I am very interested in how to improve human judgment. All leadership success, and yes, life success depends on it.

Harvard-based researchers have spent years proving that virtually all of us are irrationally biased.  We all have opinions that are not based on facts or direct experience but rather emotional thinking shortcuts. You see, thinking takes a lot of energy and discipline but our brains are built for efficiency so it is always designing shortcuts.  The name of these mental-shortcuts is stereotypes.

When we hold tight to stereotypes they become prejudices.  Once we have a prejudice we’re constantly selecting evidence to support our prejudice so we don’t have to go to the effort of opening our minds to new data or considering that, in this specific case, what is usually true is not true.

For instance as you consider the 3 photos at the top of this article, who might you want to avoid walking by on deserted street at midnight? If you are like most people in the Harvard research you would scamper away from the man in the hoodie. That would be foolish as the man in the sweatshirt is the famous great guy basketball star Kevin Durant who is known for his charity and loving kindness. The figure in the burka is not a terrorist but a British Muslim nurse.

And the handsome man in the suit is none other than Ted Bundy who raped and murdered 30 women. Trusting Bundy based on his looks and charm was tragically fatal for those who relied on their visual bias.

Simply put, prejudice limits our capacity to make smart decisions or see deeper truths. Yet these thinking shortcuts are difficult to tame.  Humans have spent thousands of years finding security, believing that our tribe offers protection from other tribes who want to kill us and take our stuff.  So when we see that people are a lot like us we tend to trust them. When we worry about people who do not seem to be like us with regards to how they look, what they like to eat, how they like to live, or to appear to have different standards and values, we seek to protect ourselves. This is the natural state of human emotions–and it is increasingly dysfunctional.

Although we reflexively have automatic preferences toward people who look like us, act like us, and seem to believe what we believe–that thinking is proving the be one of the most destructive challenges of our time.

Consider this. Never before in history have human beings been exposed to so many other human beings who are not like us. In 1950 2.5 billion people populated our planet. Today nearly 7.5 billion people fill the planet. And the variety of beliefs and cultures is astonishing.  This requires a new way of thinking. It requires open minds rather than defensive ones. Collaboration rather than competition. Innovation rather stagnation. Sustainability rather than exploitation.  

As many of you know, I constantly seek to surface unconscious bias that is so pervasive in our workplaces as I help women advance in leadership.  Nearly all organizations are built on an authoritarian model that unconsciously favors “strong-man” behavior. Most men have a strong belief that typical male behaviors of assertiveness and taking control are ideal leadership behaviors because that’s what they are biased to believe from working in business structures that favor those behaviors. So they tend to give women who act in these “male” ways more leadership opportunities.

The problem with this bias is our research (Apple to Zappos) clearly indicates that in today’s radically competitive business environment, old-school, stereotypical male leadership is more likely to fail than succeed.

What is true is that while hard power style seems to create efficiency it quashes innovation.  Hard power rewards obedience and group compliance.

Growth comes from opening our minds to new possibilities.  Economists have discovered that opportunity is usually a function of seeing what was previously unseen but is right in front of us.  That’s why the cognitive diversity that comes from seeking the ideas of people not like us is such a powerful driver of innovation, and value creation.

Our unconscious bias is psychological blindness. We literally don’t see opportunity when we are either judgmental or fearful.

The question I ask male executives when I am trying to get them to see the value that women who lead like women bring is “What might you be blind to?”

The evidence that organizations are more successful when at least 30% of senior leaders are female is overwhelming. One big reason is that women are more socially intelligent. This advantage drives them to be more inclusive and open to new or different ideas. It’s not that women are less biased to begin with. The edge they have is that they are less reactive, less impulsive and more empathetic. This helps them to stop and think before they dismiss the ideas, needs or values of  people different from them.

The bottom line:

We live in a complex, diverse world that our brains and emotions seek to simplify by separating people into groups of people like us and not like us.
Diversity challenges our biases that hard power leaders are unlikely to value.
Women have gender brain and social strengths that make them better suited to harvest the value of cognitive diversity through practical innovations.

