“He must be quick to break those habits that can break him – and hasten to adopt those practices that will become the habits that help him achieve the success he desires.”
(John Paul Getty)
We all know employees and even managers who are conducting jobs that they feel inequitable in correspondence to their skills and abilities for what the job really requires. I’ve been in the Human Resources and Development business for two decades now, and never once did I find an exact match between the job description of a person and the tasks that they perform for who they are.
Many people debate and would say: “I agree that this is the jobs’ size and its right positioning, however, this is not my size, nor my positioning!”, “I do much more than this”, “if anyone replaces me, I don’t think they’d be able to do this particular task”.
Brian Tracy links responsibility and control: “There is a direct relationship between the acceptance of responsibility and the amount of personal control, this means the more you accept responsibility, the greater sense of control you experience”. At work, this direct relationship between accepting responsibility and the sense of control is what makes the difference between the details of a job description, and the way the job holder performs it.
There are four types of jobs (or tasks) that you can do, as Dr. Victor Frankl, the founder of Logotherapy indicates:
The first ones are the hard to learn and hard to do. This type of job is like accounting or administration for a person who has no natural skill or ability in that area. It would be so hard to learn, and no matter how many years of experience you accumulate, it would be hard to do. Their work is always hard and seldom satisfying. How many people do you personally know that are in this trap?
A job that is hard to learn but easy to do is the second type. This can be a competency like Drawing Excel sheets with calculation formulas or conducting a surgery. It takes remarkable commitment and focus to acquire, yet once you have mastered it, it is quite easy to do, one time after the other. Regrettably, this type of job can become dull and boring and will stop stimulating you over time. It seldom causes you to draw out your potential and develop your talents.
The third type of job is a job that is easy to learn but hard to do. Like physical labor, like riggering, gardening, upholstery, air conditioning installation. It’s proportionally easy to become skilled at a physically challenging job, but it is constantly hard to do, no matter how extensively you do it.
The most significant category is the fourth, easy to learn and easy to do. You find yourself learning it so easily, and doing it so naturally, that you roughly forget when and how you learned it in the first place. Easy to learn and easy to do jobs are the best display of your likely and innate abilities and talents. This is where you exceed, get the best results, and earn the very most.
Obviously, you ought to explore continuously your activities and talents in order to identify the things that you learn and do easily. These are the elements that would stimulate you the most, and this is the job that would make you work eagerly, make the best results out of, and earn the maximum from.
It is true that no one would know your winners better than you, yet, if you do not make the effort to explore several jobs and see yourself performing them; you’d not be able to find your dream job. Once you do, and you start running your own business, you ‘d be focusing on the tasks that you’d like to do the most, and optimizing your productivity in them, while eliminating the jobs that you like the least, and this would ideally reach you to the next level.
An argument here would be that not everyone would afford to open their own business, and the above obviously wouldn’t apply to a regular employee, who has to fulfill and perform a job description as it is, whether they like all the tasks in it or not; let’s take a step back here, and recall… what made this person take the decision and accept a job that has several tasks that they despise doing? Was it the pay? job security? or simply the “go with the flow”? or maybe it was just “running away from a previous job that seemed to be unbearable or a previous horrible boss? This is where I put the focus on the decisions we make and this is what this whole book and methodology is all about. Once the driver of our decisions is a negative trigger, we would haphazardly be going from one wrong decision to another ; which would lead us to probably worse scenarios.
I remember here the story of the Lion and the Gazelle, it says:
“Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up, it knows it must outrun the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the slowest gazelle, or it will starve. It doesn’t matter whether you’re the lion or a gazelle-when the sun comes up, you’d better be running.” (Christopher McDougall, Born to Run)
One is running to survive, and the other is running for the exact same reason, but one is reactive while the other is proactive.
Survival is the basic need of all living creatures, we are born with this urge to stay alive, and we figure out by instinct how to do so, first we learn how to eat, drink and sleep, and then we start to adapt to our environment, and as the environments change, so we adapt more and more. As the security and safety that the word brings, “adaptation”, it also brings in to our minds the most dangerous instinct: “settlement”. We learn how to adapt to our small circle, the family, what we are told to do, and not to do, what is good and what is bad, the definition of everything around us as we are told, and then the bigger circle, school, we get conditioned on convenient education, on the regular day at school, and we take our first step into the comfort zone; we settle for a certain amount of exposure, limited with curricula and synopsis and proven theories, and for the constant way we always need to prove that we studied: “exams”, so they become the target instead of being the tool in our educational journey, to grow on us as we get into higher levels of education, and to become the ultimate basket that we throw in everything we learned over the year. Later, we settle for the most convenient way to continue our paths, some go to university, others to college, and a lot give up on the system itself, hence on their abilities. Thank god life is the ultimate teacher, and the vital school, hence many of the very well known names who dropped out of school or failed to continue higher education have exceeded in their business and personal lives.
Anyone who stops learning is old. Anonymous
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Explore your innate and acquired talents, what you like to do most and what you enjoy doing; target your next job and do not work aiming to survive, as Confucius said: “Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.”
