutes are filled with activities that drain you, no amount of camaraderie or commitment to mission will compensate. Down this path lies burnout.
And, as the Red Thread Questionnaire will reveal for you, when it comes to the “what,” the details matter. When I first started at Gallup, I was delivering results to each person who took one of our strengths assessments, and writing up a report on how this person could grow by leveraging their strengths.
I was pretty good at it. The report writing, I mean. But the activity itself left me cold. I remember calling up the COO of the company, Connie Rath, and saying rather desperately, “I just don’t seem to care enough about this particular person. What’s wrong with me?”
And she replied, “Nothing’s wrong with you. Have you tried presenting? Maybe you’re more cut out for communicating in larger groups.”
I tried it, and I was.
One-on-one coaching was something I thought I would love. Until I realized I didn’t. And so the scavenger hunt continued. A huge thank you to Connie for allowing me to keep scavenging.
You Can Find Red Threads Every Day
As I mentioned in chapter 1, of all the questions the ADP Research Institute has asked during its global studies, the two most powerful in predicting all positive outcomes, whether performance, first-year retention, engagement, or resilience, were these:
Do you have a chance to use your strengths every day?
In the last week, have you felt excited to work every day?
Those who answered “strongly agree” were far more likely to have a boss who reports that “I always turn to this person for outstanding results,” far more likely to stick around for more than a year, and far more likely to answer the engagement and resilience items positively.
Notice the words “every day” in each question? These words matter. If you remove them, then these two questions lose all their predictive power—meaning the way someone answers them doesn’t show any link to all those positive outcomes. The questions don’t ask about “all day every day,” but they do ask the respondent to own and claim “every day.”
What does this mean for you? It means that in terms of your productivity and your psychological well-being, frequency matters. Any day that goes by without you finding something to love, something to get excited about, raises the chance that you will, over time, become less engaged and less productive. No, you won’t ever find the perfect job, a job you love 100 percent of the time. You won’t ever “do only what you love.” But you can—every single day—find some activity or situation or moment or event that you love. It might be the thinnest of red threads, but you can find it.
At least, you can find it if you are deliberate in looking for it. So, begin each morning by spending a few minutes anticipating what the red threads of the day might be. Which instances or activities you think will lift you today. They don’t have to be giant lifts—my institute’s data has no patterns showing that the people who are supremely excited by work once a quarter are more productive and engaged. When it comes to love, extreme frequency trumps extreme intensity. So discipline yourself to devote a little attention at the beginning of each day to pick out your loves for the day.
In this sense, your enemy here isn’t necessarily that you don’t have any red threads in your work. Your enemy is distraction. You’ve stopped paying attention to which moments you love, and so, like all ignored things, those moments have withered and lost their potency.
The antidote here is your attention. Be intentional. Pay attention to the red threads you’re going to find at work today, and you’ll get from them what you need. Every day.
You Always Have More Power Than You Think
Back in 2008 a very dear friend of mine, B, started to feel numbness in her legs. After suffering through a blitzkrieg of tests, she got a heart-rending diagnosis: ALS. Lou Gehrig’s disease. It’s a breakdown in the motor neurons that slowly causes the patient to lose control of her muscles. As her husband said at the time, “It’s like she’s been sentenced to death by slow-motion car crash. Me and the kids have to watch her die, and there’s nothing any of us can do about it.”
Today, twelve years into a disease that typically kills in three, she is still very much alive. Yes, she can no longer move, or eat, or speak, or even breathe by herself, but she’s still in there. And thanks to a fancy machine that can sense where her eyes are focusing, she can communicate to you and me as vividly as she ever could. Each letter has to be selected individually, so for someone as smart and verbal as her, the speed of communication, or lack thereof, must be incredibly frustrating. But at least she can still connect with the rest of us.
In reference to the Covid-19 pandemic, I asked her the other day how she had retained her resilience and spirit. For the last decade she’s been doing an extreme version—sheltering in place and social distancing—of what we’ve been suffering through for over a year and a half. I thought she might be able to teach us something.
Marcus, all I can tell you is that I choose to focus on those things I can control. There’s so much of my life now that I can’t control that if I focused on all I’ve lost, I would be suicidal by dinnertime. Instead, I focus on what is still within my control. I can still be a good mother to my kids. I can still be a spouse to my husband. I can still be there as a friend.
