Hi. I’m Marcus Buckingham and it’s lovely to meet you.
I read magazines backwards. And with books, I read the last page first.
Maybe you do the same. If you do, then you already know that this book ends with the same ten words it starts with. Well, nine, actually. I drop the “Buckingham” because I figure by the end, you and me, we’ll be on a first-name basis. But surname aside, the start and the end are the same.
Introductions are funny, aren’t they? You don’t know me. I don’t know you. We say hi, nod, shake, and introduce ourselves. The word “introduction” comes from the Latin verb introducere, meaning to lead in. This leading in assumes that the parties involved will go deeper and learn more about one another. Otherwise, what would be the point of the introduction, right?
What if I told you that you don’t know yourself enough to have any kind of authentic relationship with yourself beyond that “lead in.”
How many years of math did you take? Science? Social studies? What about Spanish or French?
And how many years did you spend learning about you?
No years, I bet.
Months? Nope.
What about a week? Have you ever spent a week diving into the extraordinary uniqueness of you?
Two years ago I was speaking at a large leadership conference. It was a group of spa owners and operators. Mostly women, as it happens. A smart, fun group.
I said the math, science, Spanish thing and then asked, “When was the last time you spent any time studying the uniqueness of you?”
A pause. There’s always a pause. And straight faces, stares. But this time a woman about ten rows in yells: “I took your StrengthsFinder assessment!”
People chuckled, cheered. Takes courage to yell out in a room of a thousand. I asked her to stand.
“What’s your name?”
“Destiny,” she said.
“Brittney?”
“No, DESTINY,” she said louder.
I had erred on purpose. “Hi, Destiny … how long did the assessment take?”
“About twenty minutes,” she answered.
“How about the results report? How long did that take you to read?”
“About fifteen minutes,” she shrugged.
“OK, great. And where is your report now?”
“Uhhhh … I put it in my desk drawer, I think?” Her pitch rising at the end.
“So thirty-five minutes. Only thirty-five minutes on you, Destiny?”
A pause.
“Well … does therapy count?” she said with the biggest, best belly laugh. The crowd roared around her.
I cocreated the StrengthsFinder system with Don Clifton in 2001. Then the StandOut assessment exactly a decade later. I’ve done research and given thousands of speeches in just about every country. It doesn’t seem to matter your gender, age, race, religion, nationality, culture—people around the world don’t spend much time at all learning about who they are at their very best.
And, of course, since they’re so close to those things they love to do, they don’t value them. I imagine the same’ll be true for you. We see just how easy it is for you to remember customers, their names, and something distinct about them, and we marvel at this gift. We see you zero in instinctively on that one error in the long lines of computer code, and we’re amazed. We watch as you find just the right words, tone, and eye contact to calm that patient down, and we wish we could be so naturally reassuring. You? You aren’t astounded by these gifts. You are inside them, so interwoven with them that it’s not just that you don’t value them. It’s more that you don’t see them at all.
You can go a lifetime never seeing them.
Tragically, most of us do.
And Destiny, if you’re reading, a) I’ll never forget your laugh. It still makes me happy. And b) No, therapy doesn’t count. Because the focus in therapy is typically on what’s wrong with you. And the work in therapy? How to fix what’s wrong.
Us humans, we’re masters at drilling into what’s wrong with us. From the beginning of your existence, the word you heard most from your parents was “No” or “Don’t.” Your parents’ job was to keep you alive. They meant well. You got really good at understanding all the bad things around you. Hot stove, busy street, granny’s rosary.
Then you go to school. You get an A+ in drawing and painting and a C– in math. Nobody talks about your love for the arts. Everyone’s attention is on your flailing in math.
Then you go to work and have your first performance review. The first thirteen minutes are delightful, and the other forty-seven are spent on your “areas of opportunities” and a plan for your “development.”
Then you get married and go to therapy.
The uncomfortable truth is that, more than likely, no one is worrying about what makes you unique. Nobody is dedicated to introducing you to yourself, to helping you get curious about and build a really deep relationship with you at your best. School doesn’t do it: schools want to make sure that everybody learns what everybody is supposed to learn. Work doesn’t do it: work is most concerned about performance, about what needs to get done. Everybody in your life, since childhood, has had expectations and demands that don’t necessarily have any direct connection to you discovering the unique things you love and building a life around them.
Of course, your parents want you to be happy. But if you told them that living in your van and selling burritos to hungry surfers is what makes you happy, I think they’d start pointing to alternative, more “successful” paths.
What no one is doing is starting with you, listening to you, paying attention to what you instinctively pay attention to, and giving you methods and techniques to then apply these unique gifts in the world. Which is a problem for you since, as Steve Jobs said in his famous Stanford commencement address, “The only way to do great work is to love what you do.”
