by Tom Rath
If you fail to do meaningful work that makes a difference today, the day is gone forever. You can try to make up for it tomorrow, but most likely you won’t. Before you know it, several days will have gone by, then a few years. A decade later, you may look back and realize that you missed the opportunity to contribute to the growth of another person, pursue a new interest, or launch a new product. But the opportunity to do something you love will always be there, as long as you start today.
Don’t Fall Into the Default
Even when people think they are chasing their lifelong ambitions, in many cases, they are following the dreams of someone they admire. Consider how many people you know who have followed in the footsteps of a sibling, parent, or mentor at some point in their career. If you think about the way many people are raised — surrounded by role models and examples — the carryover of one generation’s aspirations to the next makes perfect sense.
Many of my friends from college went on to attend law school, mainly because of families or cultures that pushed them in that direction. Other friends pursued a graduate degree in law primarily for salary and security. Only one of my close friends went to law school because he had an extraordinary amount of talent and passion in that area. A couple of decades later, he is the only one I know who continues to practice law.
A Canadian study of more than 71,000 pairs of fathers and sons published in the Journal of Labor Economics reveals just how likely people are to gravitate toward a parent’s career choice. Longitudinal research into young men’s career choices over decades, starting in 1963, found that about 40 percent went on to work for the same employer as their father at some point in their career. Even more striking was the fact that nearly 70 percent of boys who had fathers in the top income bracket went to work for the same company. It is important to note that this large-scale study was limited to men, given the makeup of the workforce during the 1960s. However, smaller studies suggest that a mother’s occupational choices have an even more direct influence than a father’s choices on a daughter’s career choice.
It is perfectly normal for proud parents to want to share the things they have learned with a son or daughter. And it’s certainly not a bad thing to follow in a parent’s footsteps. You learn a great deal from the people you spend time with growing up, and often interests and passions converge. However, this puts an additional responsibility on you — to ensure that you are following your own dreams.
Cast a Shadow Instead of Living in One
When I am out for an evening walk with my five-year-old daughter and three-year-old son, we often play games with our shadows on the street as the sun sets. If either of my children walks into the path of my much larger shadow, their image disappears. When my son steps into his big sister’s shadow, he has to move a bit faster to escape. What my kids love most is being able to see their full image projected on the street ahead, which grows in size as the sun sets in the background.
While we have fun with this, I can’t help but think about what this imagery represents. For me, it is a great reminder of the basic human need to carve out one’s own image. As a parent, I need to avoid the temptation and ease of treating my children the same. I have to avoid pressuring them into boxes created by society’s expectations or my own. My role is to help my children be more of who they already are.
I can spot early traces of unique talent in my children, even at their young ages. My three-year-old son is remarkably observant and inquisitive. Simply telling him to do something because “it’s a rule” is typically met with a defiant “no.” Instead, he learns by observing why. His five-year-old sister, in contrast, loves structure and teaching people about what she has learned. She also has an unusual ability to remember things and has a natural gift for empathizing with and relating to people.
As my children grow up, I have no doubt that both subtle and overt pressures will steer them in different directions. It is already tempting for me to imagine my daughter being a great teacher, like her mother, or a smart and caring physician. Given schools’ intense focus on science, technology, education, and math, I’m sure that both my son and my daughter will feel pressure to excel in these subjects. Yet when they enter the work world, the most valuable goal they can have will be to do something that provides a positive charge and creates meaning.
Everyone grows up with different expectations. One of the best ways to find your areas of interest or passion is by exploring new subjects. If a parent, friend, or mentor introduces you to something you enjoy that builds on your natural talents, it can be quite informative. There is nothing better than working on something you love with people you love. However, it is also easy to fall into a “default career path” — one that is more about other people’s expectations than about your internal motivations.
The only shadow you should live in is your own. You were born with unique traits and influenced by people who helped you become what you are today. To do justice to those who have invested in you, the challenge is to live the life you want.
Craft Your Dream Into Your Job
Every day you let something keep you from following a dream, you lose an opportunity to create meaning. However, few people find their ideal job on their first attempt. This is why chipping away at a dream in small steps can be deeply motivating.
You should be able to spend some time every day engaging in activities that energize and recharge you. This is an important distinction; it takes only a few moments to make a day more productive and fulfilling. Even in the worst situations, you can find opportunities for growth. The key is to shift your focus away from what others do that hinders you — or from work situations beyond your control — and instead seek out small things that enable you to make daily forward progress. You can always do something to boost the spirits of a colleague or customer, despite what is going on in other areas of your work.
