⚡ Career Strategy #14: Do what gives you energy.

Follow your heart or follow your head? There might be a way to do both and succeed at work.

Nov 29, 2024

Welcome back to Fuzzy’s Career Strategy Series, where we share research-backed strategies & stories to help you realise your best career.

Part 1: 👋 Introducing the Career Strategy Series
Part 2: 🪜 Ladder Climbing as a Strategy
Part 3: 👩‍🎓 Controlled Supply as a Strategy
Part 4: 🥇 Excellence in a Power Law Field as a Strategy
Part 5: 🔍 Niche-ing as a Strategy
Part 6: 🧱 Skill-stacking as a Strategy
Part 7: 👷 Be A Generalist as a Strategy
Part 8: 📊 The Portfolio Career as a Strategy
Part 9: 📣 Building a Platform as a Strategy
Part 10: 🌊 Wave-surfing as a Strategy
Part 11: 🏗️ Adding Leverage as a Strategy
Part 12: 🌏 Proximity as a Strategy
Part 13: ⏱️ Sequencing as a Strategy
Part 14: 🧪 Optimising for Discovery as a Strategy
Part 15: ⚡ Do What Gives You Energy as a Strategy

There are thousands of possible pathways for your career, but our research found there are ~10-15 dominant career strategies, which can be layered together if needed - and we’ll be breaking those down for you in this series.

⚡ Introducing a surprising strategy: do what gives you energy.

Steve Jobs to 2005 graduates: 'Stay hungry, stay foolish' | Stanford Report

"The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle." - Steve Jobs

Let’s be real - this series can sometimes feel like a downer.

We’ve often rejected the classic advice to ‘follow your passion’.

In fact, we kind of started out by demonising it.

But there is an alternate view, which is epitomised by this week’s strategy:

Optimising for activities that give you energy can actually fuel career success, more than forcing yourself into jobs which don’t suit you.

When you ask high-profile leaders, many give this advice 👇

From billionaire investor Warren Buffett: "In the world of business, the people who are most successful are those who are doing what they love…"
To iconic talk show host Oprah Winfrey: “Passion is energy. Feel the power that comes from focusing on what excites you…"
And entrepreneur Richard Branson: "There is no greater thing you can do with your life and your work than follow your passions…”
Even the author Mark Twain: "Find a job you enjoy doing, and you will never have to work a day in your life”.

In this post, we’ll dive into the science behind energy and motivation - plus share tips on finding what gives you energy and using it to make career decisions. Let’s get started!

⚙️ How it works.

We all have different personalities, meaning we are all energised and drained by different kinds of work.

For example:

You might love spreadsheets but find writing an email takes forever,
You might love working in teams but procrastinate like crazy when no one else is keeping you accountable,
You might find a demanding boss with high standards to be motivating (or alternately causes you sleepless nights),
You might stay up until midnight working on a project that connects with your values, while doing a slapdash job on tasks that don’t excite you.

Whatever your preferences - this career strategy is about working with them, not against them, by choosing tasks which gives you energy.

This allows you to work (cough) harder-better-faster-stronger, produce better outputs and make quicker progress in your career.

Finally discovering your superpower at work.

What does that look like in practice? 🤔

For example, if you’re someone who studied a technical field but actually gets energy from teamwork —> can you focus on becoming a people manager within that field to maximise the amount of time spent doing tasks which suit you?
Or if you’re someone who enjoys analytical thinking, but struggles with tight deadlines and occasional all-nighters in your job —> can you find a role in a different industry or part of your company which uses the same skills at a more thoughtful, predictable pace?

🧠 The why: what’s happening inside your brain?

Why do different tasks have such powerful impacts on our motivation?

Well, there’s a ton of fascinating neuroscience behind it, but let’s focus on a couple of examples from opposite ends of the energy spectrum.

📈 The positive end: flow states.

The term ‘flow state’ was popularised by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, to describe deep immersion in an activity.

In flow states, people report feeling a loss of self-consciousness and a distorted sense of time (feeling sped up or slowed down), as well as a sense of intrinsic reward (enjoyment for its own sake, not for the end result).

Activities like surfing, gaming, trading, acting, cooking, painting, hiking, dancing, reading, rock climbing, music and problem solving in an area you enjoy (for example, mathematics) often produce this sense of ‘being in flow’.

And in terms of what’s happening in the brain, flow states correlate with:

Reduced prefrontal cortex activity, leading to less self-criticism and greater immersion,
Release of dopamine, boosting motivation and focus, and
Increased alpha and theta brain waves, associated with relaxed alertness and heightened creativity.

So if we spend more of our working hours experiencing a sense of flow, we’re much more likely to feel energised and be effective at our jobs.

📉 The negative side: toxic workplaces.

From micromanagement to bullying, favouritism, gossip, harassment, blame-shifting, ‘busy work’ and burnout cultures, modern workplaces can be psychologically stressful in a number of ways.

And while we might want to adopt a mantra of professionalism and just ‘shake it off’, our ancient brains haven’t caught up enough in evolutionary terms to handle chronic negative working conditions.

Why?

