Doing your best work, according to most people, involves doing what you love and using your natural natural talents. But that’s not enough if you’re serious about doing your best work, always.
Seven Ingredients for Doing Your Best Work
- What you love to do
- Your natural talents
- Knowledge
- Practice, lots of it
- Right purpose
- Right people
- Right conditions
A talented musician who loves to play piano, wants to perform professionally. This requires practice, practice, and more practice. He/she needs to be knowledgeable about music, the piano, and how to make it as a performing artist.
Right purpose asks, and answers, to what end? Is music a universal language to highlight our shared humanity? Is it a way to celebrate important moments in people’s lives? What about right people and conditions? What kind of music does our pianist want to play and for what audiences? Do small or large venues showcase his talents best?
Jonathan’s story illustrates how to discover right purpose, people and conditions.
Jonathan’s Story
Jonathan’s purpose is to bring greater peace to the world by way of Buddhist principles and practices. To grow his knowledge and practice these principles, he lived in an Ashram for 10 years, where he meditated and practiced yoga daily.
At the Ashram Jonathan discovered he was a natural teacher and loved helping people learn. To discover right people/students and right conditions, Jonathan decided to teach anyone who asked, anytime, anywhere. This is how he discovered he does his best work teaching young adults. The particular setting matters less – schools, prisons, recreational programs, retreats, someone’s home.
Finding Life’s Partners and Life’s Work
According to Freud we do two most important things in life – love and work. Consider how we go about finding life partners and how we can apply it to finding our life’s work.
We spend time with a variety of people in a variety of ways – school, work, recreation, parties, social events. We discover that special someone who makes our heart go thump. We get to know them better. It’s fun and exciting. We meet each other’s friends and family. We find out if we’re a good match, before committing to each other.
Why not do this with, and about, our work, as Jonathan did?
We also need to be wary of veering off our right path.
Wrong Work
We’ve all seen people abandon their gifts and what they love to do, only to cause suffering to self and others.
- Genius engineer turned CEO who’s not good with people
- Skilled surgeon who’s amazing at commanding an operating room, turned department leader who doesn’t collaborate
- Excellent kindergarten teacher who’s assigned to teach 5th grade
So, stick with your greatest talents, and what you love to do, on purpose.
Do what you know and have practiced enough to do it extremely well. Do that work with the right people and under the right conditions. By so doing, you’re doing your best work, always.