As I’m writing this, at this very moment, she’s just texted me. I had to put my dog to sleep this week—sweet Marshy, my golden, got pneumonia and I had to make a really tough decision. B’s text reads: T told me you had no option but to put Marshy down. That is such a hard day for you and I am sorry you had to go through that. I remember how he was always a part of your life and how much you loved him. I know you must be devastated, but he adored you, so please hold on to that thought. Sending love as always.
Imagine how long this one text must have taken for her to construct. While she’s lying in her bed, sores on her body, frozen in place, she’s not railing against her plight. She’s thinking of how I must be feeling this week, and is reaching out to show her love. She is still right there, and can still be exactly the kind of friend that she ever was.
I bring up B because of course she can teach us something. Your sense of purpose and resiliency stem from your sense of agency. Yes, there’s a great deal that you can’t control at work. You can’t control how your company performs with all its customers, you can’t dictate who your boss is, you can’t change that daft performance appraisal form, or that certification you’re required to take. Start to make a list of all the things at work you can’t control, and you’d never stop writing.
Do as my dear friend does, and ignore the list. Instead, focus on what at work you can control. Seventy-three percent of workers say they have the chance to modify their role to fit their strengths better. So start here. Once you’ve identified one or two red threads, figure out how you can use them to get your work done.
For inspiration, think about the most successful person you know. Not just financially. Someone who appears to have most, if not all, aspects of their work figured out. Someone who, when you look at them, makes you think, Lucky them. How did they get such a job? It seems to fit them so perfectly. How did they find such a great match?
The reality, of course, is that they didn’t find it. They made it. They took a generic job description—as all job descriptions are—and they deliberately and gradually fashioned the job so that it focused more and more on the activities they loved to do. Almost all of us have this room to maneuver. The most successful of us use this room to weave new red threads week by week so that, eventually, the actual work itself is dense with things they love.
No one will ever do this for you, since no one will ever know your red threads as intimately as you do. So it’s up to you—no matter what role you find yourself in—to take responsibility for weaving what you love into what you’re being paid to do. You, like 73 percent of the workforce, have the power to create the job in your image.
You might start by just focusing on which red threads you know you’re going to be able to draw on today.
Then, one week, maybe you figure out how to devote an entire day to one of your reddest threads.
Perhaps, as those Disney housekeepers did by making a little stuffed animal scene for their guests, you can get creative in how a red thread can be woven into a new way of getting your job done.
Perhaps you can sign up for a class that’ll help you practice and fine-tune one of your loves.
And then, over time, you might refine your loves into something so distinctive and so powerful that your team is prepared to design a role specifically around you.
As you do this, you may well find that your team and team leader, who were previously neutral to or even obstacles to your success at work, start aligning themselves around you. Others sense something different about you when you are in love with what you’re doing—just as the research tells us that people in love are more attractive to others. It’s almost as if people can pick up on your elevated levels of oxytocin or norepinephrine.
In your career—as in society at large—change follows the focus of your attention, particularly when you’re attentive to what you love.
Never Brag
Whether in interviews, performance reviews, or just regular conversation, you don’t need to claim how amazing you are, or how much better than everyone else you are. Most of us find it quite difficult to highlight our qualities while not coming off as a braggart, and so contort ourselves into knots trying to appear humble, while nonetheless trying to leave the other person in no doubt as to our superpowers.
You don’t need to contort yourself. Claim specificity rather than superiority. Don’t say “I am the best at … ” Or even the humble-pie version of that.
Use the phrase “I am at my best when … ” And then describe in detail the sorts of activities, situations, contexts, and moments that bring out your very best.
“I am at my best when … ” works really well in job interviews. A version you might want to try when joining a brand-new team is this: “You can always rely on me for … ” Here again, you aren’t claiming superstar performance, you are merely detailing for them the sort of contribution you hope to bring to the team. Not only will you come across as analytical rather than arrogant, but you’ll also reveal a capacity for self-mastery. And that’s always a gift to any team.
Here are a few more ways you can describe the detail of your Wyrd without bragging:
Over the years, I’ve found that I …
Other people tell me that I …
I get a thrill from …
I find I learn best when …
Some of my best times are when I …
Strive to Be Different, Not Complete
One of the strongest forces preventing you from finding what you love is the widely held belief that any job done well requires you to possess a predefined list of attributes and skills. You’ll see this in lengthy job descriptions, career paths laid out according to which skills you need for each role, and performance appraisal forms that aim to measure and rate you against the predefined list. The message you’re sent is that excelling at a job requires you to be complete, to display all the predefined attributes or skills. If you are seen to be lacking certain ones, then you’re encouraged to go acquire the ones you’re missing. Then you’ll be complete. Then you’ll excel.