However, the bias against women advancing to leadership in organizations inhibits women from using their strengths.

Leaders can dramatically increase the group intelligence of their senior leadership and organizational performance by making sure qualified women make up at least 30% of their C-level, VP’s and senior directors.

If your organization does not look like this, ask the most senior male leader you can connect with to read this and ask him to suspend his bias and consider the positive implications of it’s factual truth.

We have cracked the code on healthy, fulfilling work. Sociologist Jeanne Nakamura’s research on the conditions that create “vital engagement” are crystal clear. Work that energizes our minds and inspires our hearts is work that engages our talent to benefit other human beings. 

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This makes us feel that we are making a positive difference. Unfortunately her research also reveals that only a small fraction of us feel our work is consistently fulfilling. I believe the reason for this is lousy leadership. Authoritarian leadership. It’s time for all of us to do a more thoughtful job of leading our lives and committing to our “vital work.”

Just look at this chart. It comes from the research of Dr. Jonathan Haidt of New York University. His research reveals that human brains wire themselves to define leadership through two possible lenses. The most common paradigm of leadership is authoritarianism. We experienced this as the myth of “ strong-man hero.” From the chart you can see that authoritarian leadership is a high control style seeking to maintain their advantage through maintaining the status quo or conquest. They resist change, install bureaucracies, squash creativity and attempt to drive success through efficiency and compliant employees. They most often believe that people want to be told what to do.
 
Authoritarian leaders act on the premise that they know more and are more capable than the collective talent of their employees. Their mindset is dominance. The most common business strategy of an authoritarian leader is to achieve a dominant market position through mergers and acquisitions, consolidate to economic power and drive efficiencies. The consulting firm PwC recently found that the authoritarian model leadership is most admired by other authoritarian leaders. A leadership literature review covering 5,000 years of leadership biographies dating back to Alexander the Great powerfully reinforce our cultural assumptions about effective leadership.  We hero-worship authoritarian leaders who are competitive, decisive and confident to the point of arrogance. The result is the world we have.

The question to consider is whether or not the dominant leadership style that got us here will create a world with the best possible future?

The second major style of leadership is one that is grounded in promoting individual autonomy.  This is empowering leadership that is primarily human-opportunity oriented. It is optimistic and solution focused. Its goals are focused on creating valued benefits that improve the quality of life of organizational members and customers. These leaders promote creative collaboration to generate streams of valued innovations.
 
Leaders who are motivated to empower employees are known as transformational leaders.  This is descriptive because the mindset of these leaders is to transform the capabilities of employees into actions that benefit customers and thus drive growth. Empowering leaders believe in fostering group intelligence and achieving goals through teamwork. They foster cultures of universal inclusion and respect for individual viewpoints, talents and experience. The distinct advantage of empowering leaders is that success comes by adapting to changing circumstances rather than resisting them. New research from McKinsey and Company clearly reveals the companies with empowering leaders are highly agile are much more able to thrive and grow in our modern economy.
 
So, what kind of leader do you aspire to be?
 
Since you’re reading this, I assume you want to be an empowering leader. I certainly hope so.  I want you to be. But I also know from my decades of experience that you may be reluctant to express your leadership if you work in an authoritarian culture. Remember authoritarianism creates cultures of compliance. That means discouraging you from thinking on your own. If  “going along to get along” is leaving you exhausted here’s what I’d like you to consider…
 
I want you to imagine that you have a powerful leadership voice inside longing to express itself. I want you to imagine that the prison door that has prevented you from doing what you really desire to do has been unlocked and all you have to do is swing the door open, walk into the sunlight and start enrolling people in your vision.
 
I realize that your vision may be quite blurry right now.  If you haven’t really invested yourself in doing the inner work to become clear on the difference you want to make, you may mistakenly believe that you have no leadership vision.

You may even believe that you’re not really a leader. But I don’t believe that. Both my years of experience and all the recent research on the science of leadership confirms that effective leadership is a small group of learned habits.
 