Our brains spent a long time evolving to rapidly spot physical threats and outrun the threat.

Let’s say your ancestor is being chased by a tiger.

Your brain spots the threat, and activates the sympathetic nervous system, pumping your body full of hormones like adrenalin to increase energy and blood supply, and cortisol to maintain a steady supply of fuel to our muscles and brain while we avoid the tiger.

But while a chasing tiger might be gone within minutes (or you might be eaten, so it’s a moot point!), the modern workplace brings chronic stress.

The slow-drip of a never-ending inbox pinging at us or a bad boss doesn’t achieve the same rapid resolution as the tiger chase, so our bodies are experiencing a constant low level of this ancient stress response.

Over time, this stress response can have dramatic effects on our motivation & effectiveness, like:

Chronic cortisol exposure keeps your brain in a "survival mode," focusing on immediate threats rather than long-term goals. This makes it harder to find joy or satisfaction in challenging, growth-oriented work.
Cortisol can suppress the release of dopamine, a neurotransmitter associated with reward and motivation. This makes it harder to feel energised or motivated by work achievements or future goals.
Chronic stress impairs the prefrontal cortex (responsible for executive functions like decision-making, planning, and focus). This can make it harder to stay organised, concentrate, or complete tasks effectively.
When under chronic stress, everything may feel equally urgent and we experience difficulty prioritising, leading to procrastination or decision fatigue.
Prolonged stress might lead to depersonalisation, including a sense of detachment or apathy toward your work, colleagues, or clients.

Bottom line: while it may feel ‘fluffy’ or non-strategic to take into account what brings you energy at work, it can actually have a huge impact.

🌈 So how could I actually use this strategy?

Spend time understanding your unique energy fingerprint.

There are obvious signals of what brings you energy, like:

The hobbies you choose to pursue in your free time,
The types of people you choose to be around, and
Past experiences that have led to peaks or troughs in motivation.

But you might be surprised by what comes up if you track yourself too.

Try keeping a diary of what drains or energises you across every area of your life for a number of weeks - and be as specific as possible, observing yourself without judgment as you are, rather than as you would like to be.

You might end up with a list which looks like this (but probably longer):

Compare it to your work - and other possible careers. Does it feel like you should make a shift to something which better fits your energy profile?

Consider energy AND your likelihood of success in a field.

It’s all well and good to say that singing gives you energy - but there’s a very small number of professional singers in the world compared to the number who want to be professionals (this earlier post is a great read on these kind of ‘power law’ careers like sport, media & entertainment).

So how should you proceed?

Imagine if you placed all of the potential jobs you could do on two axes.

One axis ranks them from draining to energising.
The other from low to high likelihood of success (however you define it).

And together, they make a matrix with 4 quadrants 👇

🗻 The ideal.

Jobs that fall into the top right quadrant are probably a no-brainer. You’re likely to see a positive feedback loop emerge between feeling energised, succeeding, feeling more energised, succeeding more, and so on.

🔚 The dead end.

Jobs that are draining with a low likelihood of success are not worth your time, unless you have no better options available.

🤩 The dream.

When it comes to energising fields with long odds of success, it can be useful to impose a time limit, think about Plan Bs where you can use transferable skills and be conscious that you need more than effort and talent - you might also need to create an edge to succeed in hyper-competitive fields.

🏃 The grind.

Jobs with a high likelihood of success that diminish your energy might be worth thinking of in terms of sequencing or as part of a portfolio career.

For example, can you do this for a number of years to build financial security, a portfolio, a reputation, a network or a set of skills, which you can then use to transition into roles which you find more energising?

🧠 Keep in mind.

A few considerations to note before you choose this strategy.

🎨 Turning a passion into a vocation: Sometimes, turning the thing you love into a job you need to monetise can make you fall out of love with your hobby and your work. For example, if you enjoy unfettered creativity, and instead find yourself working on client briefs which feel commercial and constrained, you might wish for a career that’s ‘just a job’.
🥱 Being energised doesn’t mean enjoying every minute: Every job has pain points and occasional boring moments - make sure the search for a perfect job doesn’t turn into inertia or an inability to commit.
🔋 Energy sources evolve: You might find yourself motivated by intellectual challenge and more responsibility at one point in your career, only to find that your priorities shift to spending more time with family, friends or hobbies - or vice versa. Keep observing & tweaking as you go.
💥 We don’t hear as much about the failures: We are over-exposed to stories of improbable success against long odds, but failed career moves receive little attention - a variation of what is known as ‘survivorship bias’. Even the celebrities who are quoted urging us to follow our passions can be found highlighting the importance of multiple factors in career success. For example, the full quote from Richard Branson above actually reads, "there is no greater thing you can do with your life and your work than follow your passions—in a way that serves the world and you".
🥇 Excellence can also breed enjoyment: We often think of passion as needing to exist as a precondition for motivation, with a chain of causation which looks like: passion —> effort —> mastery —> success. But there’s interesting emerging evidence that becoming good at something actually makes it enjoyable, meaning the chain of causation can also look like this: effort —> mastery —> success —> passion!

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