Work Energy

by Jim Harmer

  Excuse me? Make it here? I had a college degree and this guy thought I might not have the mental capacity to understand the complexities of opening up boxes and putting the probably-pooped-on products on the shelves?

  Somehow, I convinced him to give me a shot, and I was issued an apron and a box cutter. I’d report to work by 11 p.m. and clock out at 3 a.m. each weekday.

  I was humbled, but I was grateful to have whatever paycheck I could get to provide for my wife and child. Every night I’d fret over going to work, hate every instant of my job, and come home exhausted. The work was so painfully dull that I had to have a distraction.

  The path toward my goal was about to begin, and I didn’t realize it.

  Since we had paid our way through college buying and flipping things on Craigslist, we scoured our three suitcases to find anything we could possibly sell for a little extra cash. We had only two valuable possessions: an iPod Shuffle that Emily’s dad had given her and an inexpensive Canon Rebel XS digital camera. Our net worth? About $300.

  About six months prior, I’d bought the camera when I was nervous about becoming a father of a newborn. I thought photography would be a fun hobby for a dad, so I sold my skis and a gun to purchase the camera. It was a stretch to spend $500 on anything, but I had earned the money and we had our needs met at the time, so I went for it.

  As I began making the Craigslist post for the camera, Emily saw what I was doing and begged me not to sell it. She said she couldn’t bear to see me part with it, even though we were in need, when I’d worked so hard to earn it and enjoyed it so much. Reluctantly, I kept it.

  As it would turn out, Emily’s insistence that we keep my camera would earn us millions of dollars over the next few years and entirely change our lives.

  One of the few possessions we also kept was her iPod Shuffle, which was still pretty cool in those days. A little rectangle that could make hundreds of songs come out of it was still quite a novelty. I guess listening to music trumped having food because I started bringing the iPod to work with me so I would have a distraction from the boredom.

  Because I was a nerd, I knew about podcasts, but to most people, they were still a foreign concept. I downloaded every free podcast I could find—tips for law students, religion, news, politics, and even business podcasts. That’s when one of the podcasts mentioned a new website called “Smart Passive Income” by Pat Flynn.

  He didn’t have a podcast yet, but I found some free software that could make PDFs of his blog posts. Then I found another piece of software that could convert PDFs into an mp3 file with a horribly mechanical voice reading the text to me.

  I downloaded everything—every word—every day.

  He shared things like how he had started a website and made money selling an ebook study guide to people who visited the site.

  I also listened to podcasts like Internet Business Mastery and a dozen others. They were earning real money online by creating websites and podcasts to gather an audience. Then they made money selling online courses and having advertising on their sites. I was riveted.

  Every night, I listened to every business and technology podcast I could find as I repeatedly put cans on shelves. My shift would end, and I’d get home just before the horizon would begin to light up with color.

  On my knees each morning before I crashed into bed, I’d plead for God to help me find a better job until school started—anything! I didn’t understand why we had to go through that hardship, and I certainly didn’t realize that the answer to my prayers was the hardship itself.

  The answer to my prayers was the hardship itself.

  I just wanted to find a better temporary job or stumble upon a pile of money on the street. Surely God could arrange for that. Instead, I received something far greater—endless hours at a dull job with no distractions, where my headphones brought the best minds of the new world of blogging and business right to my earbuds. I had months and months of the most knowledgeable people in internet business tutoring me every single night, and I didn’t even appreciate what I was receiving.

  Sometimes God’s greatest gifts really are “unanswered prayers.” Thank you, Garth Brooks.

  This book is about fearlessly taking on any goal you can dream up, but for most people, career and financial goals are often at the fore. In the ensuing decade, I have worked with thousands of people wanting to start their own small businesses. It’s a massive goal, and this book will teach you the work energy formula for taking it on.

  Others of you want to achieve health, familial, or other goals. Perhaps you just want to excel at the job you already have. A Harris Interactive study found that only 20% of American workers report feeling “very passionate” about their jobs. At first glance, that statistic may not seem dire. Sure, only 20% of workers are “very passionate” about their jobs, but many others at least don’t despise their work, right? Not so fast. A study by Gallup (https://www.gallup.com/workplace/238079/state-global-workplace-2017.aspx?g_source=link_newsv9&g_campaign=item_225752&g_medium=copy) found that only 15% of employees are engaged in their work.

  Just think of what those numbers mean. If you are like most people today, you are not engaged or passionate about the place you will spend eight hours a day for decades of your life. Will you be satisfied with your life if that’s how you spend so much of it?

  Worse yet, what about the time after work? If you don’t get fulfillment from your day job and then you go home to watch TV, you’ll end up wishing you were the kind of person with a passion for something—anything! You’ll yearn for hobbies or some other goal you can take on and tackle. If you don’t get fulfillment from something, your happiness will suffer. Whether your goal is career related or something else entirely, you must have mountains to climb if you want to be happy.

