478 | What Happens When Leaders Love What They Do?

Chris LoCurto 0:10
Welcome to the Chris LoCurto show where we discuss leadership and life and discover that business is what you do, not who you are.

Welcome to the show, folks, I hope you're having a fabulous day, wherever you are. Does the phrase Love what you do seem more like an American fantasy or reality? I think a lot of people today would say that it seems more like an American fantasy. But I want to dive into this a little bit and find out a is it only a Western ideology? Or is there actually some ability to love what you do? Or is it just not possible? Now? Again, like I say, I think a lot of people don't love what they do. And that's probably the real reason why we're doing this podcast the show today, because we want to talk through what does it mean when you do love what you do. But I know there's plenty people out there that actually do love what they do. I happen to be one of those people. I love a lot of what I do, right, but it takes getting there.

In Ecclesiastes King Solomon tells us to plant to love to live to work, and then to enjoy the fruits of one's labors. Probably one of the the wisest man who ever lived concludes by saying this, I have seen what is best for people here on Earth, they should eat and drink and enjoy their work. Because the life God has given them on Earth is short. God gives some people the ability to enjoy the wealth and property he gives them, as well as the ability to accept their state and life and enjoy their work. They do not worry about how short life is because God keeps them busy with what they love to do Ecclesiastes 518 through 20. So, on today's episode of what happens when this is a part of a series of what happens when that we're doing, I want to highlight the positives of loving what you do. Now, I'm not gonna go through and teach you how to love what you do, I'm going to highlight the positives of when you do and I will be honest with you, I'm somebody who agrees with Daniel Lapin, who says, you know, Don't go this crazy, ridiculous message of go find what you love and do it. Especially to all the young folks that if you love playing video games, find out how to make that a business. The percentage of people who are actually going to make money off of playing video games is so insanely low, it's crazy. But we have a ton of people who love to play video games. His point is, go do something that takes care of you puts food on your table takes care of your family, and learn to love it. Now, he's not saying don't go after passions, he's not saying that you can't go do something you love. But here's something you will come to understand. The more you focus on taking care of the right priorities first, the sooner you will get to actually loving what you do. If your priority is to go find something you love, it may be a really long time before you actually put food on your table. Right doesn't mean that you don't get to love what you do doesn't mean that you only need to go do work on stuff that you don't enjoy. That's not what he's saying at all. What he's saying is make sure your priorities are correct. If you go put food on your table, you can learn to love aspects of it. I've done many jobs in my life that I did not love. I didn't even enjoy doing parts I hated. But I had to put food on the table that helped me to learn what are some of the things that I could love about that job, and do on a daily basis. So before we dive in, let's be real. We don't always love everything we do. I think we can all agree with that. I don't know anybody who loves every aspect of everything that they do.

Chris LoCurto 4:08
I don't know if I've met that person. I'm not saying they're not out there. I just don't know if I have, according to Mr. Marcus Buckingham in the Harvard Business Review, highly successful people find that there are moments situations or contexts that they love. They don't love all that they do. But they do find love in what they do. So maybe you don't love everything that you do. But there are reasons you were drawn to do certain things and to do them well and maybe in a way that only you can do them. So call it your gifting college or calling, or just that that's how you're wired. But maybe you've noticed the difference when you really love and embrace what you do. And when you don't. I can tell you I my whole life. I've been drawn to helping people. I've been drawn to teaching people I just Look I have is that I actually was trying to help people. Even when I was in like grade school, I remember trying to help other kids solve problems with things. Nobody listens to you when you're in grade school. No, nobody wants your opinion on how to fix things and you know, solve things. But I remember on the school yard, you know, trying to help people solve problems that they had, right? I've always been drawn to teaching to helping to taking care of people. And I can tell you, there are times that I didn't love everything. But I never knew in those early years going throughout my 20s, when I started leading, going through different businesses, I never knew that I'd be doing what I'm doing. Now. The funny thing is one of the things that absolutely lights up my eyes that makes me so happy and fills me with joy is something that I've always loved doing anyway. But it took a whole lot of different jobs, different leaders, different situations, different complexities, to get me to a place where I could actually pour out information that helped people.

You know, it's funny, my daughter one time said, you get paid to give advice. And I'm like, Yep, she goes, I want to do that. I said, Great. Go learn something that you can help somebody with. You have to actually have advice that helps somebody can't just be nobody wants to give you money for something that doesn't actually help them. Right. So it took me many, many decades of hard knocks, you know, going to the school of hard knocks, to be able to help people not make the same mistakes, to help people overcome things. Does that mean I've loved every aspect of this? Oh, for the love? No, not even remotely close. I've had many times that have been very difficult, very tough, painful, but my gosh, I love every single time I get to help somebody, what do we do the show? Because of the responses that we get from folks saying how much it helps. So why don't we come back we're gonna dive into the deep end where leaders love what they do.

