Drop out – or do a job you love doing?

Did you enjoy every day you spent at work last week? If your answer is no, beware! Accumulated dissatisfaction – not stress – leads employees to drop out and even burn out. Is this inevitable in today’s environment? Marcus Buckingham argues that we love our jobs when we feel we’re making a unique contribution. His latest book offers a guide.

Have you lost some of your enthusiasm at work? If so, it’s time to take stock. Explore the possibilities opened up by your uniqueness: You have a particular combination of talents, which give you a sense of achievement when they allow you to make a positive contribution. Unfortunately, the methods used to manage your career so far may have steered you away from your talents toward a boilerplate set of skills. But if you can unearth and use your talents, you will finally (re)discover pleasure in your work (and excel at it).

Based on

Love+Work
by Marcus Buckingham (Harvard Business Review Press, 2022).

Rediscover what you really love

Since grade school and throughout your career, you’ve been subject to methods designed to manage cohorts of students and then employees, to transmit standardized knowledge to them. Throughout this journey, you may have lost a sense of who you really are and what you actually love. Now you have to search for this sense of meaning, to transform it into pleasure and performance at work.

Find all the clues (sometimes they’re well hidden)

In your personal and professional life, you come across many clues that hint at what you really like, but you may no longer be able to see them. Sharpen your focus so you can pick out what energizes you and sets you apart.