by Jim Harmer
When you tap into your work energy, there won’t be anything that can stop you from achieving, and I will help you discover yours. If you feel disengaged at work or feel that you have little willpower to stick to your goals, then you merely need to identify and learn to turn on the work energy that is currently lying dormant within you. High achievers are those who have developed their work energy into a weapon they can unleash on any goal they deem worthy of achieving, and soon you’ll be among them.
When I began writing this book, several people encouraged me to develop a concept of three or four work energies so that people could more easily classify themselves. “You know, like the color personality test!” I simply haven’t found that to be the case. Each person’s drive is distinct, according to their specific talents and life experiences.
Your work energy usually develops from a desire to be viewed positively by others. I am the youngest of six high-achieving boys in my family and I wasn’t particularly book smart in school, so I learned to compensate by achieving big goals to get noticed and coming up with creative ways of achieving them. My friend who was adopted wants others to see her as a survivor and be impressed with what she can live through. My friend Ricky wants others to see how smart he is. My wife was always the one people came to for help in her family when she was growing up, so now she loves being busy all the time in serving others.
What about you? What work energy has been driving your decisions and work all your life?
Action Step Two: Discover Your Unique Work Energy
What Drives You?
I warn you to not make snap judgments about your work energy. Not understanding yourself could lead you into a lifetime of picking the wrong types of work and wondering why you quickly become disinterested with them. Be open-minded in discussing this topic and remember you can always come back to these action steps by simply going to WorkEnergyBook.com/steps, so you don’t have to stop reading right now.
The following seven questions have been carefully designed to help you discover your unique work energy. After you go through them for yourself, ask a spouse, family member or long-time friend to answer them about you. Another person may understand you better than you understand yourself.
1. What is your leadership and teaching style? If you have kids, you will identify this in your parenting. When you come up with something to play with your kids, what do you do? Do you find yourself competing with them by timing them in races? Do you feel better when you’re busy caring for necessities? Do you enjoy sitting on the sidelines watching them in sports games, or do you want to be the coach? What do you dream of your kids becoming? What unique family vacations would you like to take? Looking at your parenting approach is a clear insight into your work energy. If you don’t have children, look at how you teach others or how you lead.
2. What unique life experiences forced you to learn certain traits? You’ll enjoy doing work when you naturally feel strong and comfortable with the behaviors and attitudes required to do what’s necessary. How did you overcome situations that made you sad and worried? How has your birth order in your family affected your personality? What did your parents teach you?
3. Who is someone you loved, but whose personality others found off-putting? What helped you to understand them?
4. What would a perfect workday look like at your current job? If you could design the nature of your work, what would that be?
5. What do you intentionally do to impress other people? What do you make a point of mentioning to make sure others see you in the way you want to be seen?
6. What character trait are you proud of in yourself?
7. When you were growing up, what was something hard to do that you enjoyed working on?
You may already have work that matches your work energy. If so, you need this book just as much as someone who is currently performing soul-grinding work because that’s the only way you’ll be able to turn on your work energy—when you know what it is.
This book isn’t just about your career. It’s about igniting a fire in your bones that drives you in every aspect of your life. How could you enjoy your kids more by matching your time with them to your work energy? How could you finally learn the guitar by setting up a training method that matches the way you like to work?
Another group of readers may not know what they want to pursue at all. If that’s you, I encourage you to fill your mind with education. Subscribe to 20 podcasts and binge-listen. Expose your mind to a wide range of ideas, thoughts, hobbies, and interests. It likely won’t be long before you find something that begins to kindle a little fire in your bones. When it does, consider your work energy and how you could apply it to that endeavor.
You don’t need to know all the answers right now. As we pursue this concept throughout the book, you’ll read dozens of examples of those who have successfully identified the work that matches their work energy, and it will help you to identify your best work.
If you find yourself stuck in your career and wondering where your passion went, stop focusing on the industry you’re in or the topic of your work. Focus on what type of work drives you. Focus on what your work energy is, and how you could adjust your thinking or position within that industry to better match it.
Fail to understand your work energy, and you may never ignite the fire in your bones. Your work energy, the thing that drives you, is within you. What is it?
“I had a dream once.”
—The big dude in the tavern in the Disney movie Tangled that my daughter has watched so many times I can’t think of any other quote without first thinking of that guy. So let’s all just pretend it’s a meaningful quote and move on.
After the initial sale of my ebook and shamelessly plugging it while posing as a caller to Leo Laporte’s radio show, I was hooked. I only earned $300 and sales quickly slowed to a trickle, but it was a trickle nonetheless.
I wish I could adequately express how I felt. The freaking internet sent me a check! It felt unreal. People I’d never met were sending money to my PayPal account and I didn’t have to do any additional work for a sale.
