The Secrets of People Who Love Their Jobs: Shane Lopez (Transcript)

That’s a great career for me.

And I became a psychologist after 10 quick years of college. I got out and I was studying what was right with people. So I became a positive psychologist, studying what was right with people.

And today I want to talk about the emotional fruits of labor. The emotional fruits of labor.

I want to talk about what life gives you when you love your job. And since I’ve been researching this, I have lived differently. I work differently. And I hope the same happens for you.

Now, even though I look for people who love their jobs all the time, I meet people who don’t like their jobs quite often. In fact, they had this uncanny ability to find me and sit next to me on long flights. And I learned a lot about the jobs they hate.

Now, the reason I think these people talk so much about the jobs they hate is because they’re in pain. They’re in pain. I know… I’ve been a job hater. I’ve been in that pain.

You spend a third of your life… a third of your life going to a job that makes you miserable and you don’t get to do what you do best. You don’t get to shine. You don’t get praise and recognition. And you work for this boss that you secretly call a soul sucking happiness vampire.

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I hope she’s not here. And it just drains you. But I also meet a whole lot of people that love their jobs. The first person I ever knew who loved his job was my Uncle Ray.

Uncle Ray was just this fascinating enigma to me. He would swoop into our little town of New Iberia, Louisiana, and just change my life. My life would go from black and white to color when Uncle Ray was in town.

And he just had this way about him. While other people were talking about jobs they hated and clearing my grandmother’s living room, Uncle Ray would captivate us with talk of the travel agent job he loved. So let me tell you a little bit about his job.

He started in the travel industry in a job that wasn’t all that exotic. It wasn’t all that adventurous. He was a customer service agent at a regional airline, a customer service agent at a regional airline. And he didn’t get to travel as much as he had hoped. But what he did get was just a ton of experience and a ton of opportunity.

And he had one manager that changed his life. His manager said to him, “Ray, you’re people soother. You calm people down.”

My Uncle Ray built a career and a life out of that one talent. Being a people soother. When the airline National Airlines shut down, he moved to California, doubled down on his commitment to the travel industry, doubled down on his commitment to what he did best.

And while working in an orchard, he sought out his next job in travel. He was recruited by the owner of a travel agency, Mr. Galley and Mr. Galley recognized Uncle Ray’s potential to put people at ease.

Ray quickly learned the business. He had no experience playing interests, but he quickly learned the business and he carved the job into something that was uniquely his. He shaped it little by little, and it became his job.

And he would turn hassles of travel into plans for a dream trip. And customers flocked to him. In just a little bit of time, he became one of the top grossing agents at the firm. And then after 10 years, he was one of the top grossing agents in the country and he was also named vice president of Segale Travel.

I tell you this story about Uncle Ray, because he inspired me. He inspired me to look at life as if there was potential, to look at life as if I could make a difference. I could work on my job. I could change my job into something that really meant something to me. That something that really mattered to me.

Now, I believe the best career advice comes from the Rays of the world. And these people really do exist. These people who love their jobs, they really do exist.

They pop out of bed in the morning, energized, ready to go. They come home at night, still full of energy, ready to share with their families. These people do exist. They’re not mythical creatures like Unicorns or Jay Hawks or Democrats in western Kansas. They’re real. They really do exist.

And I want to tell you about the work I’ve been doing to find these people and discover their secrets. In the last three years, I’ve been working with huge data set of 8500 working Americans and trying to figure out exactly how many people in America love their jobs.

How many people are having a love affair with their jobs? What do you think? What percentage?

You’re all wrong, 13 percent. 13 percent of people are having a love affair with their jobs. They are uniquely engaged. They are uniquely passionate about what they do. 87% of people are not.

Who are these people? These are real people. These are artists. These are accountants, teachers, preachers, soldiers, mechanics. These are real people. And they don’t have special degrees from special universities. They don’t have beautiful, perfect resumes. They’re people like you and me. So even I can love my job. Even you can love your job.

Now, in researching these people, I started conducting interviews because the data was strong, but I needed data with a soul. So I started asking people about their jobs and getting the stories from them and learning more and more and more each and every day.

I’ve interviewed hundreds of these folks. And I’ve learned two things. Two things have emerged from their stories of loving their jobs.

Number one, people who love their jobs have great lives.

They have great lives. They’re off the charts in well-being. They are at the height of happiness. And loving, your job is almost an antidote to human suffering. It’s almost an antidote to human suffering.

When I found out, it just blew me away, that people who love their jobs are thriving, not struggling, not suffering.

So the first secret of people who love their jobs is that happiness depends on the goodness of your jobs.

Second, what I found was that these people did not land those jobs they loved. They slowly created those jobs. They designed and built those jobs out of ordinary positions. They just did editing, nudging in with a lot of effort turned a reasonably good job into one they could love.