All of this comes about because someone is trying to bring structure to what’s called “workforce planning” or “talent planning.” Their efforts are well intended, but are based on the completely false belief that if they can just define all the jobs specifically enough, then they’ll be able to select, assess, and train people for these jobs in a predictable and organized way.
The reason this belief is false is that excellence is idiosyncratic—namely, no two people who excel at the same job achieve excellence in the same way. There is no research published in any refereed journal proving that people who excel in the same role—whether they be Navy SEALs, teachers, emergency room nurses, or financial advisers—all possess the same list of skills and attributes. They may well share similar certifications or have passed the same tests, but that’s the extent of their sameness. Why they work, how they work, how they build relationships, how they take in information, how they learn, when and why and how they innovate—all of these are unique to each individual.
Unless you happen to be high up in human resources, however, you won’t be able to change all the processes that flow from the belief that those who excel in the same job excel in the same way. So, what can you do?
Well, on the surface, you can play the game. Getting rid of job descriptions and job leveling and job competencies is not a hill you need to die on. So, if you want a particular job, it might be sensible to try to show that you match the predefined skill set closely. And if you are preparing for a performance review that includes being rated on competencies, it might be worth thinking about examples that prove you possess all that’s supposedly required of you. Luckily, these sorts of things come around only once a year.
But in terms of your real-world success and fulfillment, you’ll need to ditch the fakery of appearing complete and instead learn to differentiate.
First, this means learning how to make best use of your red threads. You are a unique individual who finds love in very precise activities, outcomes, and instances. In chapter 8 I shared the Red Thread Questionnaire, which can help you pinpoint the detail of your red threads and differentiate them from all the other threads in the fabric of your life. These red threads are the source of your energy, your learning, and your comparative advantage. You will never be complete. Instead, you will always and forever be weaving these threads into some sort of differentiated contribution.
Second, to differentiate means to become comfortable with describing those threads which are not red. As you’ve just learned, when you join a new team, you should feel comfortable describing your red threads by saying, “You can always rely on me for … ” or “I am at my best when … ”
But you should also learn a technique for describing your threads that aren’t red. Here, these sorts of phrases can be helpful:
I’m not at my best when …
I find I procrastinate when …
I seem to struggle with …
I’m drained when …
These are simple phrases, but I imagine you haven’t used them much at work. Work—because it’s built around the myth of completeness—is not a place that encourages you to describe what you don’t love. Even though, deep down, you know that you love some activities and loathe others, even though you know that some drain you while others uplift you, and that the difference between these is quite specific, still you will find few venues in which you’re encouraged to share this super-important information about you.
What you’ll find yourself doing instead is twisting your language around so that you make your weakest threads appear strong. Hence, in job interviews, in response to the inevitable “What are your weaknesses?” question, you’ll hear yourself striving to make a gray thread sound red, as in “My weakness is that I care too much” or “My weakness is that my standards are too high.”
Try to break yourself of this habit. You won’t be able to see and weave your red threads if you spend your life pretending that all your threads are red. Of course, your confessing that some activities drain you or bore you doesn’t absolve you of doing them—as the Mayo Clinic research from chapter 6 shows, you don’t need an entirely red quilt to excel at what you do. You’re not going to love all activities at work, and you’re going to have to knuckle down and do them nonetheless. But by clearly differentiating your reds from the rest, you will, over time, become a more trusted teammate. No one trusts a person who loves all they do—just as you don’t trust the waiter who, in answer to a question about what’s good on the menu, answers “Everything!”
Learn to differentiate, honestly and vividly, between your reds and all the other shades.
You’re going to want to apply this to your teammates. Their red threads are as specific and as distinct as your own. To remove frustration from your work life, stop expecting from people what they cannot give. If you’ve asked a teammate for something more than a couple of times, and they’ve misunderstood it or haven’t delivered it by the deadline or just plain forgot it, then take a hint: this isn’t a red thread of theirs. To collaborate well, you need to have some understanding of their threads, and they of yours. The more comfortable you are with sharing your reds and the rest, the more comfortable they’ll be in sharing theirs.
This even applies to your team leader. I once worked for a person I was trying to impress by showing her just how many options I’d thought of in terms of next actions. I stayed up all night concocting an uber-detailed PowerPoint of a multiforked flow diagram of if/then possibilities. By morning I’d created something that made NASA’s moon landing plans look rather slapdash.