I set my sights. I’d had my back against the wall financially for too long, and I finally saw a path forward. I was going to make an online business and nothing could stop me.
Usually, our biggest dreams in life are simply ways to compensate for a past perceived failure. I failed my family financially and now I knew how I’d compensate for it, going forward. I only had to figure out how to make this goal a reality.
Sales mostly ran dry after a week. It turned into just a random drop. Every two or three days, someone would come to the website and pick up the $5 ebook. I checked my online dashboard every few days and was disappointed to see no sales coming in at all.
I immediately began working on my second book and continued writing on the site as I feigned attention in my classes.
“Mr. Harmer, a schoolboy kicked another boy and then the injured boy got a freak infection in his leg. Was the boy who kicked the other child liable for the infection?”
I felt like saying, “I have no idea, but the internet sent me a check!”
A few months later, I was up late watching orange dots appear on my website’s map and writing a list of articles on the site. Emily was on the couch asleep beside me. I hadn’t checked my ebook dashboard in a while, so I decided to see if I’d finally made a sale there yet. I was certain the new ebook craze on the iPad would have brought in sales, yet there had been absolutely zero activity on this dashboard for months.
When I logged in, I found an account payable balance of $1,935.27. I couldn’t understand it. Had all that happened in one day? No—it looked like the sales were spread out over a few months, but I hadn’t seen anything! I dug through the entire website and finally found it—sales were only reported quarterly. I was certain there was some kind of trick. That couldn’t be real, but it was.
I kneeled down in front of Emily, woke her up, and said, “I think I just earned $2,000!”
We spent at least two hours reading every word on the website to ensure we weren’t getting ahead of ourselves. I had actually earned almost $2,000 from my little ebook project.
At least 100 more refreshes of my account dashboard later, a check was in the mail for my earnings, and I actually received it.
We needed the money desperately. Emily and I didn’t even have a bed—just an old mattress on the floor in our apartment. We certainly had no money for decorations in our little apartment, so Emily bought some colorful circular placemats and tacked them on the walls. It looked about as good as you’re imagining.
A dream began to grow within me. Although we needed the money, I began to dream of building my online presence into an actual business rather than just a one-off side hustle I’d done to earn a couple hundred dollars from an ebook. I dared to allow myself to see something much larger, and it allowed me to reinvest in a fledgling business.
I began to dream of building my online presence into an actual business rather than just a one-off side hustle.
It was about this time that Nikon announced a revolutionary new camera—the Nikon D7000. I felt sick to my stomach about spending that much money on a camera, but Emily and I decided together that there was an opportunity with this website, so we’d reinvest every single dollar we’d earned. I bought a camera, a lens, and an inexpensive tripod.
We so badly needed the money that I’m amazed we didn’t use it on a few necessities at home. A dream is a powerful thing, and if you will summon your dreaming juices and allow those dreams to grow, you may find yourself taking action on things you don’t yet dare vocalize to others.
The Dream Catches Fire
The website grew slowly until my third year of law school, when it saw an explosion of traffic and earnings.
I continued putting out books. Two, three, four, five books—and all of them were selling. They generally got positive reviews, but they were also short and homemade.
At the same time, the traffic on the website continued to grow as I published articles almost every day on a wide variety of photography topics. In 2011, my traffic went from 23,000 pageviews per month to over 300,000 pageviews per month.
I had a straightforward approach to getting traffic to the website. I published new articles almost daily. Because I’d spent a year watching the orange dots, I got pretty good at guessing what topics for articles would get the most traffic.
On the podcasts I listened to, the hot new topic was online video courses, and I decided to sell one of my own. By this point, I had grown a significant following on Facebook. I used the 300,000 pageviews per month to push my website visitors over to Facebook to like our page. I had 50,000 Facebook followers at the time.
I was ready to take action on what I was learning because my work energy was being fed. I had become good at writing blog posts that drove traffic, and I needed a new challenge to conquer that was measurable so I could know people liked what I made. After some late-night strategy meetings with Emily, we decided to sell an online photography basics course for $75. The course would last 30 days, and I’d email my students a video lesson each day. Why didn’t they get all 30 lessons at once? Because I hadn’t created them yet. I made the video each day to send out that night. I wanted to do a good job for my customers and I did my best, but I was very much a new business owner making all kinds of mistakes.
I created a sales funnel introducing my Photography 101 course and then announced it on Facebook. I was really nervous, but also extremely excited to see if someone would spend that much money on a course with me.
I refreshed the page 60 seconds after making the post on Facebook, and the entire course was sold out. I had sold 50 seats in the course at $75 each, and it was sold out in one rotation of the second hand. I stared at a PayPal balance of $3,750.
