Life's Work Resources

No one can answer what your Life’s Work is but you. These questions and resources are ways to discover patterns. Then you have to keep digging and act on them.

Questions

What did you do effortlessly as a child?

Ask your mother – what stood out about you? What were you naturally inclined towards without any provoking or pushing?

What are you endlessly curious about?

What do you know more than most people about? Don’t doubt your own genius here. You don’t need a PHD to make you an expert on something.

What is something you stopped pursuing or never pursued because of social pressure?

Questions to ask family or a friend

What are 3-5 things/subjects you think I know more about than most people?

What is something you’d ask me for advice about? Or recommend somebody else talk to me about?

What is something you think is difficult, that seems easy to me?

Questions from Others

Where do I get greater returns than the average person? (James Clear, Atomic Habits)

What comes naturally to me? (James Clear, Atomic Habits)

Resources

Jordan Peterson Personality Quiz – learn more about yourself

Strength Finders – discover your strengths and find careers or positions to leverage them.

Quotes I like about work

"If you can't figure out what kind of work you like, pay attention to what's easy to concentrate on and gives you energy vs. what makes you tune out and feel tired." - Sam Altman

“My ambition was to write, but I had buried it so deep that it only peeked out in dreams and moments of insight that appeared at odd instants and then vanished without a trace.” – Steven Pressfield

“To feel ambition and to act upon it is to embrace the unique calling of our souls. Not to act upon that ambition is to turn our backs on ourselves and on the reason for our existence.” – Steven Pressfield

“The counterfeit innovator is wildly self-confident. The real one is scared to death.” – Steven Pressfield

"To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, that is genius.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"The work you do while you procrastinate is probably the work you should be doing for the rest of your life." - Jessica Hische

"Hardness scares off the daydreamers and the timid, leaving more opportunity for those of us who are willing to take the time to carefully work out the best path forward and then confidently take action." - Cal Newport

"The worse thing in life that you can have is a job that you hate, that you have no energy in, that you're not creative with and you're not thinking of the future. To me, might as well be dead." - Robert Greene

"You know what I finally learned after a long time is basically if you want something enough - unless you're totally without ability - but if you want want something enough, and you keep pushing towards it, you will probably get there because nobody is pushing back with the same amount of energy." - Robert Gottlieb

"Every time you sit down to work, remind yourself: I am delaying gratification by doing this. I am passing the marshmallow test. I am earning what my ambition burns for. I am making an investment in myself instead of in my ego. Give yourself a little credit for this choice, but not so much, because you've got to get back to the task at hand: practicing, working, improving." – Ryan Holiday

"If you find something very difficult to achieve yourself, don't imagine it impossible - for anything possible and proper for another person can be achieved as easily by you." - Marcus Aurelius

“The danger is when money is combined with prestige, as in, say, corporate law, or medicine. A comparatively safe and prosperous career with some automatic baseline prestige is dangerously tempting to someone young, who hasn't thought much about what they really like.” – Paul Graham

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