Being Rather than Doing Will Make You Happy
Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about.
—Oscar Wilde
When was the last time you caught yourself doing something that you love? Not just something you enjoy, or find amusing, or that is better than doing the paperwork, unless you really love paperwork, but something that completely fills you up from the inside, and lights you up like a Christmas. It goes beyond simply that it was nice; it involves regret when you walk away and a deep sense of contentment that you had been involved in that process. When you do something you love, it gives you a sense of fulfillment and feeling of self, which cannot be achieved merely by doing anything. Loving what you do stops what you are doing from being a task and instead causes you to be who you are, lost in the moment, and knowing that this, this thing is right, right now. No amount of money, job title, reward, or recognition can match that feeling. In fact, if it was not for the fact that you need to pay your bills, it would be something that you would willingly do for free.
It’s Not About The Money
When it comes to being happy, salary has to be taken out the equation. Judge et al (2010) found that the link between salary and job satisfaction is very weak, being engaged with the work that you do isn’t going to happen because you are paid well. In fact, the research by Deci et al (1999) found that incentives can have a negative effect on our enjoyment of a job. You should be remunerated for the work you do in a job because you are bringing all your skills, knowledge, and talent into the endeavor, but money cannot be given as a reason for the motivation behind why you to do what you do it. Now, many people reading this will not have the luxury to turn down paid work because it isn’t motivating. Most of us work because we have bills to pay and need to keep a roof over our heads and food in our bellies. However, the decision to stay in a job you hate because of the pay will never make you satisfied. We are conditioned to believe that we need all the trappings of success to be happy. From the moment we are old enough to take in information, we are marketed to, persuaded, and influenced in order to convince us that if we just had the latest, greatest, most marvelous thing, then life would be truly wonderful. But what are we actually trying to achieve? There is the story about the businessman trying to persuade the fisherman on the beach to commercialize his fishing business and when asked why, it boiled down to becoming successful enough to enjoying sitting on the beach, something the fisherman was already achieving.
Too often we spend so long looking at what we don’t have, we miss what we have already got. Therefore, money is a minor consideration versus working in a position where you are truly able to be yourself. It might mean making some hard choices about where you live, and the type of lifestyle that you enjoy, and you might think that you have worked hard to achieve these things that society tells us are so important. But, they are just things, and you can’t take them with you, and is the enjoyment you get from these things really worth you working yourself into an early grave doing a job you hate and missing out on all the things you would love to do? It’s a fundamental question about what yardstick we seek to measure success by.
What Is Success?
Some time ago, when I was experiencing one of those nose to the brick wall moments in my business, my family had a meal to celebrate my brother’s birthday. We were struggling financially at the time, so much so, that my family ended up agreeing to fund our families travel costs and the cost of meal, so we could join the family celebration. During the meal, my Mother decided to toast her children. She started off with my eldest brother, who although had passed away, was a great success in his career and had achieved the position of Sales Director. Cheers. Then she talked about my middle brother who, at the time was a successful electronic engineer and a Project Director. Cheers. She then celebrated the recent promotion of my younger brother who had secured a position as a Director at a Bank. Cheers . . . and then there is Carrie . . . . Cheers. I do come from a family of high achievers, and I had given up a successful corporate career to be, rather than do a job. The situation I was in at the time was painful; by my family’s standards, I was a failure, there were possibly even concerns that I had lost the plot and gone a little bit mad. Perhaps there is some truth in that and about twelve months later my first business failed, and that was a hard time to work through. But what is success? It’s a question you need to ask yourself. What measuring stick are you using to determine whether you are successful or not? Whose measure of success are you trying to measure up to?
I have discovered success on my own terms; it doesn’t come with a proper job title. I say I’m a Woman of Many Businesses because I can’t quite decide what I want to be when I grow up. It also doesn’t come with the usual trappings of success, and I rarely wear a suit. Confucius said “choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.” I truly love the work I do, and it rarely feels like a job. I occasionally pinch myself because I can’t quite believe that people pay me for doing something that is far too enjoyable to call work. Yet growing up, I was led to believe that few people got to live the dream, that this was the preserve of the lucky few, and yet, more and more people I bump into have decided to redefine what success is and choose to be who they really are instead of do a job. Living in the fullness of your potential means it is not just job satisfaction that you experience, it is life satisfaction. I appreciate that pursuing a dream is risky, and many people pursue their dreams and fail. I address failure further in Chapter 12, so, for now, I will simply say that failure is an important part of our learning process, and shouldn’t be feared, and also that you should never give up. In pursuing who you are, your definition of success will fall out of sync with societal norms of consumerism. It doesn’t mean that you can’t earn a decent salary, I now earn more than I did in corporate life, and it doesn’t mean you can enjoy the fruits of your labor. But, it does mean that you don’t need those things to feel successful.
For me, my measures of success are to do with seeing that moment when the light bulb goes off and I know that the person I am working with is changed forever, that they finally understand how amazing and brilliant they are, for the first time in their lives. It is the feeling I get when I submit a manuscript, finished to my satisfaction for editing, and it is seeing the transformation in an organization and chatting with the senior management team as a trusted advisor because they have experienced how the stuff that I do using organization development delivers the change they were hoping for. Those are moments that motivate me to get out of bed at 4:15am on a Monday morning to get the train to London to deliver a day of coaching. It’s what keeps me going when I experience a bout of writer’s block and worry about missing a deadline, and it is what makes me push through when Chief Executives are suspicious as to whether ‘playing with Lego’ will deliver a return on investment. I can articulate these measures of success because I have worked out what really makes me tick, and what really makes me happy.