Even if you are stuck in a job that is far from ideal, you have the ability to create a little meaning on the side. Volunteering in your community is a great way to spend meaningful time every month. I have several friends who say they get more personal satisfaction from a few hours of volunteering than they do from anything else. This can also be a great way to explore new areas and interests that may turn into something larger down the road.
A new body of research suggests that people forge great jobs with effort, as opposed to finding them through job postings. This research, led by a team at the University of Michigan, found that you can craft existing jobs to significantly improve the meaningfulness of your work. Effective “job crafting” starts by looking at how much time you dedicate to specific tasks that give you energy each day. It also entails looking at the way your relationships at work and your perception of what you do create meaning for others. If you review these three areas, you should be able to build some of your dreams into your current job.
Think back through your education and career. Identify a few instances when you felt such a positive charge that you lost track of time. Make note of exactly what you were doing and who you were with at these times. Then see if you can bring that into your current work and think about one thing you can do tomorrow to spend more time in your element.
Also consider how you can spend more time around specific people who energize your work and less time around those who don’t. You can do more for other people if you stay clear of those who consistently stress you out or drag you down. Work is like any other social network: both negative and positive emotions spread quickly.
Initiate to Shape the Future
In this age of infinite information and endless distraction, it’s easy to spend an entire day reacting and responding. Demands coming at you from others will always consume some portion of your day. Yet in most cases, what you will be most proud of a decade from now will not be anything that was a result of you simply responding.
What will matter later in life is what you initiate today — striking up a conversation that leads to a new friendship, sharing an idea wi
th someone at work that turns into a new product or offering, or investing in another person’s growth and watching her succeed over the years. If you want to create a positive charge for others, your ability to do so will be almost directly proportional to the amount of time you can spend initiating instead of responding.
Yet it’s much easier to react and respond to what others want. Do a quick calculation of the percentage of time you spend responding to things in a typical day (answering email and phone calls, etc.). Compare this with the percentage of time you spend initiating actions. In most cases, reactionary time greatly outweighs proactive time. When you’re having trouble at work or feeling stuck, that is the best time to bring your focus back to what you can do to change the situation.
While some people feel like their job is to respond, in most cases, it is not. If you work in a role serving customers directly and answer their questions with the minimal amount of information required, you could have a day full of responding. This approach is not good for you, your organization, or your customers. However, if you individualize your interaction with each person, anticipate a future need, or help even more than a customer expects, that is initiating.
Manage your communications, online and offline, instead of letting them run your life. If you don’t, you will inadvertently spend a majority of your time responding to other people’s needs instead of creating anything that lasts. While you can’t predict what will happen in the future, by initiating something new each day, you will be a part of creating that future.
Put Purpose Before Busyness
Being “busy” is often the antithesis of working on what matters most. Yet when I ask friends or colleagues how they are doing, some variant of “I’m busy” is the most common response I receive. What’s worse, for more than a decade, “I’m busy” has been my standard response when people ask me how I am doing.
Like many others, I have been caught in the trap of mistaking activity for real progress. If a mouse runs on a wheel for 12 hours in a row, it will have been “very busy” the entire day, yet it will have gone nowhere and achieved nothing.
Similarly, on many days, I confused busyness with meaningful progress. I would boast that I had worked my way through more than 200 emails or sat through eight hours of important meetings. Most of the time, I was multitasking and doing both — responding to emails while using a headset to participate in conference calls.
I started to notice a similar pattern in most workplaces. Employees feel the need to look, act, and talk as if they are so busy that a gaping hole would appear in the universe if they missed a day of work. In their minds, this shows others how hard they work and how essential they are to the organization.
You can’t blame anyone for learning to equate busyness with importance, given the way it is built into social expectations. However, the result of trying to be busy is a poorly managed life. If you are busy throughout the day and bouncing from one thing to the next, you’re probably not focusing on constructive activity. You are also probably not giving your full attention to the things that matter most, from working to spending time with your family.
Instead, aim for a daily routine that allows you enough time to do what you want, work on projects that make a difference, and spend time with people who matter to you. I have started forcing myself to substitute thinking “I’m busy” with “I need to do a better job managing my time.” That little mental trick helps me prioritize. Whether you try this or something else, find a better answer than being busy all the time. Work smarter, not harder.
Focus on Less to Do More
Staying connected is now remarkably easy. As a result, getting anything of substance done is not. The average American, for example, spends eight and a half hours in front of a screen and receives a whopping 63,000 words of new information each day. When workers sit in front of a computer screen, no more than three minutes at a time go by without interruption.
