You’re working on the wrong things.

If you’re watching this you probably have achieved a decent amount of success. Which means you must have some amount of meaning in your work. The amount of meaning you feel in the things you work on is the biggest factor in how much success you have. This applies to your personal life too.

So you’re doing well, but you also probably know, that you could perform way better.

You know other people who are top achievers at what you’re doing.

Why not you?

Your values motivate you. They determine how hard you work, and what things you’re willing to do to succeed that others wont. It’s a massive competitive advantage. The amount meaning you have in anything you work on, determines the ceiling for your performance.

But we picked our careers when we were teenagers. Probably from a 1 hr. career quiz from the high school counselor. Personally I barely understood my values back then. But you know a lot better now. You don’t have to let that wisdom go to waste, you can and should take advantage of that.

Naturally, it sounds risky to change. You actually do have a lot of good reasons for sticking with that path that was decided for you by a 17 yr old kid. We expect any changes for more meaning requires major sacrifices. But shifting to more and more meaningful work, improves your performance so wildly. That more times than you currently realize, it will actually increase your status & income. And comes with powerful side benefits.

Changing isn’t a sacrifice, it would be a bigger risk not to pursue it.

Alright, lets get into why the more meaning you have in your work, the more likely you are to be a top performer. A Michael Jordan of your field. Then how that solves the problems that hold most people back from pursuing that work.

More Meaning = More Ability

Now we all know people will put in more hours on work that matters to them.

But on top of that you get more work done every hour you put in. Studies show on average over 60% of time you spend working is wasted doing things like looking at your phone, and talking to people. Things that become invisible even to yourself. The more you care about your work, the more this wasted time gets replaced by actual work. So you don’t just get more hours in, you get more out of each hour.

Next, you have the Rocky Effect: Endurance.

This is what builds Olympians.

Do you know that Rocky 1 wasn’t even about winning? It was about not quitting.

“It’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward. How much you can take, and keep moving forward. That's how winning is done.”

In all competitions in life, and especially businesses, the one who wins is the one that stays in the game the longest. Everything worth doing has hard periods, down markets, boring days. And if you’re suffering for no reason, that pain is intolerable. But when it’s for a purpose that means something to you, all that pain feels like pride.

The more closely your work matches you values, the more it actually raises the bar of what things consume any of your willpower at all. So when the rough times come, your competitors are already at the end of their rope and get pushed over the edge. But you’re arriving fresh and rested with a full tank of willpower to get through it.

Even more powerful, meaning in your work raises your tolerance for getting outside of your comfort zone. And the Comfort zone is where mediocrity lives.

You will be willing to do the powerful but hard things others wont. This doesn’t just add to your performance like more hard work, it multiplies it.

Now there’s some uncomfortable things that are just simply required to even be a low performer at some jobs. Like a surgeon that cant handle blood wouldn’t make it a day.

But far worse are the uncomfortable things that you can skate by without doing. The ultra high ROI things that you don’t have to do, but separate the average performers from the elite.

• A Business owner getting just enough customers through word of mouth, but avoiding cold calling to get more
• Presenting at events in your field, one of the most uncomfortable things in the world, to get reputation as an expert
• Interviewing strangers for market research, refining your product-market fit

I bet your thinking of one right now in your work. One you know would raise your performance, but it’s not worth it to you to do it even once, much less do it day in and day out. The more meaning you have in your work, the more these won’t bother you, and you’ll find yourself doing these high ROI tasks that your competitors don’t.

Finally, the subtle but most powerful of all: working on what you value increases your personal skills. Your social magnetism.

Most high level success comes down to people. And people connect over values. When you are taking action on things that are meaningful to you, both professional and personal, it makes you magnetic. People are drawn to you, and interested in what you have to say.

When I’m at a coffee shop or bar and someone politely asks me “What do you do?”, if I tell them about my safe day job, I get a polite response and we go back to what we were doing. But if I tell them about working on this channel their expression perks up, they lean in asking more questions. People around us turn in their seats listening in.

Most people don’t understand their values much, but everyone has experienced that thrilling, alive feeling they got when it happened. And everyone wants to feel it more. When you are acting on your values, the people around you feel a taste of that feeling again and want to be around it.