So the second secret of people who love their jobs is that love worthy jobs are made, not found.

Now, there’s a whole science about loving things have an affinity for things you make versus things you find. I’m not going to bore you with that. I want to tell you one story, though, that backs up this research.

It’s a story, an old story about a motivational psychologist named Ernest Dichter.

Ernest Dichter was hired by a company because his new timesaving product wasn’t selling as well as they thought it would sell. Brand new timesaving product called the Cake Mix. The cake mix came into vogue in the 1940s and 50s, and it was selling well. And then the sales flattened.

Get it? Cake sales flattened. I do enjoy myself.

And then cake sales flattened. And then after a while, the companies asked Ernest Dieter, what’s up with these cake sales? Why aren’t they continuing to grow as we thought?

Well, what Ernest did was he interviewed housewives who were the primary purchasers of cake mixes at the time. And he asked these housewives, why don’t you buy more cake mix?

And the answer was very interesting. The answer was that it was too easy. These are not my cakes. When I make a cake mix cake, it’s not homemade. It’s not made by me. It’s not made with love.

So Ernest went back to the drawing board. He said, OK. All you have to do is pour the contents in the bowl. You have to add water. You mix. You pour the contents into the pan. You pop it in the oven and bake it. What could we change about that process that would invite more mothers to feel like they made something rather than found something?

And what was his conclusion?

Add an egg.

So now for the last 50 years, we’ve been adding eggs to our cake mix. Every time we make a cake out of a box, we have to add one or two eggs, not because they couldn’t add egg powder, which they had in the mix prior, but because we need to make things.

We have a drive to make things. We also have a drive to have ownership and autonomy.

So I ask you a quick question. By clapping tell me if you’ve ever rented a car.

(Clappings)… Thank you.

OK, now tell me by clapping if you’ve ever washed a rental car.

All right, so we have these lovely people who have rented cars and no one, not a single person in this room has ever washed a rental car.

Why don’t you wash your rental car?

You don’t own it. It’s not yours. Somebody else will take care of it. I already paid for that. Someone else will do it in my stead. That’s a renter’s approach.

And if we have a renter’s approach to our jobs, we’ll never love our jobs. If we don’t make our jobs our own, we’ll never take care of them in a way that we can love them.

Now is a part of the talk where I’m supposed to inspire you. I’m supposed to tell you this story about how I left my job as a tenured professor to make a bigger difference in people’s lives.

Wait. I still lose my breath when I say that. OK, I left my job as a tenured professor to make a bigger difference in people’s lives. And it’s a great story, but we just don’t have time.

All right. I should tell you about Joseph Campbell and quote him this wonderful quote:

“Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors where there are only walls.”

That’s a great quote. I should cite Steve Jobs and his Stanford commencement speech. “Find what you love.”

But I’m not going to quote either of those guys. Because what people who love their jobs tell us is that that advice, while popular, is misleading.

It’s misleading. So take the Confucians saying:

“Choose a job you love and you will never work a day in your life.”

Sounds like something that an unemployed philosopher would say. Choose a job you love. It makes it sound like they’re just showrooms full of jobs that you would love. And all you have to do is walk in and pick that job and your life will be much better.

But what we know from people who love their jobs is that they take this job that’s pretty good. And they turn it into something amazing.

There’s also this wildly popular saying, follow your passion. That is the most dangerous career advice we could ever give anybody – Follow your passion.

There was a study done on people’s passions, and they asked people to name the things that make their heart pound. And only 5% of people could name things related to work.

5 percent could name their passions. But you’re supposed to follow your passion to the Promised Land. But that’s just not happening. What people who love their job say is that they are full of zest and zeal and passion, but they created it. They created it on the job.

So what does that leave us with? What is it; what kind of career advice does that give us?

Well, people who love their jobs say you will not land the perfect job. You will perfect the good job you have. You’ll perfect the good job you have. And that’s the advice I want you to hear. And you do that by designing your life. You do that by designing everything about your life so that your job comes to life and the rest of your life is made better.

Now, there are five life design strategies I want to share with you.

The first one is Test Drive the Future.

Second one, Trust your Gut.

Third one, Play to your Strengths.

Fourth, Craft your Job.

And fifth, Shop for the Right Boss. Which is my favorite one. We’ll come back to that.

Test drive your future.

You have to get to know your future self so that you can make choices and changes at your job today. You have to do that. And my friend CEO of a fundraising consulting firm, his name is Patrick Alderdice. He legislates dream time at his office. 30 minutes a week of dream time is mandatory for all his employees.

So he came up with this dream program because he said after people graduate from college, they stop dreaming. So he instituted a dream program whereby you have to commit to your dreams in public. Share them with all of your colleagues.

Then you consult with a dream manager at work. That’s a real job. And then you spend 30 minutes every Friday morning working on your dreams. And they don’t have to be related to work. All right.