They are:

1. Set direction – envision a better future and campaign for it.
2. Motivate commitment – create compelling business cases for change and address the inspirational and practical reasons to support your goals
3. Actively collaborate – engage all your stakeholders in creating the best action plans to achieve your vision.
4. Results focus – empower your team members with clear goals, clear roles, clear decision authority and clear rewards.
5. Transform you and your team’s performance capability through river of respectful feedback that leads to continuous improvement.

 
SMART Leadership. You will notice that none of these five behaviors require an authoritarian personality. In fact, the three most common attributes of authoritarianism – competitiveness, decisiveness and arrogance, are not factors related to leadership success. My point is that if you dream of a better future you can be a transformational leader to help re-design our collective strategies to achieve something better than where we are currently heading. The science of leadership research reveals that you don’t have to be perfect at a huge set of difficult behaviors.  In fact, no two great leaders have identical leadership styles. But what effective leaders have in common is that they consistently address these 5 simple habits. So can you.

So, if leadership is that simple why don’t we have more empowering leaders? The problem is you may be unsure of habit number one, Setting Direction.
 

Authoritarian leaders have no problem voicing a vision that improves their personal status, power, wealth or fame. Empowering leaders tend to overthink how they might help other people achieve their goals rather than develop a clear vision of their own goals. But your vision for a better future is alive and it burns deep within you. You just need to put more focused attention on your highest and best
desires. You need to honor them. You need to liberate them.They are a gift of your moral imagination.
 
Here is how:
 
Know who are and who you are not. All of us listen to a constant inner dialogue between our inspirational voice and our critical voice. Our critical voice is the loudmouth that takes up most of our headspace. Our critical voice nags has to be cautious rather than be bold. It focuses on all of things that could go wrong rather than the opportunities that could go right. Our critical voice is constantly telling us we are smaller and more limited than we truly are. One of the most powerful ways to quiet the critical voice is to negate its power to define our identity.

• You are not your job.
• You are not your achievements.
• You are not your failures.
• You are not your role (mother, father, daughter, son, manager, student etc.)
• You are not your education.
• You are not your economic status.
• You are not your thoughts.
• You are not your emotions or your feelings.
• You are not your possessions.
• You are not your weight.
• You are not your current beliefs.

The reason I am sure you were none of these things is that all these things change over the course of your life.
 
Now, start asking yourself who am I, really? 

I am serious about asking yourself this question.Try this. Over the next five days set aside 10 minutes in the early morning, or lunch time or on a quiet walk in the evening and simply ask yourself “who am I?” Then patiently wait for your inspirational voice to whisper the answer.
 
I believe the answer you will discover is that you are the values you choose to be. You literally become the values that you value. That is liberation!

It is liberating because you have just been freed from thinking that you were only your current strengths. What? That’s right the strengths movement has actually become a limitation to many people. Millions of people have taken “strength finders” or some other analysis of how you habitually achieve success. But knowing your current strengths is only the beginning. What limits us are our weaknesses. Our strengths give us opportunities but our weaknesses cause our failures. It doesn’t have to be that way.
 
In earlier times, moral education promoted the idea that you could become a more virtuous person through practice. Famously, Benjamin Franklin pursued excellence in 13 virtues by practicing with great focus one week at a time.
 
Let give you some simple examples. When I was younger I was always late. Often, very late. It lead to a catastrophic loss of an opportunity I really wanted. I vowed that I would never be late again.  And for the most part, over the past 30 years, I’ve been extremely punctual. I am frequently complimented on my punctuality. It was a weakness I turned into a strength.
 
My wife is an energizer bunny. She is always in action. She wanted to appreciate beauty more than her fast paced allowed her to do. So she got serious about photography. With practice it made her notice the beauties of nature much more frequently and much more deeply than before.
 
I have a very demanding client who demands to be the number one priority of everyone in his life.  As you can imagine this weakness has led to a lot of problems and unhappiness. For the past year, he has used his impatient feelings as a positive trigger to be more thoughtful and patient in the moment. It’s been transformative.
 
