The clients with whom I most love to work are people who have achieved some degree of worldly success, but who are not happy in the work they do. They want both success and happiness, but are having difficulty figuring out how to do that. One day, I mentioned this in a brief presentation I made to a small group. The next day, one of the group members dropped off in my mailbox not one, but three, articles that argued it was somehow selfish and irresponsible to want to be happy and fulfilled in your work!!!!! One even suggested that you should be moderately unhappy in your work, to make you hungrier, I suppose. I was stunned that some people really believe and argue this nonsense.
Actually, what the writers were doing was assuming that being happy in your work means that you aren’t making any money – the “starving artist” image. Unfortunately, many people who are unhappy and unfulfilled believe they cannot have it all. They think it is either “success”/or satisfaction. It isn’t. We spend far too much of our lives working to be anything less than happy and fulfilled. Otherwise it is a horrible waste of our energy, enthusiasm and talent. It is a “lose-lose-lose” situation. We lose, the organizations for which we work lose, and the world in general loses, because we could be contributing so much more.
The first step, then, toward finding both success and satisfaction in your work is to get rid of the idea that you can’t have both. You can, even if you don’t know yet how to do that.
To your success!