Well, yes, that’s an easy thing to agree with—who wouldn’t want a life in which you get to find those things you love and then turn them into a contribution so valuable that people will actually pay you to do what you love? And it’s an easy thing to say to anyone just starting out in their career, or thinking about a career change. It just rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it. “Find what you love, and do it!”
The hard part is the doing. Of course, you want a life in which you get to do a lot of what you love. You have within you so much energy, so much insight, so much power, so much joy. You don’t want to get to the end of your life and look back and realize that you didn’t get to feel any of it. You want to get to the end and look back and know—deep in the very heart of you—that no matter how much money you made or didn’t make, you lived a first-rate version of your very own life, rather than a second-rate version of somebody else’s.
But how do you actually do it?
The data on this is a bit confusing, to be honest. Survey the most successful, most resilient, and most engaged doctors, teachers, entrepreneurs—really, anyone who’s thriving in any profession whatsoever—and the number of people who self-report that they love all they do is tiny. So to tell you that to thrive in your life you’ve got to “do what you love” would seem to be setting you up for failure.
And yet, dig a little further in, and Steve Jobs was still right. To do anything great in your life, you will have to take seriously what you love and express it in some sort of productive way. We know this because when we survey a group of people who are highly successful, resilient, and engaged and a contrast group of people who are less so, the two best questions to separate them are these:
- Do you have a chance to play to your strengths every day?
- Were you excited to go to work every day last week?
Those people who are thriving answer “strongly agree” to both of these. Every single day they report that they get to do something that plays to the best of themselves, something that gets them excited. Not all day. Not everything. Just some things—but every day. They don’t necessarily “do all they love.” Instead, they find the love in what they do. Every day.
You can learn to do what all these thriving people do. You can learn how they did it, and apply this to all parts of your own life. You don’t necessarily need to hold out for that perfect job where you do all that you love. Instead, you can learn the skill of finding the love in what you do. You can learn to identify those activities that excite you, where you feel at ease, at your best, pinpoint those moments or situations or outcomes that you love, and then learn how to weave them into what you do, every day.1
You are the project of this book. Together, you and I are going to uncover the mysteries of you, and reveal to you the unimaginably unique mark you can make on the world. Give yourself more than the thirty-five minutes Destiny did. Take the time to go beyond the introduction, and dive into the intricacies of what makes you “you.” Use the book as your primer so that, over the course of your life, you can stand strong in who you are, and what you love to do, and how you choose to express that love. There is no one, nor will there ever be, who is quite like you. Which activities you love, what draws you in, what keeps your attention, what lifts you up, what drags you down are part of a pattern you share with precisely no one. You deserve a life that reflects this truth. You deserve a story where in school, and at home, and at work, and in your relationships you become expert in how to draw love from life, and how to weave this love into contribution.
You deserve, in all parts of your life, a lifelong love story.
My most personal commitment to you is that this book will help you tell it.
Your Fellow Traveler
You know my name, but not much else. Journeying together all the way to the very heart of you requires that we trust each other. You’ve spent a good deal of your life trying to fit in and armor yourself against the harsh realities of family, school, and work. So have I. If we’re going to free each other of that armor and open ourselves up to more, we’ll have to be willing to share—our successes, our fears, our hopes, mistakes, loves.
I confess this isn’t easy for me. I’m one of those people who studiously avoid eye contact on planes so that, God forbid, I don’t have to get into an actual conversation with the human sitting next to me. But, on this particular journey, distance and separation aren’t going to be our friend. We need curiosity, honesty, and—I can’t quite bear to say it, but OK—vulnerability.
So, yes, name’s Marcus. British. Mum’s from a family of coal miners in North Yorkshire. Dad’s parents were in retail in the South. He was a Royal Air Force lieutenant. They met on the base. He brought her down South. She was a teacher. He was in human resources.
Relatively happy childhood. Older brother. Younger sister. So yup, I’m the consensus-seeking, peace-making middle child.
Huge and long-suffering Arsenal fan—if you know soccer, you’ll understand why.
Huge and long-suffering Nebraska Cornhuskers fan—if you know college football, you’ll understand why.
College-educated in the UK, then came over to Lincoln, Nebraska—more later in the book on why the heck I would make such a leap.
By training and by disposition, I am a psychometrician. Meaning I’ve spent my career finding ways to measure things about you that are important, but that can’t be counted.
I can count your height, your grade point average, your salary, how many days of work you missed, how much you sold. But what about your strengths, or how much leadership talent you have, or how engaged you are, or how resilient? This has been my focus for the last thirty years. The first seventeen of them at Gallup, and now as the cohead of the ADP Research Institute, where my team does research around the world on all aspects of human thriving.