When you liberate yourself from your habitual self and begin a serious journey to self-actualization to the best person you can imagine you unlock the key to empowering leadership. This will ignite your leadership courage. You will begin to have a more clear vision of the difference you want to make and how to engage the help of others to create a world that works for everyone. Once you have a vision and a direction just follow the other four habits. You will liberate the leader within you.
 
If you could change the world, what would you do?

Do that!

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For years I wondered why some ordinary people consistently had extraordinary opportunity and why many extraordinary people languished in a kind of invisible frustration.

I was recently doing a private review of clients and projects I’ve been involved with over the past three decades. I was trying to identify what people consistently thought and did who achieved the amazing versus many talented people and organizations that underachieved.

I used a personal filter measuring winning not only in the public sense of growing a healthy enterprise or distinguished successes in art and science, but I also looked at private success. Success with family, relationships and a capacity for joy and contentment. Once I got my list I examined the most recent research on personality and habits correlated with high and admirable achievement. It looks like my life experience and recent research agree on the most important drivers of admirable success. Let me boil it down to four things.

1. People I most admire are… Optimistic realists.

I’ve worked with my share of dreamers and so-called visionaries. They constantly leap from one big idea to the next while positive realists nearly always see the opportunity of sustaining their efforts through setbacks and boredom. Creative persistence is the key. It requires neither doing the same thing over and over nor jumping ship before the sails unfurl. Instead, it is a constant energetic process of evolution that enables you to become great over time.

2. People I most admire practice… Practical Empathy.

There are four ways of seeing others, and I have seen all these ways up close, causing either disappointment or success. At one extreme is the self-interested bully. They just demand what they want. Right next to them is the charming narcissist. These people act like they care but only to manipulate you. Lots of powerful people are bullies or charming narcissists, just none I admire.

At the other end are people who are emotionally empathetic. They literally feel what others feel. They make good friends, but it’s hard for them to build enterprises. They often mistake a person’s potential for their performance. They wait too long to make hard decisions. They are usually bound in a web of competing commitments and they hate to say no. I know this type very well because it’s most like me. The most effective place to be on the empathy scale is the mid-range. I call it practical empathy. Walt Disney had it. Howard Schultz has it. So do most other big scale leaders that we have good reason to admire.

Practical empathy enables you to understand the needs, desires, and problems of others without letting emotion cloud your judgment or prevent you from making tough choices. Practical empathy is very rare, I found. Most of us either don’t really care or care too much. Practical empathy is what enables a person to take a small opportunity and grow it into something big.

3. The people I most admire have… Hungry Humility.

By hungry humility I mean a desire to learn that overwhelms any need to be right. Rare?… you bet. Power and success annihilate humility in most of us.

4. Finally, the people I most admire are driven by one guiding principle… Moral Ambition.

This is the persistent desire to create honest-to-goodness value for other human beings. I find of course, no one is perfect, but there are some that are striving to be better at doing better. I know a great CEO-owner of a large scale imprinted t-shirt and sports uniform business who brims with moral ambition. It shows up in how he treats, pays, and educates his hourly workforce. It also shows in his commitment to sustainability and the environment.

I see persistent moral ambition at Nike to create a “Better World” by inventing sustainable materials and manufacturing and most especially by training thousands of young women athletes in emerging countries to build their confidence. I see moral ambition at Clif Bar that bakes genuinely healthy energy bars and believes employee’s lives’ are as important as their work. I could go on.

I know many successful leaders with moral ambition because I seek them out. Creating value for humanity is not an afterthought. It is their core business strategy. Yes, moral ambition is at the root of the greatest people I know. Not just leaders but of all the people I’ve come to admire.

When moral ambition is channeled and released through optimistic realism, practical empathy, and hungry humility it becomes a force. A powerful, unstoppable force. It all begins with asking yourself “what am I trying to accomplish… is this the best I can do?” So the question I ask of people that want to achieve something great is this…

“When you get up in the morning do you look in a mirror or through a window?”

I recently spoke at the Women in Technology Summit in Silicon Valley. My speech was entitled, “Why Women Need to Lead,” which focuses the data and evidence that women make superior leaders in volatile, disruptive environments where continuous innovation is essential to success.