A study of 150,000 smartphone users found that these devices are unlocked 110 times per day on average. During peak evening hours, people check their devices nine times an hour. From email and text messages to breaking news alerts, phone calls, and social network updates, distraction is the new default. By one estimate, the average worker loses 28 percent of each day to distraction. Only one in five workers report having the ability to focus on one thing at a time during a workday.
On average, people spend about half of their time thinking about something other than what they are doing at any given moment. According to one very detailed study by Harvard’s Matt Killingsworth and Dan Gilbert, people reported that their minds were wandering 47 percent of the time. What’s even more disturbing is that this is not pleasant mind wandering; instead, the distractedness tends to make them less happy.
Killingsworth and Gilbert wrote, “A human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind.” During almost all of the activities they studied — walking, eating, talking to a colleague, shopping, watching television — people spend no less than 30 percent of the time with their minds wandering. There’s even a very good chance that your mind is wandering while you are reading this book.
Trying to do a little bit of everything leads to doing nothing of substance. When you let the demands of a day pull you in 20 different directions, they do exactly that — causing you to react to a bunch of small things instead of doing anything big. Working while distracted has also been shown to decrease performance and quality levels. In most cases, the human mind simply functions better when it is highly focused.
Saying no to distractions can be challenging. But it is something you need to do for the sake of focusing on the things that matter most. The rare occasions when I have been able to completely disconnect for a full day of writing have been some of the most peaceful, productive, and liberating days of my life. And oddly enough, everything around me continues to go smoothly, without missing a beat.
If you can eliminate a few small distractions that take up a great deal of your time, then you can spend more time on things that energize you and give you a positive charge. This additional mental downtime can also help you be more creative. Start by writing down one thing you are doing today that you know is not a good use of your time. Commit to changing your pattern to do less of it. Then come up with a short list of distracting things you will do less of in the future.
The next time a new opportunity presents itself, think carefully before you make an ongoing commitment. If it is something you feel you should take on, determine what other activity you might need to let go of. When you are struggling between two choices, remember that there is always a third option: doing nothing. In many cases, declining both options is the best route.
Silence Pavlov’s Bell
In the late 1800s, Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov first observed that dogs could be conditioned to start salivating the moment they heard a bell ring. He had taught the dogs to associate the bell with receiving their food; thus, the dogs drooled in expectation every time they heard the bell ring. This phenomenon came to be known as “classical conditioning,” and it is exactly what you do every time you hear a buzzing that indicates you have a new message.
Each time your computer dings to signal a new email, your phone vibrates with a new text message, or you see a notification on your screen, you associate these stimuli with the “reward” of having new information available to read. A few decades ago, all of your mail arrived just once a day, when it was delivered to your physical mailbox. This system provided structure: you could count on receiving a batch of information at roughly the same time each day and could then consume it all at once. Today, endless notifications have turned into the electronic equivalent of Pavlov’s bell.
Most job descriptions do not list checking email and social networking sites as a core part of anyone’s daily responsibilities. Yet people often spend more time on these activities than they do on more productive investments of their working time. One study estimated that professionals spend a
t least half of their day responding to email and checking social networks.
The most disturbing finding from this study is the degree to which people allow messages to interrupt their work. Nearly a quarter of workers basically sit around watching their inboxes, and read information the second it arrives. Another 43 percent admit to checking messages more than they should. Only 30 percent of people check their messages occasionally, but not to an excessive degree. This means that more than two-thirds of people could be letting electronic communications run their lives, causing undue anxiety.
A 2015 study from the University of British Columbia found that people experience less stress if they check their email fewer times a day. Yet many continue to experience what researchers dubbed “telepressure,” or feeling the need to respond immediately. When people experience telepressure, it is associated with a decrease in sleep quality, more sick days, and the likelihood of mental and physical burnout.
To overcome some of the most common distractions, shut off the alerts that break into your day every few minutes. Email and phone calls are the two most common disturbances that infringe on people’s time, according to a recent survey. Other interrupters include toggling between applications, checking social network feeds, instant messaging, text messaging, and Web searching.
I have found that even something as subtle as glancing at a “breaking news” notification on my smartphone’s lock screen can ruin my concentration. It seems like most of the messages and notifications are from people or organizations who think it is important that you see their messages immediately. This is why halting these alerts, even for short blocks of time, can do wonders. One group estimates that it takes 67 seconds to recover from every message you read.