There is so much opinion in the air these days, so much content, so many sentences beginning with the words “I think that … ” And while some of these opinions are worthy, and many well intended, my personal talisman is reliable data. What do we truly know about what all the best leaders have in common? What are the strengths of the most effective teachers? What attitude do all the most successful entrepreneurs cultivate in themselves? The answers to each of these questions are knowable so long as we can measure strengths, talents, and attitudes. Which we can. If we’re careful.
So in this book, one of the things I hope to do is bring all this reliable data to bear on you, your life, your work, your thriving. I promise you this book will be the most authoritative deep dive into all that you are, and all you could be. No opinion. No “I think that … ” Just the facts that we know for sure.
This is my tenth book, and it’s going to be quite different from the others. My previous nine were all based only on science, which, as a repressed Brit, and a data-driven repressed Brit to boot, I was more than happy to rely on.
But your life is a story, and if I’ve served you well, by the end of this book you’ll think of your own story in a new way. No matter what challenge or decision you face, you’ll have a smarter and more insightful way of making sense of it. A wiser and more loving way to make sense of yourself.
Which means I’m not going to be much help to you if I don’t share some of my own story. I’ve struggled, loved, reached, fallen, reached again. I’ve made some rule-breaking career decisions—making that leap to Lincoln, Nebraska, in the late ’80s and investing all my savings in building a software company are two that spring to mind. I’ve made some truly rotten decisions—let’s leave those for later. I’ve created those strengths assessments, written books on managers—First, Break All the Rules is one—built a career inside a large corporation, left and committed myself to the life of an entrepreneur, sold my company, wrote more books, and rejoined the corporate world. I’ve run myself, then a team, then several teams, then teams of teams, then back again.
My life is not yours, and, frankly, mine is made far easier than yours might be by my gender, race, and first-world upbringing. Still, if you are to learn from others’ real-world experience, then that experience, just like the real world, is going to be idiosyncratic. Mine is the only life experience I can reliably report on, and so in this book I’ll share both what I’ve learned from it and what the data confirms (or refutes).
I do wish we could be sitting next to each other, and I could ask you about your life, your choices, your stories. But a book doesn’t give us that. So I’ll spill the data, give you some questions you can ask yourself, try to teach you a brand-new language to make sense of you in your world. And I’ll tell you some stories from my own life.
My simple hope is that these stories will help you craft your own.
Make Love Work
As the title says, we’re going to be talking here about both love and work. And really there’s no space between the two. Some will tell you not to bring your personal feelings—your loves—to work. The data, however, reveals that the causal arrow pointing the other way is just as strong. How you feel at work—whether your work is uplifting or soul-destroying, whether it fulfills you or empties you out, whether it makes you feel valued or utterly useless—all of it will be experienced most keenly at home, by you and the ones you love.
What you love, who you love, how you love, why you love what you love, and how those you love feel about your loves—all of your love life is the subject of this book. You are not a sectioned being, with one slice of work over here balanced out with one slice of personal life over there. Instead, you are a whole being, unified. You have but one cup, which is either filled with or empty of love. So yes, we will be talking about your love life. Your passions. Your relationships. Your learning. Your childhood. Your kids—if you have them. We will be talking about how love fills your life, and what this love-filled life creates for you, and those you love, and those you lead. We’ll be talking about all of it.
And love too is a unified thing. Love is love is love, whether it flows from your work or your charity work or your relationships or your faith or your kids. When you are devoid of it, you are a brittle, broken thing. When you are filled with it, you are a marvel.
You will learn the most only when you vanish into the subject: How can you learn what you love to learn?
You will be resilient only when you find the love in what you do: Which activities lift you up with love?
You will lead others effectively only when they trust that you know and love the best parts of you: What about you do you love enough to lead others with?
You will develop the most only in response to another person: Does this other person see what you love and love what they see?
What happens when you love to do something at which you don’t excel? Or when someone you love can’t see what you truly love? Or when they see it and wish you didn’t love it?
Let’s dive into all of these questions. I can’t serve up the answers, of course—the intricacies and idiosyncrasies of your life are your own.
But I can teach you the code for how to answer them for yourself. Each morning many of us wake up and put our amor on. We come to see life as something to be withstood, something to get through, unscathed. We block out the noise, march on with our head down, surviving—as an employee, a parent, a student, a partner. The risk in all this, of course, is that we get to the end never really hearing what our life was telling us all along. Never really seeing ourselves for all that we are.
With this book, my hope is that you can change all of this. You can change your relationship with life and your relationship with yourself. Because, in truth, your life is not the clamor to be shut out. It is instead the source of all joy, passion, power, and contribution. Each day, life is sending you thousands of signals revealing where you are at your best, where you’re strongest, most creative, most attractive, most special. Each day your life is speaking to you in a language only you can understand.
Together, as you read this book, let’s do everything we can to build fluency in your own life’s language. Let’s help you learn how to decode its signals to discover the extraordinarily powerful truth about you.