"A career is a scavenger hunt for love"

A few ideas about careers to help your steering.

• "A career is a scavenger hunt for love" - Marcus Buckingham.

• Unlearn the metaphor about careers being a ladder, a lattice, or a jungle gym.

• Love means paying careful attention to what are specific things that you LOVE doing.

One of my amazing thinking partners calls this going with the way not against - or wu wei - and offers an illustration: it's like knowing that everyone respects and likes a great football player, so you might try to put a lot of energy into being a great player, but inside sort of you know that is not you, that you don't even like football much. Learn to listen “in” to that inner voice. Be patient, it speaks very very softly and may even be found in your body, not your head.

Then go deep into mastering those areas of love. It's in those areas you'll find your way to being able to contribute uniquely over time. And, you'll have a better chance of enjoying yourself along the way.

• The best way to future-proof your career is to go deep into your specific areas of love and not to go out wide and broad.

Every brain is different and has 100 trillion connections (Carl Zimmer, Scientific American) and that means you are literally and beautifully unique.

And that means - no one else can ever be a better judge of your loves than you.

• The "what" you do, on a daily basis, trumps the who and why. (Unlearn your focus on purpose and passion - that will come if you develop strong and unique mastery in your particular areas of love).

Unlearn that you can get great at anything if you only put in enough energy and time. This is the fall-out from taking the "growth mindset" too far. Stop beating yourself up. You have an opportunity to be great in the areas in which you are wired - if you put energy into those places.

Learn you're beautifully unique and the more you understand and steer towards your loves the more you'll enjoy and contribute.

Think about the things you "love" in work, and in life. These things will be particular to you alone. Marcus Buckingham calls these your "red threads". He also says we only need about 20% of our day working with our read threads. Any less, makes our roles challenging. He says, most of us have some (it may be limited) ability to influence our roles in a way to create more red threads.

And... putting on my vertical development hat here too, for those of you who are still reading and still curious about your growing edges. These are complex ideas in a whole lot of senses. Organisations, relationships, and systems have "ways" and "flows" too. Flows mean movement and change, or we get stuck, both in our inner scape and in our systems. Every person both affects and is affected by the many systems in which you are part. Your growth and career journey can include "you" in a much bigger sense... an unfolding mystery in which you find clues, if you are looking.

#careers #loveandwork #verticaldevelopment #marcusbuckingham

Photo source - thanks to https://unsplash.com/@ellladee