Doing What You Love in Corporate Life
In organizational life, the point in time when job possibilities can be reviewed and career ambitions discussed is during the annual appraisal. In my experience, and that of millions of managers around the world, very often the appraisal or performance review is a painful paper-filling tick-box exercise hated by line managers and employees alike. Too often the ‘conversations’ (and I do use that term loosely) involve the line manager telling the employee whether they have or haven’t hit their targets, and then setting targets for the next year. Occasionally, there might be a brief discussion regarding the Personal Development Plan, if it is part of the form, but it usually falls to the employee to fill in later. This doesn’t aid performance, nor does it explore the true passions and desires of the employee being appraised. It does provide a reminder of the individual’s targets, but to be honest, given how time-poor most managers are, it probably would have been more effective if these were by email. Of course, going through the motions of the exercise does get HR off your back, and the organization feels better about the fact that they are managing the performance of their employees. It is all slightly depressing, isn’t it, and a complete waste of everyone’s time and energy.
What would happen to conversations between manager and employee if they started the performance review with the question “When was the last time you caught yourself doing something that you love?” That would change the dynamic of the performance review meeting completely. Just consider what could happen if managers and employees explored this question with honesty and transparency. For a start, a conversation that begins with a question that requires reflection and touches on someone’s values and beliefs is richer and more profound than one based on a paper exercise. Secondly, it also forces you to drop out of task mode for a time and focus on the person, who they are, what they are, what they are capable of, examining their potential and their passions. The review meeting would discover a whole range of possibilities for the employee to improve their performance and add value to the organization. Wow! All from a simple question about stuff they love to do.
How does such a conversation help a line manager? Connecting on a deeper level helps you to understand what makes the employee tick and where their passions might help the team. Some might have a passion for numbers and analyzing data, others for meeting people. Talking about what they love will enable you to understand the types of projects and job tasks that they would embrace and enthuse about. You might also discover that these people who come to work day in and day out spend their spare time coaching kids’ football teams, organizing charity events, or volunteering for a counseling helpline, demonstrating a whole heap of transferable skills that these individuals might never have had the opportunity to use in the workplace.
The reward for the organization of such an approach to performance and development reviews is immense. Engagement is such an overused word, but if people are doing what they love, engagement isn’t something that has to be strived for, it will be a given. The organization will be filled with an employee population doing what they love at least some of the time, delivering a significant level of discretionary behavior, and creating an atmosphere that makes the organization a great place to work and that results in great organizational performance and high levels of profit.
Manage Your Career Tool #7 – What Does Success Mean to You?
Very often, we go through life with vague notions of what success looks like and pursue a set of goals that we believe will make us happy. But, very rarely, do we sit back and take time to stop and consider whether the goals we are pursuing are really the ones that will make us happy, and whether what we think makes us successful will really make us happy. This Career Tool provides an opportunity for you to take stock of what really matters to you, and helps you to define what success is, for you. The tool comprises three tasks:
- What does success mean to you?
- How other people define success?
- How you define success?
One thing to consider when you write your definition is whether what you have written is in your capacity to achieve. If your definition of success is based on how someone else behaves or acts, then you might be better served throwing pennies into a wishing well. Success measures are about you and what makes you feel successful, not about how other people feel about you.
Task 1 – What Does Success Mean to You?
Write a personal definition of success below:
Task 2 – How Other People Define Success?
Success has been defined by a number of people in a number of ways. Below are some quotes. Read through each quote and circle key words that you believe are important to defining success. If any of these quotes are particularly powerful, highlight the whole quote:
- My favorite definition of success is that it is a state of mind combined with a state of readiness. You can have one and be a flop; if you have both, you’ll win every time.—Carolyn Warner
- Put your heart, mind, intellect and soul into even your smallest acts. This is the secret of success.—Swami Sivananda
- If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from his angle as well as your own.—Henry Ford
- Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day in and day out.—Robert Collier
- There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, learning from failure.—Colin Powell
- The major difference I’ve found between the highly successful and the least successful is that the highly successful stick to it. They have staying power. Everybody fails. Everybody takes his knocks, but the highly successful keep coming back.—Sherry Lansing, Chairman, Paramount Pictures
- Passion is what gives meaning to our lives. It’s what allows us to achieve success beyond our wildest imagination. Try to find a career path that you have a passion for.—Henry Samueli
- To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.—Ralph Waldo Emerson
- You never achieve success unless you like what you are doing.—Dale Carnegie
- Success means only doing what you do well, letting someone else do the rest.—Goldstein S. Truism
- The measure of success is not whether you have a tough problem to deal with, but whether it’s the same problem you had last year.—John Foster Dulles
- Success is how high you bounce when you hit bottom.—George S. Patton
- Our business in life is not to get ahead of others, but to get ahead of ourselves—to break our own records, to outstrip our yesterday by our today.—Stewart B. Johnson
- Be there for others, but never leave yourself behind.— Dodinsky
- Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful.—Albert Schweitzer
- Success is not counted by how high you have climbed but by how many people you brought with you.—Wil Ros
- Success is a journey, not a destination. The doing is often more important than the outcome.—Arthur Ashe
- Money won’t create success, the freedom to make it will.—Nelson Mandela
Take up one idea. Make that one idea your life—think of it, dream of it, live on that idea. Let the brain, muscles, nerves, every part of your body be full of that idea, and just leave every other idea alone. This is the way to success.
What are the common themes of success that you have noted in the above quotations?
If you highlighted a particular quote, why did you chose it as a favorite?
Task 3 – How You Define Success?
Most people seek to be a ‘success.’ Yet few have given great thought to what they mean by the term. In a letter written to the other people, offer your personal definition of success. As well as giving an overall personal definition of success, include at least one specific way you wish to experience career success. Use some of the themes and words that you identified in Task 2 to help you