How to Achieve Greatness in Your Work-Life
“There are downsides to everything; there are unintended consequences to everything.” – Steve Jobs
“Without reflection, we go blindly on our way, creating more unintended consequences, and failing to achieve anything useful.” – Margaret J. Wheatley
A couple of months ago I wrote an article about how to use the current labor shortage to your advantage. Eight weeks later employers in service businesses (food service, retail sales, supply and delivery) are still struggling to fill positions. Even if they’re able to get qualified employees then they are struggling to retain them, as employees go searching for better paying jobs with better benefits. The trend has led to the creation of yet another workplace term – Pay Chasers.
Pay Chasers suddenly quit or “ghost” their employers because they’ve found a "better" job. It’s a big a problem for small businesses, not being able to count on employees, but I think it’s a bigger problem for the people who “chase pay” and says something about their understanding of their work and the times in which we live.
Historically work was seen as something more than a way to meet financial needs, it was related to the overall purpose and meaning of our lives. Culturally we believed that the nature of our work and the way in which we did it said something about us. Our work was a place where we lived our personal value systems – our “character” – on a daily and long-term basis. Longevity in a job and consistent, high quality, hard work were viewed as markers of personal quality and even greatness.
Examples of these are easily seen in the sports world. Cal Ripken, jr., Brett Favre, Martina Navratilova, Derek Jeter, Serena Williams, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Mia Hamm, Pele’, Muhammad Ali, Jack Nicklaus, and Wayne Gretzky are best known for being consistently great at their respective sports for a long time. I grew up in the football-steeped south but even I knew about Gordy Howe who, in his last year of professional hockey, played 80 games and scored 15 goals – before retiring at the age of 52. (Talk about your aching knees.)
Although the world of work doesn’t offer many of us “mere mortals” the chance for notoriety and fame it does for sports icons, it does offer each of us daily opportunities to display our own elements of greatness – and they aren’t that different from the qualities of the sports and life heroes we admire the most. Regular people who display everyday greatness are what I call “people of character”.
People of character take action. They intuitively understand that life only moves in two directions, forward or backward, growth or deterioration, so they take the initiative to grow and move in a positive direction. Even when they get stuck, they will take some small action toward a goal, knowing consistency will help them achieve their goals.
People of character are consistent. Author Andy Stanley noted that the place where you find yourself is never because you made one monumental decision “once upon a time” but, rather, that you made a series of consistent decisions over the course of a long time. Consistency in our thoughts, words and actions moves our lives toward outcomes – positive or negative. Inconsistency in our thoughts, words and actions assures us of accomplishing nothing except being inconsistent.
People of character have a vision for what they want to accomplish. Being consistent is only possible when you establish a vision for what you want in each of the areas that make up your life, then consistently making the decisions that move you toward those goals. Knowing what you want and what you want to stand for allows you to live a life of integrity – solidness.
People of character are full of truth. Honesty isn’t a behavior, it’s a life philosophy and a matter of choices. I know a man who told his children he would never use the words “I promise”. He explained that he wanted them to know they could count on him to keep his word. He would only answer them after carefully evaluating whether he had the ability to provide the outcome they wanted. The principle of truthfulness applies to far more than the answers we give our children – it begins with an honest estimation of ourselves.
People of character have humility. Humility begins with an honest estimation of our gifts, skills and strengths, as well as our challenge areas, needs and personal flaws. It is viewing yourself accurately, then looking for the ways your gifts can benefit others as well as the places where you need their gifts to help you. Where arrogance uses and abuses others for self-gain and self-deprecation withholds your gifts from a world in need, humility looks for the places and ways you can impact the world for good.
Of course, each of these qualities is possible only when we take the time to consider what kind of mark we want to leave on the world. It's something we understand intellectually but rarely connect to the ways our live affect the world and people around us.
In the BBC TV series Sherlock, Sherlock Holmes tells a client, “Taking your own life [is an] Interesting expression. Taking it from who? Once it’s over, it’s not you who’ll miss it. Your own death is something that happens to everybody else.”
My point is that each of our lives has potential for positive or negative impact on the world around us. The character with which we live our lives and do our work will, in large part, determine the lasting impact of our lives, for good or for ill, on those our lives touch. And our potential for living a great, impactful, work-life begins with the daily choice of what kind of character we want to have.
If you would like to discuss this article or just have a personal conversation about your work then click the underlined part of this sentence and we’ll set it up. I love helping people find ways to make their work fit them and become the meaningful, satisfying part of life it was meant to be.
With My Best Regards,
Dr. Jim