In 1960, a 20-year study of graduate students was begun. The study compared two groups of people depending upon how they answered this question:
“Should I focus first on financial security, and then pursue what is fulfilling to me? Or should I follow my interests, and trust that money will eventually follow?”
83% of the people in the study decided that making money should come first in order to create the opportunity to pursue their true interests. It’s a decision that most of us make when we face reality.
But as time goes by, we may find that a growing dissatisfaction with our work settles in. And we begin to question the validity of our decisions.
Perhaps you’ve asked yourself…
“Should I continue working in a business or career that provides little satisfaction… because it pays the bills? Or have I reached a point in my life that it’s time do something significant?”
Looking back at the two groups of graduate students, during the study an amazing pattern emerged. After 20 years, 101 of them were millionaires. Only 1 of them came from the group that decided to put making money first. The other 100 millionaires all came from the small group (17%) that decided that their true interests were worth pursuing first.
Now most of us aren’t necessarily seeking to become millionaires, but isn’t that precisely the point? Doing work that is personally fulfilling for you has a much greater likelihood of producing an outcome that includes financial security.
In other words, you can have both significance and success.
Without knowing our authorized work we are susceptible to tons of unnecessary interruptions that consume about “28 percent of the knowledge worker’s day, which translates to 28 billion lost hours to companies in the United States alone.” (”The Cost of Not Paying Attention: How Interruptions Impact Knowledge Worker Productivity,” Jonathan B. Spira and Joshua B. Feintuch, Basex, 2005).
Do you see what’s going on here? Something so small, so common, but so destructive has us by the throat. Recognizing the enormity of the situation, I have created a new workplace tool to determine and manage your authorized work: It’s simply called MasterPlan™.This approach combines the science of dealing with interruptions with the art of living “on your post” – discerning and fulfilling your authorized work. Considering the impact of interruptions on not only our work but our quality of life, for those who have a calling, overcoming this is as important as breathing!
And yes we’ve got science to prove it. “People can’t multitask very well, and when people say they can, they’re deluding themselves…The brain is very good at deluding itself,” said neuroscientist Earl Miller.
Miller, a Picower professor of neuroscience at MIT, says that for the most part, we simply can’t focus on more than one thing at a time. “Switching from task to task, you think you’re actually paying attention to everything around you at the same time. But you’re actually not,” Miller said. The problem is that this behavior is consistent with a type of willing slavery where we have believed that we must accomplish our work without the proper tools.
We miss our authorized work because we believe we are free when we’ve really succumbed to a willing slavery – a way of working that we’re so used to, it has become invisible. Time to open our eyes. Time to reinvent!
That’s why so many are fearful in these times…they don’t know the power of authorized work and don’t have any tools to help them find it. But not you…in my next post, we’ll wrap this up and show you exactly how to leave the slave plantations and their systems that are crumbling on the nightly news. It’s time to begin to transform your business and life into a stronghold of hope that the world will marvel at.
A few announcements before the article:
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