Wouldn’t it be amazing if you never had to work again?
I know I’ve chosen quite a ‘click-bait’y type heading there, and I promise this is not going to be some kind of pyramid-scheme sell where I offer you a UNIQUE OPPORTUNITY to make a MILLION DOLLARS in three easy steps!!! For a start, if we genuinely had enough money that we never had to work again, we might not find it the golden ticket we’d hoped for. Research shows that winning the lottery, for example, makes no difference to people’s long term happiness, while lots of studies have shown that having a sense of purpose is a key factor in people’s sense of fulfilment in life.
So I’m definitely not suggesting you all go out and buy up all of your local shop’s lottery tickets or go on the hunt for a filthy rich husband/wife to support you.
Instead, let’s consider for a moment the word “work” and all it suggests – toil, sacrifice, struggle. Dragging yourself out of bed and into the Rush Hour commute to spend eight to ten hours a day somewhere you hate with people you couldn’t care less about.
Squeezing every last drop of your energy and motivation and forcing yourself to care enough to do a good enough job and not get the sack.
Fighting boredom and frustration and counting the hours to the weekend / your Summer holiday / retirement.
This is what I mean by work. It’s like frantically trying to paddle upstream all the time instead of going with the tide and it doesn’t bring out the best in you. It’s surviving, not thriving.
I was in a meditation workshop last week where they spoke about effort and effortlessness. We spend so much of our lives pushing and striving, trying to meet what we see as our obligations, trying to fulfil society’s ideas of what success means, trying to do well in a career that doesn’t play to our strengths.
The ancient Tibetan Buddhist philosophy of Dzogchen teaches that we don’t have to make effort, that we are already perfect as we are. It’s the striving that brings us suffering and actually gets in the way of our actualization – of us allowing ourselves to relax into the natural flow of life and our true nature as already enlightened beings.
Similarly, when we have a work-life that feeds us and that plays to our strengths and sense of purpose, it doesn’t feel like effort. Writing these blogs, for example, doesn’t feel remotely like work. I’m fully in flow and enjoying myself right now! Nor does coaching or helping a young person prepare for their first ever job interview. The work I do for Careershifters is often on a Saturday, but I don’t care AT ALL – not even a bit (apart from a slight niggle when I have to go home early from Friday night parties!) - because it really genuinely doesn’t feel like work to me. This is the problem, potentially, with the 9-5 job. We are forced/paid to be in ‘work-mode’ during those hours, whether or not we are motivated or have stuff to do. I might feel a natural pull to do something or create something at 2am, but that doesn’t fit with the structure imposed upon me.
Several years ago when I was going through my own career change, I read a book called Screw Work Let’s Play that really inspired me. It’s all about how work-life doesn’t have to be boring, it can feel fun and energising, and allow you to be fully YOU, so you don’t have to leave everything you care about behind when you head off to work. It can feel, as the title suggests, less like “work” and more like play.
So how to bring effortlessness and a feeling of play into our careers?
The key is to make sure that what you do is fully aligned to your sense of purpose, the difference you want to make in the world, AND that it allows you to apply your strengths – the things you’re naturally good at and enjoy (i.e. NOT the skills that you’ve learned because you had to or because it was the sensible thing to do).
The idea of ‘flow’ here is really important. When we’re in flow, we are fully immersed in what we’re doing, enjoying it and often lose track of the time. I actually had this just now, as I’m so locked to my screen and enjoying writing these words that I’m late for an event I was going to go to! Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (I’m glad I don’t have to say that out loud) has done some fascinating research on flow and how it is so instrumental to our happiness. His colleague Martin Seligman, the founder of the Positive Psychology movement has found that those who use their signature strengths every day at work are much more likely to be happy and fulfilled in their lives. To find your strengths, just think about the times you’re in flow.
When you find something aligned with your purpose and that allows you to use your strengths, everything just seems to fall into place, opportunities arise as if from nowhere, and you’re successful without struggle, because you’re pushing with and not against the tide. You put in the effort and you do your very best at your work because you want to – because it energises you. It’s more like renewable energy than fossil fuels – rather than being a scarce and rapidly depleting source, it’s never-ending and the more you put in, the more comes out and it all circles back on itself so you’re actually energised by your efforts!
Here are a few questions to get you thinking about what your work-free work life might look like…
What's your 'Purpose'?
What do you care most about? (e.g. Creating order out of chaos? Making things work? Creating beautiful code or art or writing? Supporting others to be happy?)
What issues most matter to you? (e.g. The environment? Improving education? Making businesses more effective and impactful?)
Where would you like to make a contribution?
What do you value? (For a list of common values, you could check out a website like this one or just think about what is most important to you)
What are your signature strengths?
What energises you?
When are you ‘in flow’?
What are you naturally really good at? (my friend and colleague at Careershifters, Sarah, says you could ask your 12 year old self the same question, as they’re likely to give a ‘purer’ answer, less tainted by ‘shoulds’!)
What could you spend all day doing?
Once you’re clearer on your sense of purpose and where your strengths lie, you can design your life in a way that these aspects of your true nature are able to be honoured every day, and then it will genuinely feel like you’ll never have to work a day again (and no need to buy a single lottery ticket!)