Michelle: The single most common piece of career advice is 'follow your passion.' It's also probably the single worst piece of advice you'll ever get. Mark: Whoa, okay, coming in hot today! That’s like the North Star of every graduation speech ever written. What’s wrong with following your passion? Michelle: It’s not that passion is bad, but the advice is flawed. It sends us on a hunt for a perfect, mythical 'dream job' that probably doesn't exist. Today, we're exploring a better way, a more realistic and powerful one, from Marcus Buckingham's book, Love + Work. Mark: I'm intrigued. So if 'follow your passion' is a dead end, what's the real problem he's trying to solve with this book? Michelle: He argues that we're in the middle of an "epidemic of lost people." We're disconnected from our work, our lives, and even ourselves. And it's not just a feeling. Buckingham's work is rooted in decades of research. This is the guy who co-created the famous StrengthsFinder assessment during his time at the Gallup Organization. He's spent his entire career studying what makes people excel, and he found it’s rarely about a perfect job title. It's about something much deeper. Mark: An epidemic of lost people. That sounds dramatic, but honestly, it also sounds kind of familiar. So where does he see this starting?

Michelle: It starts surprisingly early. He tells this powerful story about a career counselor in a Canadian high school named Donnie Fitzpatrick. Donnie started doing these hour-long interviews with senior students, just asking them open-ended questions about who they are. Mark: That sounds nice, a bit of personal attention. Michelle: You'd think. But he found something deeply unsettling. The students with the highest grades, the ones who were supposedly 'winning' at school, were the most likely to break down and cry during the interview. Mark: What? Why? Michelle: Because for the first time, someone was asking them who they were, not just what their GPA was. They were so focused on achieving, on meeting external expectations, that they had completely lost touch with their own authentic voice. They were acing the test of school, but failing the test of self-discovery. As Donnie put it, "something about the way we are doing it is causing our high schoolers to lose connection to discovering who they really are." Mark: Wow, that's heartbreaking. It’s like the system is designed to process them, not develop them. And I guess that just continues into the workplace. Michelle: Exactly. Buckingham shares his own story of having panic attacks in his late twenties. He was successful, working with Disney, living the dream on paper. But he felt this profound emptiness. A doctor told him, "It’s not this one present moment that’s panicking you. It’s the buildup of your life on edge." He was lost, just like those students. Mark: Okay, I see the problem. It’s this deep, systemic disconnection. So how does this connect back to the 'follow your passion' myth being bad advice? Michelle: Because the myth suggests you need to find a job where you love everything. Buckingham's research on thriving, successful people shows that's just not true. He says, and this is a direct quote that I love, "They don’t necessarily ‘do all they love.’ Instead, they find the love in what they do. Every day." Mark: But isn't that just semantics? What's the real-world difference between 'doing what you love' and 'finding love in what you do'? Michelle: It's a massive difference. 'Doing what you love' implies the job title is the solution. 'I want to be a marine biologist.' 'Finding love in what you do' implies the activities are the solution. Maybe you're an accountant, but you find love in the ten minutes a day you spend mentoring a junior colleague, or the hour you spend solving a particularly complex puzzle in a spreadsheet. It's about identifying those specific, energizing moments and intentionally weaving more of them into your week. Mark: Huh. So it's more granular. It's not about the job, it's about the verbs within the job. The specific actions. Michelle: Precisely. It’s a much more realistic and empowering approach. You don't have to wait for the perfect job to fall from the sky. You can start finding and cultivating love right where you are. And that starts with understanding what you actually love, not what you think you should love.

Mark: Okay, so how do you figure that out? If we're all so 'lost,' how do we find our way back to what we genuinely love? Michelle: This is where Buckingham introduces this fascinating, ancient concept. He calls it your 'Wyrd'. Mark: 'Wyrd'? Spelled W-Y-R-D? Okay, that sounds a little... mystical. Is this just self-help jargon, or is there something real behind it? Michelle: I had the same reaction! It sounds like something out of a fantasy novel. But he grounds it in modern neuroscience. 'Wyrd' is an old Norse term for the unique spirit or destiny within each person. Buckingham uses it to describe your unique pattern of loves and loathes—the things that instinctively attract or repel you. And the reason it's so unique is because of your brain. Mark: My brain? Michelle: Your brain. He points out that you have about one hundred trillion synaptic connections in your brain. That's more than the number of stars in the Milky Way galaxy. The specific pattern of those connections is completely, utterly unique to you. It dictates what you pay attention to, what you remember, what you're drawn to. As he puts it, "You have galaxies within you." Your Wyrd is just the outward expression of that unique inner universe. Mark: I like that. 'You have galaxies within you.' It makes my morning doom-scrolling feel a bit more profound. So how do you read the map of these inner galaxies? Michelle: By paying attention to what he calls your 'Red Threads.' These are the specific activities that energize you, where time seems to speed up, and you feel a sense of ease and excitement. It's that feeling of 'flow.' Mark: Ah, the flow state. I know that feeling. Michelle: Exactly. And a Red Thread isn't a broad category like 'I love helping people.' It's incredibly specific. It’s 'I love helping a customer solve a problem when they're frustrated and I can calm them down and find the answer.' Or 'I love organizing a messy spreadsheet into a clean, logical system.' Mark: So it's about the details. Michelle: The details are everything. He tells this wonderful story about his own life. As a kid, he thought he hated reading. His brother was a huge reader, devouring books like Lord of the Rings. Marcus tried, but he just couldn't get into fiction. He concluded, 'I'm not a reader.' Mark: I think a lot of kids feel that way. Michelle: For sure. But then, one Christmas when he was sixteen, he was given a non-fiction book called The Discoverers by Daniel Boorstin. It was this massive tome about the history of human inquiry. Out of sheer boredom, he opened it. And he was completely hooked. He spent the entire Christmas Day reading it, ignoring his family, ignoring his presents. He was in a state of total flow. Mark: That's a great story. Michelle: It's a perfect example of a Red Thread. He didn't love 'reading' as a general category. He discovered he loved reading non-fiction that explained the 'why' of the world. That specific love, that Red Thread, defined his entire career as a researcher and writer. He had to find the love in the activity, not just the activity itself. Mark: That makes so much sense. It’s not about loving 'reading,' but the specific kind of reading. So once you identify these Red Threads, this 'Wyrd,' you're all set? Life is a magical journey of fulfillment? Michelle: (Laughs) If only it were that simple. Once you find your path, Buckingham says you have to be prepared to face what he calls the 'Seven Devils' of the modern world that will try to pull you off it.

