Welcome to Ideothetic Flow! A passion project sharing my reflections on life, being a better person and building a kinder world.
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Hi!
Despite being unemployed, the last 2 weeks were really busy as we caught up on the tasks we had put aside until my increased bandwidth now.
One highlight of the week for me was fixing a broken flush valve in my bedroom toilet. I’m very proud of myself for taking the time to try and learn something outside my zone of confidence, and resisting the urge to “outsource” by calling a plumber.
Can I find work I love?
I also started thinking bout what I want next in my career, and what work meant to me. Is it about money? Identity?
I wonder if those are actually less important than they appear, and I simply want my work to be something I feel a sense of enjoyment doing.
I gained some insights and questions to kickstart my thoughts from a series of podcasts by HBR ideacast called “Find Joy in Any Job”. The series revolves around the importance of finding work we love, and offers advice on how we can achieve it.
What makes it hard to find work I love?
One part of the problem is that we are conditioned to fear leaning into what we love. We wrongly associate success as the reward of struggle. We are told to not to be lazy, and use our grit to push through tasks we find unpleasant, instead of taking an easy roads. When we follow the things we love, what appears unpleasant to an external observer, is actually enjoyable for us, and we draw strength from our loves to push through the difficult parts of it. But, when things feel like they are going too smoothly, we get worried, we feel like we aren’t working hard enough, and end up finding a different path.
Another part of the problem is that work has organised in a way that is difficult to love. Some jobs are even designed assuming that loving the work is impossible. Instead, surveillance and control are used as the means of obtaining the output.
We are asked to conform to unrealistic job descriptions in their entirety, and to love every aspect of the job in the way they define it for us. We are expected to cover up our weaknesses rather than leverage our strengths. This is not the how humanity best functions. I love the example in this podcast about how teams should be formed: like Oceans 11, where everyone has their own diverse strength, coming together to accomplish something bigger.
These are external barriers that distract us. But, we hold the agency in finding work we love. For many people, there is opportunity to adjust our jobs, or quit and find something else. The problem is, we don’t actually know what we love, and how much of it we need.
It can be hard to find what we love when we think too broadly, and by using existing labels. I can’t “love being a lawyer". Being a lawyer is too many things at once and I likely hate many of them. What is defined as a lawyer is not even clear anyway.
What we love is unique to ourselves. No one can define it for us, least of all a standard job description. It is also unlikely be what is traditionally thought of as a reward for work - promotions, praise, or pay. It is likely something specific - for myself, I realise that I enjoy being a source of clarity for others, helping them cut through confusion, gaps of knowledge, or finding a way forward, without putting them down.
We also think we need to love more of what happens at work than we really need. The podcast explains that we only need 20% of what we work on daily to be things we love. The returns diminish greatly above that, but we also far more miserable if there is a small drop from 20%, or if the opportunity to do things we love cannot happen daily. My other takeaway from this is that if someone’s complaints about work don’t exceed 80% of their job, they actually are quite enjoying it.
The series describes life as a tapestry of many different coloured threads, and the red ones are the things we love. We need to treat our career as a scavenger hunt for those red threads, so that we can add more of them to our tapestry. Its making me think quite hard about what my red threads are, so I can try and find them in whatever I venture to next.
Thanks for reading! I’d love to hear your thoughts, start a conversation, or simply connect over a chat. You can reply this email, leave a comment, or reach me at jameschanwz@hey.com.
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Take care and have a good week!
James