Marcus Buckingham

Our genius is precise and super specific. Sometimes it’s woven so tightly within us- that we can’t even see it. We just think it’s ‘normal’- that everyone must be that way.
⋙ Take 5-10 minutes and make a list of things you think you can do better than 10,000 other people. In that list, you’ll find love. You’ll find what you need to be doing more of.


︎

▷︎ If you lead people you may want to SAVE this one. And if you have a team leader that meets with you 1:1 once a month or once every few months, or only does ‘team meetings’ — you may want to have a friend of a friend of a friend secretly send. ☇︎

REMEMBER: What this 1:1 touch-base brings to your people is FREQUENT ATTENTION. And it matters less that you do it perfectly, than that you do it at all.

Get these on your calendars leaders. I like to block my Monday afternoons for my team 1:1’s. Definitely pick a day, block it off, and BE CONSISTENT.

And thank you to the wise human that asked for a deeper dive on this topic. I always love to hear what you all want more of so 🙏 for DM’ing. I’ll also get around to doing a demonstration video on this topic. It‘ll be fun.

With LOVE(+WORK),
-marcus

The nourishment you need from your work could be right there in front of you, seen, felt, and lived by you alone.

Trust what you feel, seek out what you love, and you may well discover that the best of you was with you all along.

➤︎ This might be one you’ll want to save.
∴︎ Does your manager really care about you? Or do they just want output.
∴︎ The best managers know that actually knowing and caring for their people leads to their highest and best levels of performance.

➤︎ Remember people leave managers - not companies.

Here are 11 things team leaders should be asking. Would love to hear your thoughts. -marcus

This is one of the most important distinctions to guide your life choices.

The common definitions of ‘strength’ and ‘weakness’ are dangerously wrong. Entire careers have been destroyed and lives turned upside down because these definitions have misled us.

To begin to live a life that feels fully your own, to take control and make the choices that are best for you, start by understanding the true definition of your ‘strengths’ and your ‘weaknesses.’

doesn’t help employees thrive, or relationships thrive.

Swap FEEDBACK for REACTIONS and watch how learning unfolds.

We underestimate how utterly unique we are.

We think that our gender, age, nationality, religion and race define us. These are important of course, and yet we share each of them with millions of others. Others who are not us.

Or we think our identity is tied to what happened to us growing up - our biography. This is important, naturally. And yet still, you are so very different from people you grew up in the same house with, whose genes and gender you may share. Why are you so different from even your brother or your sister?

The ancient Norse said that you are you because you have a Wyrd. A spirit that entered your body when you were born.

Today we know that your marvelously massive uniqueness is caused by the clash of your parents chromosomes creating a vast and filigreed and one-off pattern of synaptic connections in your brain. Its patterns were laid when you were born. And when you die, no one in the history of the world will ever share this same pattern.

In all the tiniest details you are an astonishingly weird and wonderful edition of one.
Unmatched and unmatchable.

Please cherish yourself.
Honor this uniqueness with your attention.
Not to be self-indulgent.
But because only by honoring the truth of your own uniqueness will you honor others for theirs.

Self-love is the mother of all understanding.

Wherever you are, wherever you go, you deserve to be seen, heard, and valued as a full and loving human being.

Any place or any person who reduces you to a mere instrument for getting things done does not deserve you.

Find your time, measure your moment, take a stand for all you are, and leave.

Big primary qualitative research project underway. If you have a story to share - some good real-world examples - would love for you to be a part of this.
—︎ L o v e And W o r k · o r g —︎

⋰︎ The WHAT of work, always trumps the WHY ⋱︎

No matter how much you believe in the mission of your work, or how genuinely you admire the people you work with, neither of these will sustain you if the actual activities - the WHAT of your work - are not things you love to do.

To thrive at work, take the ‘what’ of your loves seriously. And use the activities of your day to nourish you.

You are the wisest person in your world.

Each day your world offers up thousands of different moments, activities, situations.

These are your raw material for decoding who you really are.

Pay lovingly close attention to your emotional reactions - which moments lift you up,
which activities come easily to you,
in which specific situations time flies by.

Your reactions are your love language. There aren’t five love languages, but 8 billion, as many as there are people alive today.

Becoming fluent in yours is the most important life-skill you’ll ever learn.

∷︎ Beware the shade makers ∷︎

Your gifts are light, shining, gleaming, dazzling all around you.
Yet some people are afraid of your light.
They are the shade-makers, prowling around you with their dimmers out, telling you to turn it down, to dull yourself, until you’re barely visible at all.
You know who your shade-makers are.
You feel the chill.
Please, for your own sake, do not listen to them. Close the door. Shut them out.

Your light is you at your very best.
Let it shine, turn it up, as bright as you can, and you will illuminate our world.