I’m also promoting a new movement, A Million SMART Women aimed at empowering a worldwide community of new women leaders.It’s an exciting time as I’ve been working with innovative education partners to provide mass on-line and on-site education to ramp up our impact.

Here’s why.

For the past 22 years, WITI has honored women in technology by inducting five or six women every year who have made revolutionary contributions in technology and science in ways that improve our quality of life. Last night I witnessed the raw power of six women who are doing things ranging from creating human tissue to heal diseased organs to designing life-saving robots. What makes these women remarkable is not just their brains and grit, but also their motives.

As they passed on their success secrets to over a thousand young female brainiacs, each one spoke of love as being a prime motive for their tireless efforts. It was breathtakingly inspiring.

When I returned to my room and turned on the TV what I saw was an alternate reality. It is the world of the present. The world my generation of baby boomers created.

For the past 15 years, I have studied generational research.  It’s fascinating how peoples’ values and attitudes seem to be shaped powerfully by the times they grew up in. Let me be clear, there are a lot of exceptions to the stereotypes I am about to comment on, but what follows reflects my direct experience, as well as the research I have examined over these past 15 years.

OUR FUTURE IS IN BIG TROUBLE… BUT, THERE’S HOPE

I believe our future is in big trouble because baby boomers are in charge. My experience with my generation born between 1945 and 1965 is that they are colossally selfish. They’ve taken self-interest to new levels of self-justification fueled by the stupid-idiotic-immoral ideas of the pseudo-intellectual’s of the time like Ayn Rand, William Buckley and Milton Friedman.

Rand infected a generation of college students extolling the virtues of selfishness and the immorality of charity.

The ever-snooty Buckley spent years on television telling the Boomer generation that the traditional order of things, which included racism, embedded in Jim Crow laws, were all part of the divine order in which people who are successful deserved to be, and people who are poor were simply lazy or stupid.

Milton Friedman convinced the new generation of business leaders that the only purpose of business was to make wealth for the owners rather than value for customers, a good job for employees, and enhance local communities. His glorification of corrupt self-interest was so complete that he claimed it was irresponsible, immoral, and illegal for business leaders to use any business assets for any purpose other than maximizing immediate financial gains for stockholders.  

He promoted the idea that company managers have no obligation to restrain pollution, improve worker safety or product reliability beyond the minimum legal requirements. He also maintained that smart corporate leaders should influence lawmakers to minimize regulations, taxes and any restraints on the naked pursuit of economic gain.

Rand, Buckley and Friedman found a very eager audience among Boomer age males.  You see Boomer children were raised by parents devoted to protecting them from the harsh realities they suffered in the great depression and World War II. As Boomers entered their teenage years, in the 60’s, the entire economy shifted to meet teenage whims and insecurities. It was truly a decade of sex, drugs and rock’n roll. I know. I was there.

A HISTORY OF BOOMER LEADERSHIP

Sixties Boomers are mistakenly credited with idealism, which inspired the civil rights movement and anti–war protests. But historians note that the civil-rights revolution was led by members of the greatest generation…leaders like Lyndon Johnson. The anti-war protests were driven by the citizen draft making it’s protest an exercise in self-interest rather than lofty idealism. (Since the military switched to an all-volunteer force we have been constantly sending troops into undeclared wars with little objection since our soldiers come from households living below or near the poverty line.)  So, the Boomer 1960’s was a mass expression of youth self-indulgence, and that was only the beginning.

By the 1970’s, Boomers turned to making money. The 60’s lingo of non-materialism and hippie flower power gave way to the pursuit of jobs, homes and cars. But underlying the quest for adulthood was the siren song of an economy fueled by personal consumption.

Boomers of the 1980’s watched the movie Wall Street without seeing the irony of the phrase “Greed is Good.” Instead they took it literally. 

Antitrust laws were gutted; Jack Welch pioneered mass employee layoffs of GE’s profitable businesses in order to take profits to fake levels. Meanwhile, paying executives with stock options became legal. This enabled Wall Street to demand that short-term financial tactics replace long-term growth strategies.

