The Level Of Actual Activities

Did they love the memory challenge of learning the lyrics of hundreds of different songs? Surely they aren’t the true geniuses of what their loves are. Surely they need the judges to weigh in on whether their loves are real, or useful, or connected in any way to actual performance. Their perspective on you will reveal the real you. And, if you want to live a Love + Work life, this line of thinking is vital for you to unlearn. Which is not nothing now. But it has nothing to say about what you love and what you don’t. You and you alone feel what you feel. What this does demand of you, though, is that you pay very close attention to the specifics of what you love. Those American Idol auditioners, what did they instinctively volunteer for? Did they instinctively love the activity of hours upon hours of solitary voice training? Did they love the days and days of rehearsals with the musicians and the arrangements? Were they instead instinctively drawn to the attention, the fame, the adulation, and the money? One of the dangers of being told from an early age that our loves aren’t real is that we don’t examine them closely, and so over time our expertise at pinpointing the true source of our love diminishes to nothing. For your loves to turn into contribution, pay attention only to the specific activities you love, not the outcomes of those activities. Pay attention to what you are going to be doing, rather than why. In this role, what precisely will I be paid to do? What will a regular week in this new role look like? What will I be doing at 9 a.m.

That's The Way It Is

What do you love most about selling? Imagine all the possible answers you might hear from salespeople in response to this question. I love selling things I really believe in. I can’t sell anything I don’t really believe in. It turns out that the best salespeople say none of these things. I love the close. For the best salespeople, the love of the job lies not in why they are selling the product, nor in whom they are selling it to or with. Instead, it lies in the actual activity of the close. In the broadest sense, this activity, of getting another human to commit, is what all the best salespeople love about what they do. Of course, the details matter. But the activity that fills up their every day with love is the activity of getting the close. Which is interesting if, by the by, you are interested in sales. Because some sales roles will offer you frequent chances to close, such as Wall Street positions, with their hundreds of closes every day.

Lighten Up

And some roles won’t give you any chance to close. In pharmaceuticals, for example, a job may be advertised on LinkedIn as sales, but in reality a pharma sales rep never gets a chance to close anyone. All they will ever be able to do is try to influence physicians enough that, over time, they prescribe slightly more of the salesperson’s products than the competitor’s. So, before you take on a new role, focus on the what questions. And if you don’t know the answers to these questions, then talk to a few folks who are actually in the role, or in the school, or in the class. Probe them to get down to the lowest level possible, to the level of actual activities, and then ask yourself how these activities fit with what you know you love. Naturally, there’ll be times when you’ll ask all your questions and still not really know if what you’re reaching for is in fact filled with activities you love. Don was making magic, I’m sure that some of this instinct was fueled by the fact that he was the chairman of the company, and that sitting by his side would confer upon me some measure of specialness. Luckily for me, I was surrounded by people who had already been in that room with him, who could tell me in the most vivid detail which activities I should expect to do, and could even give me the chance to try out these activities all by myself on various side projects. In the end, it was these feelings, rather than the allure of prestige, that kept drawing me back to that room, and that fueled my desire to get into it. Yes, that does occur. To a lot of people who enjoy singing, playing basketball, painting.

Seize the Day

You love the activity, you feel uplifted when doing it, but you just don’t seem to have the capacity to excel at it. It is positively charged, it draws you back time and again and makes you feel connected to yourself while you’re doing it. They are precious, these activities. They’ll bring love into your life, even if you can’t ever seem to get good enough at them to warrant turning them into your actual work. Your life should be an ongoing search for love. Sometimes high performance will flow from your love, and sometimes it won’t. But in all cases, more love in your life means a fuller life. I am so pleased with myself. It’s actually rather a tricky thing to do, I warn him. Don’t worry, I say, I’m a bit of a pro at this. They’ve set aside three days to record my part. I get it all done in one afternoon. As I said, I’m a pro. Make eye contact, imagine a beverage of your choice in your hand, let it flow. I congratulate myself. I’ve thought something through enough to be able to convey to my friend not just the kind of recording we’re after, but also a very specific technique for creating this outcome. Coach extraordinaire. At the end of the next day, Ashley calls. So, did it work out? The visualization exercise? I wait for his affirmation, glowing with pride in us both.