She wasn’t impressed at all. Instead, as I began laying out option one of fifteen, she started to shift in her seat, and cut me off with curt questions. Since I’d never seen this from her before, I carried on with my analysis, until she finally erupted with, “Marcus, which one do you think we should do? We need to move on this. By tomorrow.”
Her red thread wasn’t seeing the multitude of connections and possibilities. It was trusting in her people’s opinions, and therefore expecting them to have landed on those opinions before the meeting. Not all leaders share her red thread—and it’s not as though this is a leadership thread. In fact, some leaders love detailed contingency planning and possibility thinking. But she didn’t. She loved facts, conclusions, and actions.
It took me a while to figure this out—initially, I thought I was constantly letting her down. Boy, that’s hard, isn’t it. To turn one of your red threads into an actual piece of beautiful work and then have your team leader look at it as barely black and white. Our solution proved to be the same as yours will be should you ever find yourself in a similar situation: share what you love, and ask the other person to do the same. You might not use the “love” word. You might instead use the “I’m at my best when … ” phrase, or, in this case, something like “I can take in information fastest when … ” The goal is to come out of the conversation having described a red thread of yours and having learned a detail or two about theirs.
You’re not bragging, nor are you making excuses. You’re just trying to see and to be seen so that you can both collaborate better—and that, in the end, is what love at work is all about.
Shape Your Career Like an Hourglass
To begin with, you’ll take a job—perhaps any job you can get—and then you’ll keep moving, always looking for those activities that seem to be positively charged. You’ll spot one red thread, weave it into your current role, then find another, and weave that in as well. Then perhaps a left turn onto a new path, connected to the original one but angling away toward a different part of the forest. Then another turn, another fork, another path.
The early part of your career will probably feel a lot like this. Lots of weaving to and fro, and weaving new threads into the fabric of your understanding of who you are and what you love to do. This is the wide base of the hourglass.
Try not to be too harsh on yourself if you find that, during these first few years of your career, you’re searching and searching. If a career is a scavenger hunt for love, then keeping your eyes open for all kinds of possible loves is an intelligent way to begin your hunt.
The Middle of the Hourglass
But after a few years, the research shows, most successful people choose a path and stay on it for a decade or more. They may switch teams or companies or leave the big corporate world entirely during this time, but they stay focused on the same area of expertise.
The most influential research on deep mastery was done by professor K. Anders Ericsson and his team at Florida State University. His data was popularized by the concept of “ten thousand hours”—that if you spend ten thousand hours, roughly ten years, applying yourself to the same thing, you can come to excel at it.
In fact, Ericsson’s research didn’t lead to this conclusion. He found not that after ten years of focus anyone can excel at anything, but that anyone who ended up getting really good at something had devoted a significant amount of time to their craft. Which is quite different. Your loves, as specific and unique as they are, take time to be channeled into meaningful contribution.
Yes, you may experience rapid learning in some activities—this is one of the signs of love, after all—and yet true expertise in anything, whether selling, housekeeping, engineering, nursing, teaching, marketing, takes years of work. Years in which you try something, experiment with a new approach, and wait for the results—they could come tomorrow, they could come in a year’s time, they could drip, drip, drip, one small insight building on the one before, or they could come in one giant burst of insight. But they come over time, and so you learn and build your mastery over time.
This was where Ericsson’s work pointed. And if you read the actual research papers, you’ll find them thoughtful and methodologically sound. Hippocrates, though, the grandfather of medicine, said pretty much the same thing more than two thousand years ago: “Life is short, the craft is long.” We live a good deal longer these days, but his insight is still wise: any craft worth doing is bigger and deeper and richer than one person’s lifetime.
So, at some point in your career, you are going to want to honor the path you have chosen—the craft you have chosen—by giving it your extended, undivided attention. Distraction is the enemy of excellence.
And as you do this, you’ll gain not only mastery but also credibility. These days everyone seems to be some sort of “thought leader.” And the barrier to making content and putting it up on social media platforms has fallen so low that anyone with a phone can opine on anything they like, and we seem to listen—so long as they have thousands of followers, that is.
This kind of follower-driven opining may have value in the world of social media, but it’s far less likely to serve you in the world of work. Here you will build the greatest value if you can show yourself to be someone who has stayed focused enough in their field to know all the details, and which details truly matter. Regardless of your field, this sort of expertise is always valued on a team. It has heft. It is rare. It is recognized even if other folks on the team don’t understand the details themselves. It is intimidating, which is no bad thing. And it leads to you being deeply trusted.