I’m so sorry for whoever took my first online course. Looking back, it was an absolute train wreck. The lighting was awful, the photos I took were mediocre at best, and I looked scared to death in the video. Seriously, I’m sorry, but at the time I was really proud of my work as it was the best I could do.
The next month, I increased the number of seats in the class to 75 and raised the price to $99. It took two minutes and 20 seconds to sell out. I had earned $7,425 in two minutes. I was beside myself.
The next month, I really stretched myself and took on 100 students, who could email me questions or get feedback on their photos from me as often as they wanted during the 30-day class. Sure enough, it sold out in a matter of seconds. I earned almost $10,000 in less than a minute.
I was entirely overwhelmed at this point. Full-time law school, full-time internship at the Ada County Prosecutor’s Office, and running a company that was becoming quite profitable. But I couldn’t stop. The virtual praise I received by seeing the numbers of people coming to my website fed my work energy and drove me to accomplish bigger and bigger feats in the business.
After Emily and I had the horrible experience buying the scam car in Florida, the replacement for that car finally died out as well. We went to the car lot expecting to buy a used car, but we found a base model Nissan Sentra for $14,000 and we bought it brand-new.
In 2011, my blog earned $77,843—more than a lawyer’s starting salary. I applied for a job as an attorney and was offered it. My salary upon graduating from law school would be about $60,000. I owed $90,000 in student loans. I would now have my income as an attorney, and the income from my website. That was exciting.
I transferred for my last year of law school to a school in Idaho, where I worked with low-income people with legal needs. I worked on a complicated case that was crushingly stressful for a young law student with many other things going on. My client was a widow in her 80s living in California. Her late husband was an investment advisor who had helped clients for years with their investments—even as dementia slowly overcame his mind. The inevitable errors in his work came to light only after his death, and his widow was swamped with lawsuits. It was my responsibility to untangle a decade-long rat’s nest of error-ridden paperwork.
I felt pressured to get the project done, so I worked on it late every night, as winter and Christmas approached. I woke up early on Christmas Eve to return to the job. I arrived in the office before the light of day and got started.
A Christmas Eve Decision
Around noon, I walked out of the conference room to my cubicle and saw huge flakes of snow floating onto the downtown Boise landscape. In my mind, I could imagine the squeals of delight from my two little boys at home as they dreamed of their presents and candy and played from sunrise to sunset. Rather than feeling sad, something in me snapped. There were two boxes of papers between me and my family. Suddenly, I realized I was missing one of the most important moments of my life—Christmas Eve with my wife and two boys. From that instant on, I promised myself I was going to be in the driver’s seat when it came to my career. There was no way I would allow work or poverty to control my family any longer.
I did what I was supposed to do. I got a bachelor’s degree and where did it lead me? To the dollar store with no other job prospects. I went to law school and where did that lead me? To $90,000 in debt and unable to provide for the basic necessities for my family—alone in an empty office on Christmas Eve.
Until that day, I had viewed my blog as a tremendous second income. Christmas Eve changed that. Sure, I understood that the vast majority of attorneys were not working on Christmas Eve, but I didn’t want to be in a situation again where work or finances controlled us. I was going to take complete control.
My work energy had driven me to this point in my business, and I was going to pursue it. I allowed myself to dream about what life could look like if I unleashed my work energy full time. The only problem? Somehow I had to break it to my wife, who had just spent three years caring for the kids single-handedly and sacrificing financially so I could get a law degree that I was now thinking about abandoning.
You have dreams too. There is something you want
to achieve. It may be as simple as learning to juggle or as complicated as changing your work to best fit your work energy. It may be repairing your marriage or meeting a sales goal. There are things you want to accomplish, and I’ve learned that the mere act of acknowledging those dreams can give them the life they need to drive you to accomplish them.
For example, when I was 15 years old, I created a bucket list of 50 things to do in life. I created the list and mostly forgot about it for many years. I unearthed it in my old journals when I was in my 20s. I was shocked to see how many of the things on that list I had accomplished—some of them quite specific and difficult, such as singing a solo in front of 2,000 people or more and becoming a student body officer in college.
I had forgotten about the specific listed goals, but merely having that list had solidified in the back of my mind the things I would do and the kind of person I would become. Now, only a decade later, I have accomplished 35 of the things on the list. Sometimes I changed the original goals I made as a teenager, when they didn’t reflect my current desires, but I’ve never nerfed any goals to make them easier. Here are a few highlights of goals that I’ve accomplished.
•See the northern lights
•Read a dictionary from cover to cover
•Buy a house with cash
•Run a full 26.2-mile marathon
•Coach little league football