by Jim Harmer
Your work energy is so attractive to your mind that once you learn to turn it on, it will take all your willpower to turn it off.
You have felt your work energy before. You’ve woken up early, excited to get going on a project. You’ve stayed up late working on something. You’ve had days where you loved working on something so much that you didn’t notice the time. You likely didn’t realize it wasn’t the topic of what you were doing that fascinated you; it was the nature of the work. It wasn’t your love for interior decorating that kept you from going to sleep until 2 a.m. so you could decorate the living room. It may have been your desire to please others, or the creative freedom involved. It was the nature of the work, not the topic of interior design. The same is true of every work energy. It is your mind’s mechanism for achieving things according to the unique way you see them; it is the way you can best achieve greatness in the eyes of others.
My work energy was being fed as I watched the orange dots on the map pop up every time someone visited my site from a new location around the world. I was fascinated by the technology that made it possible to teach thousands of people at once. I fell in love with the thrill of thinking of a clever idea, implementing it on my site, and seeing that idea turn into revenue.
True Confession: My Work Energy
I had found my work energy. It wasn’t photography that made me love working on my site. That just happened to be the topic of my site. My work energy was seeing that the world accepted me when I accomplished something difficult, like writing a book in two weeks or creating an online photography empire.
In short, my work energy is taking on tough challenges so others will be proud of me. Deep down inside, I think I need praise. There’s a childish part of me that drives me to accomplish things that seem difficult to others. If my work energy could speak, it would say, “Look Ma! I’m amazing! Look at me! Nobody else can do this!”
And yes, it is embarrassing to write a book about work energy and then be forced to explain to everyone who reads this book that my personal work energy is that of a petulant child. Thank you for asking. It may be childish, but that’s my work energy and it knows how to get things done in my mind. “Look Ma! I wrote a book! I bet Johnny can’t do that!” Ugh.
My juvenile work energy is my own. Every individual’s work energy is unique to them and likely comes from the individual life experiences in their past. Each person’s mind finds its own drive to accomplish, and if you can identify it, you can turn it on any time you need it.
Once you identify your work energy, you can turn it on any time you need it.
You know you have a work energy. If you have ever, even once, lost track of time when working on something or felt driven to wake up early, then you have a work energy. It has been there all along, and it’s about to get things done for you.
About the same time I discovered my work energy, I had a conversation with a long-time friend. He told me about his job in technical support and how much he enjoyed it. I remember him saying something like, “Oh, I love my work! I’m getting paid to literally do almost nothing! It’s so easy! All I have to do is sit at a desk and answer the phone or talk with people when they come into the office. They almost all have the same few issues, so I look like a rock star every time because I’ve fixed their same issue dozens of times each week for the last two years. It’s the best job ever!”
I understood the words he said, but I couldn’t fathom how he felt that way. From his description of his job, I would rather be waterboarded while receiving a root canal than have that job. I would rather watch baseball than have his job! There was no challenge. The tech support questions he answered were repetitive and dealt with only the basic part of his technical knowledge.
My work energy drives me to accomplish measurable goals that I perceive others couldn’t achieve so I might receive praise from others. My friend’s work energy is feeling useful by being able to confidently solve others’ problems for them without ever being faced by a problem that would make him look unknowledgeable. His barricade is being in a situation where he is unsure of how to proceed. His work matched his work energy and avoided his barricade, so he was successful. If I worked in the same I.T. department, I would need to take on very different tasks to be happy and effective.
It was interesting to me that the topic of my work made no difference to my work energy. While I did enjoy photography, the topic of my website, I also enjoyed camping and technology and religion and politics and a lot of other things. There may have been some topics that would have been less fun to work on, but it wasn’t the topic of the site that captivated me, it was the nature of the work. I could look at a suite of numbers like pageviews on the site, revenue, the average amount of time users stayed on the page, etc. With all those numbers to compete against each day, it was work heaven for me. My work energy was having concrete problems with no readily apparent solution, which I could improve with creativity.
When I was working at the dollar store, I saw difficult problems that I wanted to tackle to receive praise and acceptance. The delivery trucks usually came on Tuesdays, and a large crew was needed to unload the trucks. But those trucks were often late. The store paid for 10 employees to sit around and do nothing for up to an hour until the truck came. The store dealt with this problem by requiring us to be at work at a certain time but not allowing us to punch our time cards yet. We had to be there for an hour, unpaid, waiting for the delivery truck. Frankly, I think this was unethical if not illegal, and the employees were extremely unhappy about it.
I had solutions to that problem. Each week, they could simply leave one pallet of merchandise in the large back storeroom. We wouldn’t stock those items onto the shelves until the delivery day the next week, so we’d have something to work on while waiting for the truck. It was a simple solution to a difficult problem that could have dramatically improved employee happiness, yet my manager could not have been less interested in hearing my suggestion. I was not empowered to use my work energy. The problem was not the company I worked for or the fact that it was a dollar store, it was that the type of work I was given did not match my work energy.
