What do you do for a living?

How many people do you know, including yourself, may be, that find themselves in jobs where they feel inequitable   in terms of their skills and abilities and what the job really requires.

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)

Many people debate during my consulting journey and would say:” I agree that this is the job size and its right positioning, however, this is not my size or positioning!”

There are four types of jobs that you can do, as per Dr. Victor Frankl, the founder of Logotherapy. 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 things 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, the security or simply the “go with the flow”, 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, 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, and that 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.

Explore your innate and acquired talents, what you like to do most, what you enjoy doing, and target your next job, 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.”