I was chatting with a colleague last week. She was telling me the story of a friend who is struggling at work. Her friend hates her job, doesn’t get along with her co-workers, and is generally miserable. “All she wants,” my friend said, “is a job where she can show up every day and not hate it.”
“But she’s missing the whole point of work,” I said. “The point of work is to offer a platform for people to share their art with the world. If she settles for a decent paycheck and congenial co-workers, she’s missing the most important thing: the platform.”
By “art,” I’m not necessarily referring to artists like graphic designers or painters. I’m talking about the work we’re meant to do, the work that feeds our soul, the work that taps into our signature strengths. For example, for someone who loves people, thrives under pressure, and loves high-intensity environments and solving 1,000 problems every minute, their art might be running the floor of a restaurant on a Friday night at 7 p.m.
I have this conversation with people often, and the most frequent response I get is: “Look, the people who get to feed their soul at work are a privileged minority. The rest of us have to work for a living.”
I don’t believe that for a second. I think that’s what you were taught in school, and you chose to believe it. School teaches kids that life is a grind, and that learning is a chore. But if you hunker down and work hard, eventually you can land a job that will grant you two weeks paid vacation!
One of the most important things that we can do for kids is to offer them a platform at school. Give them the time, space, resources, and encouragement to find what they love to do, to discover their signature strengths. Then, help them turn that passion into achievement.
Because once kids can identify their platform, they know how good it feels to be immersed in work that they’re meant to do. Anything less becomes simply unacceptable.