This natural magnetism is a massive boost to all your people skills, immediately, and without any training. It makes you a better salesmen, closing more deals. It makes you better at attracting partners, cofounders and mentors. And it makes you a better leader.

Because of all of this, having the most alignment you can between your values and what you choose to work on, significantly makes you a higher performer than others.

So why aren’t you already working on the most meaningful thing possible? Well It’s not so simple right?

Back when we were picking careers with the high school counselor we didn’t have a really clear idea of what our values were. So we wisely leaned on the guaranteed things: status and money. Your job choice can guarantee those two things, and you could be certain those would do a lot of good for you. No lie, that was a pretty good call at the time.

But now you understand the world and yourself a lot better and can see much better what would really be meaningful to work on. But naturally, you don’t want to have to give up the guarantees status and money when switching to something else.

Fair enough. But it turns out that because of your increase in performance, way more often than you think, switching to more meaningful work will actually lead you to more status and income. So it’s really worth investigating to be sure.

As for status, flat out, people always respect winners. You could be the world hotdog eating champion and at a party more people would respect you than an average lawyer. And most of our time is spent working, where as a high performer, you’re surrounded by people who look up to you and respect you.  Best of all, you have the respect of the people who understand the topics that matter most to you.

Their respect hits harder.

Now for income, it’s really simple. Being great pays way better than being good. Abnormally better. In many fields the top performers earn 10 or 100 times more than the average worker.

The common trivia fact is that people like to throw around, is that plastic surgeons make 100 to 200 thousand dollars, while the top ones make tens of millions. This same effect applies to a lot of other careers, that just aren’t famous enough for us to hear about them. Some that might be the meaningful career, that would turn you into an achievement beast.

Remember, when looking at options, you’re not comparing your salary to the average salary of a meaningful profession, you’re comparing to the top end.

Also consider that usually feeling rich is more important than being rich. Studies show over and over how wealthy a person feels is almost entire based on how much more they make than the people around them, than how much they earn in total.

So again the Michael Jordan of baking is going to feel more rich than a mediocre investment banker.

Now just in case you want to go hardcore and lean really heavy into the most meaningful work possible for you, and that would require some sacrifice of money and status, there’s some pretty big side benefits to fill that gap.

Status and money were great choices when you didn't know your values well, because those are guaranteed to benefit anyone, no matter who you are. But the fact that they are so generic that they work for everyone, are the very reason they also are kinda meh.

The bonuses you get from working on things that match your values are things specific just to you. Which is why they feel really great to you.

If you could have all the status and money in the world possible, what would you want to do with it? The status and money are pretty boring themselves, you really only want them because you can use them to get something you do want. The time and resources to start a band? Write a novel? Travel the world and get really deep into 16th century samurai history? This could be what you get out of working on the things that matter to you. And Now. Now is better. Waiting 20 years doesn’t pay interest on this stuff.

Also remember how this increases your social magnetism? That doesn’t stop at work. It has a big effect on your personal relationships, which is a great perk. It naturally draws people into your life that are excited about the things you are excited about. You’ll make better friends, and with your existing friends you may end up doing and talking more about the things you love. Every time I lean more into working on what matters to me, I find more casual acquaintances popping their head up saying that's their jam too, and we should have been hanging out doing that stuff sooner!

Its also very attractive in dating. I've seen it make existing relationships stronger too.

And flat out, it just feels good to be good at things. Ever watch a dog running just to run and feel jealous of how happy it looks to be so good at running? Well that's how this feels.

So taking the leap to working on something that matches your values better has a lot of upsides. And you probably have a pretty good sense of what your values are now. Certainly better than when you were in high school.

If you already know exactly where you should be spending your energy, what the most meaningful things for you to work on are, great. I’d love to hear what that is and your experience with it.

For most people though they know more than before, but it’s still just a rough guess. And there’s so much reward for every extra inch of alignment you get.

So if want to to figure out crystal clear what your unique personal values are find the work that would satisfy those values the most, in the next article I use movies to teach you about the 6 fundamental human needs that drive us, which ones drive you, and what kind of work satisfies them