‘Work’ at it

At just the age of 33, motivational speaker and coach Scott Dinsmore had built a worldwide community through his website Live Your Legend — a programme that helps people find (and do) the work they love. A few days ago, Scott died in a tragic accident while pursuing one of his lifelong dreams — climbing Mt Kilimanjaro, when a falling boulder struck him. Scott’s ideas on leading a more fulfilling work life, however, live on. His popular TED talk, “How to find work you love”, has been viewed over two million times, in which Scott exhorts people to find the kind of work they are truly passionate about — and how that can actually change the world we live in.

During the very early stage of his career, Scott says he received the worst possible advice from a friend: “Don’t care about how much you like the work you are doing, just worry about building your resume”. But within just two months of working at a Fortune 500 firm, Scott began to feel like banging his head right when the clock said it was 10 am, when he had to leave for work. Then, he read something Warren Buffet had said — that taking up jobs to build your resume is like saving up sex for your old age! In two weeks, Scott quit his job, determined to find something he could “screw up”. And as he read up about other people stuck in jobs they didn’t like, he came across a study that found that 80 per cent of the subjects the researchers interviewed, did not enjoy their work. That set Scott wondering: What set apart the 20 per cent who were passionate about the work they did, from this other 80 per cent?

When Scott began meeting with people in a quest to understand why so many of us are unhappy with the work we do, he would just ask them one question: “Why are you doing the work that you’re doing?” And “Because someone told me this is what I should do” was what he heard in reply most often. Scott compares it to climbing a certain ladder because everyone around you is climbing up that ladder — while it’s entirely possible that the ladder is leaning against the wrong wall, or no wall at all!

This was the next question that Scott began to think about. And the very first step in this process, he felt, was becoming a “self-expert”. The concept is simple — if you don’t know what you’re looking for, you’re never going to find it. Scott says you need to ask yourself a question: “What do we wake up wanting to do whether we’re paid for it or not paid for it?” Answering this is the very first step in understanding the kind of work you should be doing.

Scott theorised that any framework to understanding what you want to do is based on three factors: 1. What are your unique strengths? 2. What values are important to you? (What do you care most about — family, health, achievement, success etc?) 3. What have your experiences taught you? (What’s worked for you, what hasn’t — you need to apply the lessons you’ve learnt in the past to modify your future behaviour). Once you have this framework in place, you can use it as a compass to figure out what you want.

“You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with,” said Jim Rohn — an idea Scott also believed in. In the process of building up the Live Your Legend programme, he found that people didn’t do things for two reasons: Either they felt they couldn’t do it (and therefore, never tired or gave up too easily), or the people around them told them they couldn’t do it. But when you surround yourself with passionate people — people who are already doing the things that you want to do — then, said Scott, your mindset shifts from thinking “How can I do this?” to “How could I possibly not do this!” “The difference between where you are and where you want to be, are the people you choose to put in your corner,” was how Scott chose to explain his idea. So surround yourself with the right ones, work on your own self and ask yourself this: “What is the work you can’t not do?” Happy discovering!