In the 90’s excessive consumption fueled new levels of social comparison in which the distinctions of rich and poor were obvious to everyone. Our Boomer led culture embraced the ideal that more is better and much more is much better. In the 1950’s almost no one had servants. Nannies were considered an artifact from the 19th century. But now dual career households had re-created the need for personal servants and the ultimate measure of success became a private jet.

Meanwhile Boomer business leaders got serious about becoming lean. Job outsourcing became popular and headcount reductions fueled a new mania in management consulting. Corporate pensions were eliminated in the social contract and employees were torn up. Research and development budgets were continuously cut.  Email replaced middle management. And Newt Gingrich launched the idea that governing was ideological warfare rather than the art of practical compromise.

During the first decade of the 21st-century the financialization of our economy became dominant. The stock market Internet bubble made millions for professionals, but evaporated the savings for millions of every day investors.

In 2005 I sat through a presentation made by Citibank Boomer leaders who claimed to have cracked the code on eliminating debt-risk through mortgage-backed securities. Wall Street pinheads created a fantasyland for materialist appetites by making 5000 ft. McMansions a must-have item. People bought homes with rooms they never used, filled with furniture they never sat on.

Meanwhile, Boomers kept working for the “man.” The man was a new breed of professional CEOs making tens of millions of dollars every year regardless of their competence. These are the idiots who got paid to nearly destroy our entire economy, along with trillions of dollars of middle-class savings. They are still in charge.

A GENERATION OF NEW IDEALS

It is now very clear that the children of boomers will not pay their dues.

That’s because they don’t want to join the club their parents have built. They have seen what mindless obedience to the “man” buys.  It is not the life they admire or value. The accumulation of evermore stuff does not create happiness, satisfaction or even enjoyment.  They have discovered that travel can be more enriching when you sleep in a spare bedroom of an AirBnB than a five-star hotel. They were suckered into massive student loans for inadequate educations. They have little loyalty to employers who have no loyalty to employees.

Nearly every new generation expresses ideals contrary to the dominant generation that preceded it. Boomers were wild and selfish, as much as their parents we’re traditional and communitarian.

The 125 million millennial’s are mostly inclusive and purpose seeking.

Of course, they are riddled with their own imperfections as with all humans. But one thing they are not…is timid about creating a world that works for everyone. And the leaders of this ideal are mostly millennial women. They finally get that they don’t need permission to change the world… and they will. These are the women I see at conferences today.

It makes me smile.

What we’re seeing play out, not only in our country, but worldwide, is the last distorted blast of Boomer excesses. When an old order dies it’s death rattle is grotesque. As long as Boomers lead our institutions, human suffering will increase.

• Human trafficking will not stop.
• New wars will replace old ones.
• Money-laundering of corrupt billionaires will flourish.
• Good companies will fail.
• Starvation will increase.
• Adequate healthcare will be difficult to access.
• Harmful products will be sold.
• Our air and water will be polluted.
• The seas will rise, and
• famines will be commonplace.

Although many of you might disagree, my long life and my decades of experience with powerful leaders tell me that we will turn this around.

We will turn it around because women, especially young women, who see beyond their self-interest in short term gain, will claim their power.

In the meantime, I will do EVERYTHING I can to make sure that happens.

That’s why we need A Million Smart Women leaders and men who support them. We need them to change Government, Business, Healthcare, Education, Science, Technology, Finance…everything. We need them to lead with their heads and their hearts. And I believe this new generation of young women has both the guts and the vision to do it.

Stay connected… this revolution is being live streamed.

TED talks are supposed to make you smarter. But sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they make you stupid. A popular TED talk entitled, “Why you won’t have a great career,” by economist Larry Smith is absolutely some of the worst career advice ever given in public.

I can sum up his advice as…pursue your work with all your might and don’t think twice about investing your precious time in your children.  In fact, he tries to make his disdain for little kids a joke by claiming that at least he restrains himself from “kicking them.”

