Lenny DistilledCraft → Time & Energy
Most people spend 95% of their time doing the work that sucks their energy so they get the 5% of the joy of the work they do. And what I realized is that if you can pull that ratio to 40% energy drive or drain or 50 50, you don't even know you're working anymore.
When people are in their gifts and their strengths, they have more energy. We all have more energy when we're operating from the things we naturally are good at. It's no one else's job to help you live in your gifts. Your manager's job is to help you perform in the job you are hired to do. It's your job to navigate your career.
Take two weeks and every night reflect on, what are the five things today that gave me the most energy? And what are the five things that depleted my energy the most? If you do that for two weeks and you look at patterns, you can tell, what are the natural gifts that I'm living in?
My litmus test is 80%, that's the goal. You're always going to have 20% of things you don't love doing. But if you're 80% of the time in your gifts, how much energy you have to give to the world.
It's not that you figure out what it is and do more of that, it's that you figure out what it isn't and eliminate that and then naturally, you'll be drawn toward what it is that you love.
I could become passively okay at management with some training, with some coaching. I don't want to spend any years of my life becoming passively okay at something.
If you're spending most of your time in your day doing things that are zapping your energy and you hate things you're doing in your job, maybe you're not in the right job. I don't know, if I was a career coach, I would just tell everyone, 'Oh yeah, quit your job. I don't know what you're doing there.'
Work on the things that make you happy, that fill you up. Life is short. We're all very lucky to be in this moment. There's no reason to spend time on things that don't give you energy.
You can write a lot more if you write what you want to write. And so this is one of the reasons I don't write for financial gain and I don't write very much on a schedule.