Mark: The Seven Devils. I'm picturing little demons sitting on your shoulder whispering bad career advice. Michelle: That's not far off! They're the lies we're told, the cultural pressures that push us toward conformity and away from our unique loves. Things like group-think, the 'excellence curse,' and the one I think is most powerful today: the devil of comparison. He calls it the 'Rate-Me-Rank-Me' devil. Mark: Oh, I know that one intimately. My phone is basically a pocket-sized devil of comparison. Michelle: It's everywhere. And he tells this story about his fiancée, Myshel, that just nails it. She was on a ski vacation in Lake Tahoe with a group of other families. Myshel is a successful executive, and she had a major work crisis blow up. She had to take calls, participate in firing her CEO—it was intense. Mark: On vacation? That's rough. Michelle: Right. But here's the thing. Another dad on the trip, Brian, was also working constantly. And the other moms were celebrating him. They'd say, "Look at Brian, what a provider! So dedicated!" But when they saw Myshel on her laptop, the vibe was completely different. One of them said to her, "Seriously? It’s ten o’clock at night and you’re working on vacation." Mark: Ugh. That's infuriating. The double standard is so blatant. Michelle: It's a perfect example of the comparison devil at work. She was being judged against an unstated ideal of what a 'mom on vacation' should be. Instead of being celebrated for her contribution, she was made to feel like she had to apologize for her ambition. Comparison makes you disappear. It erases your unique context and forces you into a box. Mark: That's so true. And social media is just a giant comparison engine. You see someone from college get a promotion and suddenly your whole day is ruined. So what's Buckingham's advice? How do you escape the comparison trap? Michelle: You can't win the comparison game, so you have to refuse to play. The antidote is to shift your focus from comparison to contribution. Don't ask, "Am I as good as them?" Ask, "What is my unique contribution?" Mark: Be different, not just better. Michelle: Exactly. He says to strive to be different, not complete. You don't need to be good at everything. You need to be exceptionally good at the things you love, your Red Threads, and then find a team that needs your specific contribution. He suggests a simple but powerful way to talk about this. Instead of bragging, "I'm the best salesperson," you say, "I'm at my best when I'm turning a skeptical customer into a believer." It's specific, it's authentic, and it's about contribution, not ranking. Mark: I like that. It's a practical shift in language that changes the whole frame. "I'm at my best when..." That's a tool you can use in a job interview or a performance review tomorrow. Michelle: It is. And it's a way of honoring your own Wyrd, your own unique pattern of loves, without getting sucked into the soul-crushing game of comparison.

Mark: So when you boil it all down, it seems the message isn't about finding a magical 'dream job.' It's a much more active, almost rebellious process of self-discovery and intentional design. Michelle: Exactly. It's about becoming a detective of your own joy. You have to pay attention to the small things—the 'Red Threads'—that give you energy. And you have to actively build your work life around them, even in small ways. The book has received some mixed reviews, with some readers finding it a bit too emotional, but I think that's because it's asking for a deeply personal kind of work. Mark: Right, it’s not a simple checklist. It’s a mindset shift. Michelle: And it's a necessary one. He cites research from the Mayo Clinic that found doctors who spent just 20% of their time on activities they truly loved had dramatically lower rates of burnout. That 20% of love in your work isn't a luxury; it's the difference between thriving and burning out. It’s the fuel. Mark: It makes you wonder, what was one 'Red Thread' you experienced this week? One small moment at work or at home where time just flew by? It's probably more important than you think. Michelle: That's the perfect question to end on. And Buckingham would say the first step is just to notice it. Acknowledge it. Maybe even write it down. That's how you start weaving love back into your work. Mark: This is Aibrary, signing off.