Contrary to what you may have heard or read, being focused in this way doesn’t make you narrow, or less open to novelty and innovation. The opposite is true. It is only when you know so well the existing ways of doing things—which ones work, which don’t, and when and why—that you are able to imagine what a more effective way might look like. Focus such as this not only helps you anticipate the future—you are deeper into the forest, further ahead than anyone else, and so can see round more corners—but also helps you create the future. This focus prepares your mind with actions, experiences, and results played out over many years, and as all innovators know, creativity comes only to the prepared mind.
Louis Pasteur’s exact remark was “In the fields of observation”—which is really all of our fields—“chance favors only the prepared mind.” In other words, you’ve got to know your field in detail before you can notice that the behavior of one particular detail is a sign of something cool and new. In Pasteur’s case, it was injecting chickens with an accidentally spoiled batch of chicken cholera and discovering that these particular chickens were then immune to the disease forever. A frustration became an insight about the germ theory of disease, which in turn led to the discovery of vaccination to prevent disease.
In your case, it might be an insight into a more effective way to reduce post-op pain in your patients. Or a slightly better way to explain calculus to a student with specific learning differences. Or a breakthrough in how a certain sports fabric can be constructed to transmit moisture away from the skin. Or how to word a marketing email so that the open rate doubles. But whatever your craft, once you’ve scavenged around for a few years, and tied a few red threads together, hold on, keep weaving them into an ever-thickening rope, and you’ll see your mastery, your creativity, and your value grow exponentially over time.
The Top of the Hourglass
And then perhaps—and it is “perhaps” because many people choose to stay on the mastery path their entire career—you can branch out and become responsible for many other people, on many other paths. This is the widening at the top of the hourglass.
Here your own mastery serves as the foundation for your ability to lead others.
This is because people follow a leader only when they see something that will turn anxiety about the future into confidence. Your mastery is, to other people, confidence-inducing. It shows them something specific and tangible about you, something vivid, not vague. It shows them that you are both an expert in who you are—and therefore who you will be no matter what situations you all encounter—and an expert in your chosen craft—and therefore are more likely to see around corners and be ready for whatever the future might hold for them. Both of these inspire confidence.
In our book Nine Lies About Work, Ashley Goodall and I referred to this leader quality as a “spike,” as in “the best leaders are spiky”—meaning they have devoted themselves to getting really good at something that matters to their followers. And this mastery, this focused combination of love and work, is the source of their ability to lead others. You know this intuitively—think of any leader, any person you would follow willingly, and they are vivid in your mind. Their characteristics, their deep expertise, their way of decision making, all of these are super-defined. This leader may not be perfect, and you neither want nor expect them to be. But they are precise—and this is why people follow them. Warren Buffett is not Richard Branson is not Margaret Thatcher is not Martin Luther King Jr. is not Desmond Tutu is not Jacinda Ardern is not Vladimir Putin—they’re imperfect, they’re different, and they’re all super-spiky.
If you don’t trust your intuition on this, there’s some research coming out of Cisco that’ll confirm it for you. In a very cleverly designed experiment, Cisco researchers surveyed thousands of employees about their views on their work and the company, and then, at a separate time, they asked these employees to come up with words or phrases to describe their team leader. Some leaders had a wide variety of descriptors, almost as if the team members were unsure about who the leader really was. Whereas other leaders generated descriptors that all zeroed in on the same few attributes. These leaders were more defined in the eyes of their team. They were spiky.
Then, using some very fancy math and natural language processing algorithms, the researchers discovered that of all the survey questions they asked team members, the one that led to the highest ratings on the spiky leaders’ teams was this one: “I have great confidence in the company’s future.”
The takeaway for you is that all the time you spend in the middle of the hourglass is vital if you ever want to thrive as a leader at the top of the hourglass. Honor your craft with years of attention, and you will not only become better at your craft, but you will become more defined and thus more confidence-inducing in the minds of your followers.
Of course, by giving your craft years of focus, you’ll also be modeling for them that you have empathy for their own search for mastery. That you deeply value mastery. That you will be patient. That you will give them the time they need to take their loves seriously, just as you did. That you are dismissive of dilettantes, not fooled by follower-fame, and appreciate, above all, that the craft is long.
This is what we all want from our leaders.