I got that wrong when I was in college. Most college students pick their career based on the topic of the work, and not the nature of the work. It leads most of us into careers that don’t match our work energy. For example: A student has a biology teacher in high school who made the class enjoyable, so she goes into chemistry, which eventually leads her to medical school. In med school, she’s mentored by a helpful pediatrician and selects that specialty because she enjoys learning about the topic.
Then she gets a full-time job and all of a sudden realizes that she hates the nature of the work. Angry, upset, grumpy patients come in every day. She spends five minutes with each one and treats the cold or flu so many times that at some point, it takes no real skill. There’s nothing new in chemistry she’s learning, and she finds that the hours of a pediatrician don’t at all match the kind of lifestyle she wanted. She looks up, 15 years into her career, and is yearning for something else, wondering what’s wrong with her and why she can’t get her drive to achieve built back up. She picked chemistry because of the topic, but she should have instead focused on the nature of the work that would match what drives her and picked a career based on that drive—her work energy.
Suppose instead this same student spent some time paying attention to what drives her: her work energy. Is she happiest doing work when she is in motion all the time, like my wife; when she gets to share knowledge, like my business partner; when she gets to compete, like me? What is it that drives her? Then she could select a career or a job position that matches that drive—her work energy.
So what now? What do you do when you’re 15 years into your career, wondering what got you there? Go back to college to pick a new major? Not likely. What if our fictional pediatrician really looked at herself and found what drives her energy, and then refocused her work to match that work energy? For example,
if I were in that position, I may find a very enjoyable career as a healthcare administrator. I would love the job of looking at a budget and figuring out how we could see twice the number of patients without spending another dime on personnel. Or, as a traditional pediatrician, I may find more joy in my work by opening my own practice and working to increase revenue or other metrics I could compete against.
My work energy is achieving measurable things that I perceive others can’t or won’t, so I can get the approval of others. It’s what drives me. Repetition shuts me down because I would have to do things I already know how to achieve or that I perceive as being so easy nobody will praise me for doing them. My friend in tech support has a different work energy: service. He feels most fulfilled when he can confidently fix things for people, while giant obstacles shut him down.
When I began to recognize how distinct each person’s work energy is, I was amazed to understand so much of my life and the things that I had struggled with, all because of my own unique work energy. When I go out in the backyard to play catch with my boys, I can’t last three minutes of simply throwing the ball back and forth without turning it into a competition. “Let’s see how many in a row we can do without dropping it!” “Let’s take a step back after each throw and see how far we can get!”
Learning my work energy helped me to understand how to be a better dad to my kids. I suddenly understood why, after planning and saving up for a vacation to go with my family to an amusement park, I felt so incredibly disengaged and dull walking around the park with them for a day. It made me feel guilty. “Do I not care about my kids enough? Why am I not enjoying this?” Then I understood my work energy and it changed how I spend time with them. I went on hard hikes with them, took them hunting, made a YouTube channel with them, and more. Those activities gave me an obstacle to overcome with them and I absolutely loved every minute I spent with them. If you love your kids but wonder why it’s so exhausting to do things with them that should be enjoyable, the answer is that you aren’t satisfying your work energy. And it’s eating at you.
When my family goes on vacation, my first question is which new country I can go to. We’ve had many excellent vacations around the world, but I have a difficult time going to the same place twice because I need to check off a new country from my list. I need to be somewhere completely foreign to me, where it’ll be hard to figure out travel and communicate with people in different languages. I’ll never forget having a soldier with a massive rifle pointed at us when we tried to walk into a pyramid that was apparently off-limits in Egypt, or acting like a monkey on the sidewalk in Japan as I tried communicate to the taxi driver, who didn’t speak English, that we wanted him to take us into the mountains where we could see the monkeys. If there’s something hard to overcome, I’m in. This simple change to how I spend time with my kids has made me love being a dad.
At work, I am invigorated by numbers. When the outcome of my work can be measured by a simple metric, I am absolutely driven to make the number increase. As an online influencer today, I always have a metric I’m focused on. Pageviews to a website, views of a YouTube channel, podcast downloads, income from a product launch, number of articles written during a month, etc. I don’t really care what I do. I don’t care if I’m recording a podcast or making a YouTube video or writing an article on a particular day. The type of work matters little to me, as long as the work can be measured. I guess deep down inside I want to impress someone—maybe myself—and I feel I can best do that when there’s a competition that can be measured.
Does that seem a little extreme? If so, it’s likely because you have your own work energy, and you may not even realize it.
I have a friend who has a very distinct work energy, and when I recognized it, it helped endear her to me and appreciate her quirks.
She has three wonderful adopted children, a stalwart husband, and a great family. Yet she turns everyday events into insane situations. She sees the sky is falling at every moment, and you can see a little glimmer in her eye every time something goes wrong. She’s constantly saying how crazy her children are, even when I see them as extremely obedient and kind. In short, she is all drama all the time, but in a fun way so you can tell she loves the insanity of it all. You cannot calm this woman down.
