The Thank God It’s Monday newsletter from HumaNext/Communication Ideas suggests an exercise in which you ask yourself: What is the job you’d do for free? Asking that question, the newsletter says, is the path to discovering one’s life’s work, calling — or “genius,” providing the inquirer with these benefits:
- You gain a stronger, more affirming sense of personal identity.
- You acquire a positive perception of yourself at a deeper, more meaningful level.
- Discovering your genius suddenly brings your life to a sharp focus.
- It infuses you with the power of purpose and makes it OK to do what you do.
- It clarifies for you the reason for the direction you’ve chosen for your life and work.
- You develop increased confidence in yourself and in what you do.
- You acquire the language to communicate the value you can add to the opportunities you pursue.
I suggest taking “the job you’d do for free” a step further and write a story about it. Write about what makes it so fulfilling that you’d do it for free.
HumanNext says discovering your genius is “a long process, or a journey, with many pleasures along the way, culminating in a thrilling moment of discovery in which your genius finally comes to focus.” The newsletter says it can’t be done with a single exercise. What follows is another suggested exercise. Again, I suggest adapting this one in story format as you’ll see below:
Exercise: Discovering Your Genius From Your Past Successes
- List many successes you’ve achieved in your life. These should be successes that provided you with great joy and elation, and in which things just seemed to flow naturally.
- HumaNext suggests creating a list of action verbs describing the various actions you took to achieve success in each case. My suggestion is to instead write a story — probably in the format of Situation — Action — Result, or Problem — Action — Result, or Challenge — Action — Result.
- HumaNext suggests identifying the few (one to three) common verbs that are repeated more often in the list above. My adaptation would be to identify common themes and patterns in your stories. Like the action verbs, these themes and patterns “are your starting clues to the basic drives that move and motivate you. They reveal the action-traits that come to you most naturally and bring you the most joy as they lead you toward achieving success.”