  You may or may not be in the kind of job I was in, where you felt your soul was being ground into a pulp during every moment of every shift, but you probably know what that feels like, right? Most of us have, at some point, worked in a soul-grinding job. If you are in a job that is simply toxic to your being and you see no hope of change, then do yourself and your employer a favor by working on a goal to find different work. Trust me, your employer already isn’t happy with your work if you feel that way.

  The more likely situation, though, is that you’re in a job you are glad to have. You may even like the nature of the work or the industry you’re in, but statistics say that it’s likely you frequently feel disengaged at work. You may even feel “passionate” about the type of work you do, but not quite to the point of feeling “very passionate.” You know there’s no fire in your bones driving you anymore.

  If you are 35 years old today and you work a typical American workweek until retirement at an average age of 62, you’ll spend another 63,168 hours at work. Just imagine sitting down on the couch and turning on an incredibly boring show like Star Trek and watching it over and over for the next 7.2 years without sleeping, eating, or going to the bathroom. That’s how much time you’ll spend at work. Depending on your job, Star Trek may be a generous metaphor. Some people have jobs so bad that it would be more like watching Major League Baseball. Can. You. Imagine?

  What would your personality, happiness, and outlook be like after 7.2 years of this torture? That’s what you’re doing to your life, if you continue doing soul-grinding work for an entire career. You owe it to the people who love and need you, as well as to yourself, to find work you love. I don’t care if that work is being a fancy financial analyst or painting houses—you need to love it. Most of you reading this book don’t need a new position at a new company. You need a new fire within yourself to love what you once thought was the best place for you to work. You picked your job, so let’s fix whatever has you feeling dispassionate.

  Achieving your goals is not entirely about the work you do in the course of your employment, although that certainly applies. Stay-at-home moms, retirees, and every other breathing person need to feel that they are working toward something,
or life will have little meaning.

  I’m going to get you fired up. Once you understand the work energy formula, you’ll have a fire in your bones that you can turn on and wield as a weapon against any goal before you. I’m confident that as you follow my story about how I learned, step-by-step, to overcome obstacles, be fearless in any setting, and achieve the most difficult goals, you’ll be able to develop that same ability.

  Soul-Grinding Work Is Not One Size Fits All

  First, though, we must understand why some work feels like drudgery to you when that same task may be enjoyable to others. Why was the dollar store work soul grinding to me when others enjoyed working there for decades? The ability to reach your goals won’t do you any good if they take you in the wrong direction.

  If you can identify the soul-grinding work in your life, it will show you the barricades before you.

  Barricades are types of work that conflict with your inner drive, your work energy.

  You can surely improve upon these weak areas over time, but in this book, you will simply learn to avoid them. Losing weight, getting a promotion, writing a book, stopping smoking, or paying off your house are already difficult goals to achieve. The point of this book is to show you how you can achieve those goals by using your unique inner drive: your work energy.

  If you are a manager or business owner, it is critical to understand your employees’ barricades as well. I spent a morning with one of my employees, going through the material in this chapter, and it revealed to me a very different approach that I need to use in designing an atmosphere where he can perform at his best.

  Years into my blogging business, I hired over 50 short-term employees in just six months. They mass-produced blog posts on several sites at once, but the quality of the articles was poor despite my efforts to train them.

  I theorized that I could improve the quality of the articles they were writing if I could get a few of the employees writing better content so as to inspire the others. To make it fun, I created two teams of three for each shift. The workers on these teams would go into a separate room of the office to do their work. They’d have more time to work on the articles, and I spoiled them to make it a privilege to be on the “black team.” I provided them free snacks and drinks, cushy chairs, and I designed the room with a huge 10-foot flag with a custom Viking logo for the “Black Team Content Warriors.” There was even a sign on the door to that room that read, “Top Secret. Black Team Only.” This was one of my finest ideas ever.

  It was a competition to achieve “black team” status. Each Monday, I would review the work from the two black teams and pick a winner. The winning black team would get to stay for the next week’s competition, and the losing black team would go back to being regular workers and the shift would come up with three new people to be their black team for the week.

  After the first week, I reviewed the articles. They were no better than the articles from the regular workers, who had much less time to write their pieces. I was frustrated, but I gave some training pointers, selected a winning team for the week, and then the next week’s competition began.

  This pattern continued for a few weeks until I got a call from the office manager. He had a question. “What do I do if nobody wants to be on the black team? Should I just pick some people and force them?”

  My jaw hit the floor. How could they not want to be in the room with the cushy chairs, a more relaxed pace with nobody micro-managing them, and all the Nutter Butters and cold diet root beer they could drink? How could they not want to be in the room with the 10-foot flag and the custom-designed Viking logo?

  The manager’s answer was very simple. They didn’t like the competition. They were nervous about being criticized and losing. Whose fault was it? Mine. I had designed work following my own work energy, which will be discussed later. I would have been excited about an opportunity to stand out from the crowd and receive praise in a competitive environment. The fear of criticism wouldn’t have deterred me. Yet, for others, it was a barricade. I had designed the project for myself without considering the barricades of my workforce. The black team was scuttled, and I still have the flag hanging in my office to remind me of my mistake.

