Find Your Zone of Genius by Laura Garnett

Find Your Zone of Genius by Laura Garnett

Author:Laura Garnett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Published: 2020-07-09T16:00:00+00:00


The Purpose of Purpose

Discovering your purpose is how you can recognize the specific impact that fulfills you by understanding why you are drawn to it. In fact, knowing the kind of impact that motivates you is a career must. Without it, you are missing an essential ingredient for success.

Adam Grant, a professor at the Wharton School of Business, has researched the connection between personal fulfillment and impact at work and examined what motivates workers in settings that range from call centers and mail-order pharmacies to swimming pool lifeguard squads. In each of these situations, Grant has found that employees who know why their work has a meaningful, positive impact on others are not just happier than those who don’t; they are vastly more productive.

In one study published in 2007, Grant surveyed employees at a public university’s call center who were asked to phone potential contributors and ask for donations. Grant and a team of researchers arranged for one group of call center workers to meet with scholarship students who were recipients of the school’s fund-raising largesse. It wasn’t a long meeting, just a five-minute session where the workers were able to interact with the students who benefited from donations to the university. Over the next month, that little chat made a big difference. The callers who had interacted with the scholarship students spent more than twice as many minutes on the phone with potential donors as callers who hadn’t attended the meeting, and they brought in vastly more money, a weekly average of $503.22, up from $185.94. This research demonstrates clearly that knowing the impact of your work affects your motivation and performance.

A second theory on motivation comes from Daniel Pink. In his book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, Pink writes that there’s a gap between what science knows and what business does. Science tells us clearly that rewards such as money and benefits don’t motivate employees, but businesses disregard the research and continue to use these kinds of rewards in hopes of boosting performance and productivity. Often, those benefits do lure high-quality employees into particular jobs. However, free food, game rooms, and even raises do nothing for the day-to-day motivation needed to enjoy work. This paradox leaves employees feeling confused: why don’t they feel more motivated in the midst of receiving so many perks? But there really is no mystery. Perks are nice to have, but they don’t help you feel more challenged in your job, nor do they provide the long-lasting fulfillment that purpose-related work does.

Pink found that the real drivers of motivation are the following:

1. Autonomy: the desire to direct our own lives.

2. Mastery: the urge to get better at something that matters to you (which I believe is linked to genius).

3. Purpose: the yearning to participate in the service of something larger than ourselves.

Pink writes:

The first two legs of the…tripod, autonomy and mastery, are essential. But for proper balance we need a third leg—purpose, which provides a context for its two mates. Autonomous people working toward mastery perform at very high levels.



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