And guess what? It’s working.

People were pursuing their passions. Patrick just came back from Nepal, which was part of his dreaming that he engaged in. And other people pursuing their passions, they’re becoming debt free. They’re going back to school. They’re starting families. They’re doing amazing things, all because of dream time. They’ve changed their jobs and they’ve changed their lives. And it’s boosted engagement, productivity and well-being at work.

Trust your Gut.

Now, the second one is trust your gut.

Now, trust your gut can be used when you’re first interviewing for a job and hopefully when you go into a setting, you’re certainly just sensitive to the reactions of the other people in the workplace.

But I want you to think about what people who love their jobs said to me. They said that they are surrounded by caring co-workers. Almost every one of these people said they were surrounded by caring co-workers. When I inquired, it came to my realization that that didn’t happen by accident.

What they did was they slowly stopped hanging out with the people they didn’t care about, And started hanging out more with the people that cared about them. It’s a spend versus send strategy that they used and you can use it at work tomorrow.

Spend more face to face time with the people that give you the warm fuzzies at work and send more emails and texts to the people you don’t give a damn about. The spend versus send strategy allows you to be civil, but yet get your emotional needs met at work.

Play to your Strengths.

Now there’s playing to your strengths. Play to your strengths.

Doing what you do best makes you feel better and makes you work better, both feeling better and working better. I have a great quote by Sir Ken Robinson, I don’t know if you’ve heard of the guy. Here we go. I could read it in a British accent. Are you ready? I won’t do that.

“We create our lives symbiotically as we explore our talents in relation to the circumstances they helped create for us.”

Identify your strengths and play to those strengths. And I promise you, your work will become more rewarding for you.

Craft your Job.

Next, is job crafting.

Craft your job. My friend Amy Rusinoski has developed this whole suite of techniques that you can use to job craft at work. One simple one is to queue up your day in a different way.

So while you used to maybe go into work with this willy-nilly approach to your tasks, what if you did all of the most engaging and inspiring tasks first? So that the rest of your day when you were met with drudgery, you could plow through that.

Or what if you reversed that and you went to work and you dealt with all the hassles of the day first and then ended the day on a high note?

Either one of those is job crafting. So we can slowly, slowly shape our jobs over time to turn them into more rewarding jobs.

Shop for the Right Boss

And the final one is boss shopping.

This is something that we can all do, but it’s hard. It’s really hard. We have to sacrifice some things because there are only one in 10 people who are bosses are really great bosses.

So we have to shoot for good bosses who get the most out of us and also care about our well-being. And what you need to do is think about shifting and switching, maybe the office you work in, the schedule you work, the branch you work at, so that you can get a boss that can get more out of you.

I want to tell you a story about Mary, who both trusted her gut and did some boss shopping. Mary applied to every teaching job available to her in driving distance when she graduated from college.

And she walked into the buildings with two criteria. She wanted warm colleagues and a great boss. And she searched and searched and searched and interviewed at a whole bunch of places. But then she landed at Langley Park, McCormick Elementary. And at that school, she found caring colleagues and a boss who just got her.

In fact, she told me she called her mom from the car after the interview and said, “Mom, this woman just gets me. I’m going to work for Patricia Kelly.”

So Mary got the job. She was thrilled. She got the job at Langley Park McCormick Elementary. And things were going wonderful up until the day when she was setting up her classroom… her first grade classroom.

She got called to the principal’s office, which is never a good thing, even when you’re grown up. And Patricia Kelly had some bad news for Mary. The enrollment projections were off. There were fewer students going to that school than planned. They had one too many teachers. Mary was out of a job.

News of this situation spread, Mary’s in her classroom, packing her boxes back up. When a senior colleague comes to her, one of those people who treated her warmly upon her initial visit and said:

“Mary, I heard about the enrollment; the enrollment numbers, and I want to tell you that the enrollment was higher at another school than projected. So I’m going to take that job because you need to be with Dr. Kelly. You need a great principal and you can keep your job. ”

Mary has been working for Dr. Patricia Kelly for 25 years. She’s a fifth grade teacher now at Westover Elementary and last two years ago, she was named the most hopeful teacher in America.

Shopping for the right boss pays huge dividends.

Now, the central message in Mary’s story, in Ray’s story and the story of other vibrant people, happy people who love their jobs is pretty simple. But it should change everything we do to prepare ourselves and others for careers.

Happiness depends on the goodness of our jobs, and those good jobs are made, not found.

Thank you.

Resources for Further Reading:

Transcript: Lauren Singer on Why I Live a Zero Waste Life at TEDxTeen

Creative Thinking: How to Get Out of The Box and Generate Ideas by Giovanni Corazza (Transcript)

You Don’t Find Happiness, You Create It: Katarina Blom (Transcript)

Dan Gilbert: Happiness: What Your Mother Didn’t Tell You (Transcript)

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