I would characterize her work energy as survivorship. Growing up rejected by her birth parents and in a chaotic situation, she had to learn to survive. That work energy drove her decision to become a social worker, prepared her for years of struggles in raising three children who were all adopted from drug-addicted parents, enabled her to help her husband who is also from a broken home, and gave her the strength to live through the loss of her mother. Because of what she has lived through, she has developed a work energy that allows her to thrive in difficult situations. She swims best in deep water. She thrives on difficulty because she wants to show others what she can overcome. Without realizing it, she even makes things in her life seem harder than they really are because she needs something to fight against. She’s a fighter and feels her greatest fulfillment when she can flex that muscle of surviving difficult life situations.
My wife’s work energy is motion. She needs to feel busy in order to feel happy with her daily work. Each morning we wake up at 5 a.m. to exercise, read scriptures, spend an hour together, and get ready for the day before the kids wake up. During that hour together, she rarely sits and talks to me. This morning, she folded laundry and assembled shelves while I sat on the couch talking with her. She doesn’t need me to be in constant motion, but she needs to be. She really enjoys our time together but prefers to enjoy it on the move. She can’t sit down to talk or she wouldn’t enjoy it as much. Motion is what drives her and makes her feel happy. She applies her work energy to everything she does—even when that work isn’t career-focused. Her work energy drives her to be the best stay-at-home mom, best Shaun T exercise nut, the best piano player, and the best person she can be.
My good friend and business partner, Ricky Kesler, has a work energy of sharing knowledge. Ricky was crazy good at school. In high school, he aced everything, every time. I was the B student, and he was the A++ student. By the way, the thing that annoys me most is how people get a GPA above 4.0. How is that even possible? Nerds. I hate nerds. I swear they go to these “National Honor Society” meetings to scheme about how they are going to convince the fools that it’s possible to get more than 100% on a test and score more than a 4.0 GPA, and then snicker to themselves when they give a nonsense argument for it that the rest of us can’t follow.
Anyway, when we’re in business meetings, I don’t bother with a calculator because I can just ask him and he’ll immediately know the answer to complex math questions. I’ve never seen anything like it. However, school ended. Ricky completed high school, a bachelor’s degree, and an MBA. Suddenly there were no more tests to work off his work energy, and no teachers to give him satisfying above-4.0 numbers just to spite all the dumb kids who couldn’t even understand how that was possible.
Consequently, Ricky is happiest at work when he can share his knowledge. He doesn’t particularly enjoy a brand-new project like I do because he doesn’t feel he has unique knowledge to share. He has a difficult time on camera when he needs to ad-lib an explanation of something for a YouTube video, but when he teaches a class on something he knows about, he is absolutely in his element. Right now, at this very moment as I write this section of the book, we’re at an industry conference called FinCon where we’re speaking. One of the attendees booked a 15-minute session with him to ask him some questions. I found a very comfy chair to sit down and write this because I absolutely know he’ll go very long with that appointment. When someone is asking him questions about a topic he knows well, he will go on forever. Why? Because he gets to flex his work energy. He thrives on doing Q&A webinars or Q&A presentations, because people come to him for his knowledge and he has a chance to share it. Update: That 15-minute appointment? It lasted 57 minutes. And yes, I clocked it.
Ricky gets bored with big-picture business meetings discussing marketing ideas. He can’t show to others that he has the knowledge to a specific question when speaking creatively. In fact, he interrupts nearly every big-picture meeting with something like, “Hey! We just got an email from a customer who … ” and then he tells us how the customer could fix the problem. We have a customer service specialist who handles those emails. That customer service specialist reports to our customer success director. There are two levels of people who should handle that email before Ricky, but he can’t stop sharing his gift in that way. He is driven by sharing knowledge. It makes him a talented teacher and mentor, and it keeps our company focused on the individual customers who keep us in business. He—like all of us—has to feed his work energy to enjoy his workday.
Watching Ricky with his kids proves out his work energy even more. He is intensely focused on their academic performance and learning. His work energy dictates how he enjoys spending time with his family.
It may take you some time to discover your work energy and, depending on how well you know yourself and how many different types of work you’ve experienced, to understand what you enjoy and what you don’t.
Here’s an example for you. We have a marketing manager in our company named Freddy, and I sat down with him while writing this book to get a sense of his work energy. As we made our way through the action step for this chapter and Freddy told me about his past jobs, his family life, and his personal experiences, he came to realize his work energy wasn’t what he previously thought. Turns out he’s a people pleaser.
I don’t mean that in the way you usually hear it, though. “People pleasers” are generally looked upon as disingenuous politicians, stealthily pushing their own agenda. Freddy just has an inherent need to give people what they want, for better or for worse. When he and his wife are making plans, he quietly tries to figure out what she is in the mood to do. Is it just because he is a kind and selfless husband? Heck no! He seeks approval from the world by giving others what they want. It is the mechanism his mind has developed for getting ahead. Another example is that his sense of humor tends to change drastically, depending on who he is with, for the same reason. He wants to see that those around him are satisfied. That’s why he is perfect for marketing. He has an instinct that tells him what people want, and he knows how to tailor the narrative to them. He’s living his work energy.