Matters
Chapter Seven: Get Rid of the Jerks
Chapter Eight: Learn Forever
Chapter Nine: Make Work Fun
Chapter Ten: The Dream Gets Bigger
References
Suggested Readings
Acknowledgments
About the Author
If there had been a contest twenty-five years ago for the person least likely to write a book like this, I would have been the winner, hands down. No questions asked. I was someone with a good education and experience as a professor and a consultant with a good salary, recognition, and prestige.
The only problem was that work just did not work for me. I was good at my job, but I didn’t feel like I was being as successful as I could be. Truthfully, I was having a lot of trouble at work. I was unhappy and unsatisfied. You might even say miserable some days. And I couldn’t figure out what to do, although I tried.
When I took what I thought would be a temporary assignment in Asia, I had a chance to make a fresh start and I made up my mind that things would be different. It was either now or never for me. I asked myself a lot of questions. I kept a journal; I paid attention to what others said; I kept on pushing myself outside my comfort zone; I listened to my students, clients, and colleagues; and I began to figure things out for myself.
It took me a while, but I learned and developed an approach to working that allowed me to have the kind of life at work I had only dreamed of before. I became much happier and more satisfied at work. And as I was figuring out things for myself, I began to contribute more of what I knew to others.
I was able to create a life at work that not only worked for me, but one that other people told me they wanted as well. I wasn’t always sure whether what I knew was something I could explain. There were times when I couldn’t identify specifically what it was I had learned or what I was doing.
But as other people took notice, they wanted to know more. They’d tell me I was a great role model for them. When I first heard this, I couldn’t believe it. I, who struggled so much before and took a long time to figure things out? They’d see me at work or at social occasions and would ask me, “How do you do it?” Initially, I didn’t know what they meant. What was it? How could I explain what I knew to them?
Several years ago I told myself I had to figure out exactly what I was doing. I got tired of not being able to answer people’s questions about my approach. Even more than that, I wanted to help others have a similar satisfying work experience. I began to analyze more of what I did in order to answer the questions I kept getting from others.
I made a project out of studying my own behavior, actions, and thinking. I thought deeply about what I was doing. I started writing down more about what I did and how I did it.
I began to speak at conferences throughout the United States and Asia about the important elements in my approach. I shared what I knew with my students and clients. This book, What Do You Want to Create Today?, is the result of those years I spent identifying, developing, and teaching this approach to others.
If you want your life at work to be better, I’m sure this book will help. It’s an approach you too can learn. You will learn to work with purpose, passion, and power. That’s why I wrote this book.
So now it’s your turn. The approach and the experiences I detail will enable you to build the life you want at work, a life you may never have thought possible. Many of those experiences are my own, of course; others are those of friends and clients, several of whom requested I change their names to preserve their anonymity.
But before we get into all of that, allow me to share a bit of my backstory and a few more details about how it all started.
What makes people successful? How can I be successful? How can I build the kind of life I want at work? How can I use more of what I know? How can I grow more fully as a person through my work? These are the questions that have interested me all my life. They may have interested you as well.
I got a lot of advice from my parents, friends, and teachers about how to succeed and what career path to follow, but there was only one problem: None of it seemed right. None of it seemed to fit me. My uncle recommended I start my career selling a line of women’s clothes, but that was the last thing I wanted to do. My university teachers told me to “be a CPA” or “start in sales and then move into marketing.” Marketing might have worked, but I hated accounting and flunked it the first time I took it. I knew I would have to follow my own path, but I was not sure how. I wanted to develop a way of working that would be mine alone, but I struggled to figure out how to do it. I spent a lot of time trying to fit in.
As a student at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst in the late 1960s, one of my favorite activities was looking through the thick college course catalog and studying the background and degrees of my professors. I memorized the courses they taught, their educational backgrounds, and the names of the schools where they had worked before.
One professor had only a master’s of science but he was the associate head of the chemistry department, which had many PhDs. Why was he the associate head, I wondered, and how could he supervise so many Ivy League PhDs? And why was the longtime assistant head of the news office, who had a master’s, reporting to someone much younger who was just hired and had only a bachelor’s?
I knew I should have been studying, but that catalog fascinated me. I even had a few compatriots with the same obsession. The guys across the hall from me in the dorm would do battle with me to see who knew the most about the professors. They didn’t even have to be our professors, just any professor in the university. “Where did Robert D. Thompson get his PhD?” one of us would shout out. Someone would answer, “University of Texas.” “Correct,” another would reply.
“Where did Ken Stevens get his BA?” “Princeton.” “Right.” “Name two government professors who got their PhDs at Columbia.” It went on like this for hours.
I was surprised when I later became a professor and found out that most students don’t really pay attention to such things. I’ve never met a student who played this game with their friends. But for me, it was fun. I was curious about careers and what made people successful.
It became clear to me as a university student that people who attained a certain status needed more than education, experience, or even a particular set of skills. There was something else. Was it luck? Was it a particular personality trait that made people stand out? I didn’t know the answers, but I wanted to find them. That became a big part of my life’s work.
How about you? What are your theories about why some people become successful? How did you come up with these theories?
When I was growing up, I listened to my father come home every night and talk about work. He owned a drugstore that provided our family with a middle-class standard of living. Every night, he’d come home and rehash