Nice joke, Larry. Not funny!

What drives me crazy about the advice to “lean-in” to work is that workaholism is often held out as a requirement for promotion to senior leadership. In recent years, I have heard many executives say work life balance is no longer possible so just deal with it. These are the same decision makers who consistently understaff their profitable enterprises to create chronic work-load emergencies.  As people rise in management, more 24/7 expectations are heaped on them as a kind of test of commitment. A stupid one.

Since women tend to value their loved ones more than their egos women are discouraged from achieving the leadership level they deserve. In my view women are punished for their values because our work cultures are psychologically unhealthy. When talented women and men who want more from life than power, status and money are handicapped because they won’t drink the poisoned Kool-Aid of work mania, it’s a sign of sanity…NOT a lack of commitment.

The question we need to ask ourselves is “what are we trying to accomplish?” None of Smith’s advice is grounded in the science of Life Satisfaction research. Interviews with 80 year olds reveal that the single greatest source of life satisfaction when we review our lives near the end is…this is no surprise…the quality of our closest human relationships.  And quality is defined as relationships of trust, authenticity, non-judgment and mutual advocacy. It’s those behaviors that create “loved-ones.” Those behaviors and one other.

The single greatest indicator of relationship quality is whether you simply enjoy being with each other when you’re not doing anything fun, interesting or exciting. When just being together doing the mundane things of life or even nothing at all is pleasurable you know you have a treasured  relationship. As the book “The Little Prince” tells us…you know you have a friend when you enjoy wasting time together. The only way to create that kind of soul satisfying friendship is an investment of time together. Not just quality time but a quantity of time.

So where does a great career show up in end of life satisfaction?  Doing satisfying work doesn’t actually show up until number four on most people’s lists. For many people it isn’t in their top ten. The reason is simple. Most people don’t discover an overwhelming inner passion for a particular work achievement. And the reason for that is work success is not their reason for living. Yes, of course we want to make our difference and be valued but 99.9 % of us are not going to alter the course of human history in a big way.

In fact, a university study revealed that at best, historians say less than 5000 people who have ever lived have “changed the world.” Since population experts estimate that 70 billion people have been born over the course of our earths’ existence, it is highly unlikely our work will change the world in a way that satisfies our ego’s quest for self- importance.

On the other hand, it is almost assured you will change the lives of your loved ones… for good or bad.

I have worked with a number of CEO’s until they retired. Not one has told me they regret spending too much time with their family and friends and wished they had sacrificed those relationships for their jobs.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I am all for you having a great career. In fact, over 500,000 people have viewed my “Turn your Superpower into your Career” speech on University of California TV. (UCTV.tv) But clearly, becoming a workaholic is not the path to a great career. It’s a path to personal pathology. Most of the workaholics I have counseled were driven by a sense of personal inadequacy, an insecure ego drive or a lust for fame or power. Those are extremely poor guiding motives for personal career management.

The bottom line. 

1. Your life is your career…not your job…. your life. So never ever let your job or your achievements define you. It will only make you neurotic and painfully boring.

2. Only you can define your “great” career. I know bartenders and waiters who love their jobs because they are fulfilled by their interactions with customers. I know doctors and many lawyers who are very unhappy with their careers because they went into those fields for the wrong reasons. My mom had great fulfilling “career” as both a wife and mother and later a grandmother. Her career changed the lives of everyone she touched, especially mine. She made no money, was only famous among her friends and family and yet she was thrilled with her career. I know because near the end of her 91 year life she told me so.

3. A great career is one which makes you a better person. As Aristotle put it your best life arises from fulfilling your higher nature. You best career and the only one that matters is becoming the best person you can imagine becoming. Of course you will forever remain quirky but your imperfections can be catalyst for growth, learning and creativity if you know what you’re up to.

One more thing…don’t overwork to make more money than you need. There have been times in my life when I did not have enough money and that is grinding.  But please consider what my friend Steve Clayback recently said….

“You have succeeded in life when all you really want is only what you really need.”

I believe the Beatles revealed all we really need….