≋︎ The thing that keeps me on this mission is knowing that people get to the end of their lives never having expressed their loves.
≋︎ We built this course as a companion course to the LOVE + WORK book. It’s a perfect course for you to do alone, and even more impactful done in teams. At the moment the course is complimentary for anyone who has purchased the book.
≋︎ Please don’t make the world wait too long for the very best of you to be expressed. I am excited to be a partner with you on your journey. -marcus

How are you feeling right now in your job?

Looking for your first?
Looking for a change?
Desperately wanting to finally find one you love and feel the most ‘you’ in?

Perfect timing.

Join me and Harvard Business Review's Julie Devoll for an interactive event, How to Find A Career You Love.

Register now for June 22: https://events.bizzabo.com/HBR062223?utm_source=SL

You won’t ever ‘do only what you love.’

But you can, every single day, find some activity or situation or moment or event that you love.

It might be the thinnest of red threads, but you can find it.

Many people choose their jobs because they believe in what the job is trying to do. They think that the “why” of the job is the most important part. While you might choose a job for the “why,” how long you stay in that job, how fulfilled you are, and how effective you are in it depends on the “what.” So if you’re considering a certain career, go talk to someone who is already doing it and ask them what they do during a regular week. If their answer doesn’t excite you, it’s probably not the right career for you.

Your responsibility is to take seriously the uniqueness of your uniqueness, and design the most intelligent, the most honest, and the most effective ways to volunteer it to the rest of us.

Your role as team leader is the most important role in any company. And who your company chooses to make team leader is the most important decision it ever makes.

A weakness is not what you’re bad at.
A strength is not what you’re good at.

Don’t you have some things you’re really good at, but that you hate doing? We all do, right. So what should we call this - those things you excel at which you wish you never had to do again?

Those are your weaknesses. A weakness is an activity that weakens you - even if you’re good at it.

A strength is an activity that strengthens you - even if you’re not good at it yet.

Get these definitions ‘wrong’ and you could wind up in entirely the ‘wrong’ career - doing something you hate but excel at.

Get these definitions right, and you will start to build self-mastery. Because if a strength is what strengthens you and a weakness is what weakens you, then the person best qualified to identify both is you!

So, try to become ever more aware of which activities strengthen and weaken you, and then, starting with the job interview, learn how to describe each -
with power,
with precision,
and without apology.

The greatest gift you can give yourself, and others is a vivid understanding of you at your best.

∠︎ You don’t need to brag or boast in order to claim who you are, and offer your very best to others.

∠︎ And yet these others - your family, your friends, your interviewer, your new teammates - they can’t read your mind. Nothing in your age or physical appearance reveals precisely how you think, or when time flies by for you, or when you are at your most creative, or feel your most powerful.

∠︎ It’s up to you to find ways to share what you know about yourself. And the more specific you can be the better.

∠︎ So learn these phrases. Practice explaining to others where and how you’re at your best - without sounding like a braggart.

∠︎ No one likes a braggart.

But everyone’s drawn to self-mastery.

∠︎ So practice and practice until you become a master at explaining to others the precise weirdness of your amazing mind.

Any day that goes by without you finding something to love, something to get excited about, raises the chance that you will, over time, become less engaged and less productive.

Joining us on today's episode of On Leadership with Scott Miller is world-renowned researcher, author, and founder of the Strengths Revolution, Marcus Buckingham. Tune in now and listen to his thoughts on finding your and making them work for you. https://bit.ly/3UznFXu

Thank you Ny Post for recommending Love + Work as the perfect holiday gift! You can still order it in time for the holidays: https://www.amazon.com/Love-Work-Find-What-Rest/dp/1647821231/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3GGLYO7NOOPC4&keywords=love+and+work+marcus+buckingham&qid=1671558431&sprefix=love+and+work%2Caps%2C164&sr=8-1

Chuffed to have Love + Work on BookPal's Outstanding Works of Literature shortlist, in some truly great company. Read the full list here: https://bookpal.com/blog/2022-owl-awards-shortlist/

If we continue to spend our time identifying failure as we see it and giving people feedback about how to avoid it, we will languish in the business of adequacy.

Please join me and Harvard Business Review for a virtual event tomorrow on how feedback fails to help employees thrive, and what you can do that actually works.

Why Feedback Doesn’t Work and What to Do Instead Featuring Marcus Buckingham, head of people + performance research at the ADP Research Institute and author of Love + Work: How to Find What You Love, Love What You Do, and Do It for the Rest of Your Life

So honored have an article included in this celebration with Ashley Goodall. Give it a read - it's unlocked for the month.

Why Feedback Rarely Does What It’s Meant To There are better ways to help people succeed.