  You need to understand the barricades in yourself, and in those around you, so that you can design a path toward a goal in a way that will not conflict with their individual needs.

  For me, soul-grinding work provides me with no opportunities to take on new and difficult tasks. Repetition is my barricade. Repetition is problematic for me because it means I have to do something I have done before, so there’s no challenge.

  Action Step One: What Is Your Soul-Grinding Work?

  What’s the Worst Job You Ever Had?

  First, start with your career. Think through every job you’ve had. What did you like about each job? What tasks required to do the job were soul grinding for you?

  What about your current work? Focus on the specific tasks you have to do and not the job as a whole.

  Next, think through chores you need to do around the home. What can you just not bring yourself to do? I understand that no one enjoys cleaning toilets because it’s gross, but what tasks make you feel as if you’re losing your soul?

  With the answers to these simple questions, we’re starting to understand you from the standpoint of what you dislike. Sometimes that’s the best insight into understanding you as a person and identifying what makes you tick.

  Think back through your whole life now. What other work was soul grinding? When have you felt that, and why did you feel it?

  As an avid reader of books, I have to admit that 100% of the time, when the author asks me to reflect on a question or write something down, I skip it. I get a little grin on my face as I sneakily just keep reading, knowing the author will never catch me. I’m a rebel. So I’ve created a helpful resource for you, in case you do the same thing.

  For now just go on your merry way reading the book, but when you get home tonight and can sit down with your spouse or someone who knows you well, go to WorkEnergyBook.com and you’ll find a helpful list of these questions that you can read on your phone or print. You’ll learn things about yourself you have never realized, and it will dramatically change your ability to crush your goals.

  Just like those annoying radio ads, I’ll repeat that one more time: Read on for now, but when you get home tonight, go to WorkEnergyBook.com. You’ll get a free list of the action steps, which you can read on your phone or in print.

  Once you see a clear picture of what soul-grinding work is to you, it is essential that you clearly identify your barricade. For me, working at the dollar store was soul-grinding because the tasks were so simple that I could never be praised for doing the work. My barricade is doing a task that I won’t receive praise for accomplishing.

  Your barricade is unique to you. I have a friend whose barricade is the kind of work where he is likely to be criticized by others. My wife’s barricade is the type of work that puts her on a fixed schedule with specific deadlines.

  My business partner’s barricade is a task that would make him vulnerable to appearing unprepared because, deep down inside, he’s afraid of looking dumb.

  Once you have identified where you have suffered through soul-grinding work, look for the barricade—what about that work did you dread? Then put it into a simple phrase. What is your barricade?

  “The heights by great men reached and kept were not attained by sudden flight, but they, while their companions slept, were toiling upward in the night.”

  —Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  Now that you understand the barricades that would stop your progress toward a goal, we need to turn our attention to the opposite—your work energy. Work energy is the personal inner drive that makes you tick. It is the unique mechanism your mind has developed to get things done. It has been shaped by your life’s experience.

  I discovered my own work energy when law school began after the longest summer of my life, stocking shelves
at the dollar store and listening to business podcasts.

  I was relieved on my last day at the dollar store, but I traded its boredom for law school’s mental rigor. Each day, I woke up and headed straight for the law library to begin studying. Part of my law school dues likely went to a certain blue chair in the law library that I single-handedly wore out as I sat in it for many hours every single day.

  I set a firm rule that I’d quit working at school and go home every day at 5 p.m. to spend time with family. At 5 p.m., no matter what, I was done. That served our family well and provided me with at least some time with Emily and our son, Ruger.

  By day, I sat in that blue wingback chair—staring at the eight-inch screen of my horrendous $120 refurbished Dell netbook computer. Side note: netbooks were the most horrid idea the tech world has ever had. I had to squint so hard to see both of the pixels on the screen that my wife says it put a permanent wrinkle between my eyes. At 5 p.m. each day, I’d ride my bike through the palm-tree-lined streets to be at home with my wonderful wife and child on the beach.

  After that, I should have gone to sleep to prepare for another early start the next morning, but I had a nightly ritual. As soon as Emily and Ruger were asleep each night, I’d slip out the front door with a backpack containing the Canon Rebel XS camera and a simple tripod.

  I fell in love with photography on the beaches each night, as I felt the warm, humid ocean breezes. More than a few times the police would catch me and kick me off the beach, since it closed at 10 p.m. All of the legal cases I read were stories of people trying to destroy one another’s lives. But, on the beach late at night with my camera, I could hear the intermittent crashing of waves on the sand as I became a passionate hobbyist photographer. Night photography became my obsession. It fascinated me that I could go into nature at night needing a flashlight to walk around, and I could record the light with a shutter speed of 30 seconds or more and entirely expose the scene. I was enamored.