Joel Fortner 7:12
Hey, it's Joel Fortner. Here, I'm the vice president of leadership development on Chris's team and I oversee our Next Level Mastermind business coaching program. Most business owners and leaders lack a clear path to succeed in business. They question whether they're making the right decisions if they're focusing on the right things to really grow their business. If this is you, you need a coach in your life. coaches help you make better decisions, navigate uncertainty lead more effectively, and grow your business without sacrificing your life and your family. In their first year, our clients typically see an average of 67% increase in gross revenue, and an average of 138% increase in net profit and regained hours of time. Our clients stay in the program for over three and a half years simply because of the results they get. So if you're ready to run your business at the next level and see the growth you've been wanting, then visit Chris accardo.com/mastermind. Again, Chris accardo.com/mastermind today.

Chris LoCurto 8:13
Alright, so again, we're not teaching how to love what you do, you have to make a decision, right, you've got to choose to but what I want to go through today is some points of things that are when a leader does choose when a leader does love what they do, what comes of it, what's good about that, what's positive about that, the first point that I want to make is that when a leader loves what they do, there is creativity. If you've ever been stuck with without creative juices, you know without the ability to think creatively, you know how much that sucks? You know how difficult that is to be in a place where you just feel dry, right? Creativity is a byproduct of loving what you do. Now, I'm not saying you have to love what you do. That's the only way you get creativity. I'm saying when you do love what you do, creativity becomes a byproduct. It comes naturally to you.

When your hearts invested in and devoted to something. Think about that. When your heart's really in it. Oh, my gosh, you can't shut your brain off. Like there are times. It's so funny. There are certain books that I can't read. If I'm not in a place to be able to take tons of notes, there are certain conversations that I can't have, if I'm not in a place to be able to take tons of notes. There's certain things that spark creativity in me that I know that I need to set a specific time to do them so that I can come up with all kinds of ideas. Right? There's certain things that you know, there have been times I've been on a plane I can't remember the book, specifically. But this was man probably 1520 years ago. This book that I was reading on a plane. Oh my gosh. is the former CIO of Yahoo. CFO, I can't remember. Anyways, as I was reading his book, I got so inspired and praise God, he left a bunch of blank pages at the end of his book for notes, I actually wrote out a whole process of a new type of school. For Kids, that kind of went against the grain of what we experience, the creativity that came out of loving what I was doing at the time loving what, you know, pouring into myself, with this new information in the book had nothing to do with schools. It didn't have anything to do that it had to do with business. But I was able to sit down and one of the frustrations I had in my life was this, you know, not every bit of public school system. I'm not saying everything sucks, but there's a decent amount that right now is pretty screwed up and has been for a while. And so for me, it was like a, what would it look like? If if we could create a school that really trained people to leave school with skills with with the ability to go do stuff? Instead of leave going? Well, now, I guess I need to go figure things out. No, no. How do we take care of them? How do we teach them the right things, or at least what I felt like was right thing. The creativity was just amazing. It was a phenomenal byproduct, because of how much I was happy and content and loved what I did. Right? Creativity. According to Harvard Business Review, creativity has always been at the heart of business. It's the ability to create something novel and appropriate. Creativity is essential to entrepreneurship that gets new businesses started. And that sustains the best companies after they have reached global scale.

Chris LoCurto 11:46
What's the converse? Right? So think through that? What's it like if you don't have creativity, right? So without creativity, we're trapped in a box of our own design. And we're focused on ourselves and not other people. In essence, the people that we're trying to deliver a product to, obviously, right, without creativity will never ask ourselves, what if, oh, my gosh, such an important question. What if, what if we do this? What if we try this? What if this happens, what if we change this right? Without creativity, we'll never get to see what's possible? Why? How do we know that? Well, Chris, you're not you don't know that for sure. But I'm pretty darn sure. If you don't have creativity, then all you're going to see is the inertia from what's already happening. If you don't have creativity, you're not changing things. You're not busting in on things, right. Without creativity, we'll never distinguish ourselves from other people. creativity comes naturally to leaders who love and embrace what they put their hands to.

Point number two, when you love what you do, it leaves the inspiration for innovation. Innovation happens when people embrace are invested in and are inspired by their work. creative and innovative leaders are more likely to collaborate with other people to share their insight to share their ideas to seek out solutions that aren't readily available inside of their current four walls. When you're innovative, when you're creative, you don't isolate. Think about that. If you find yourself being incredibly isolated, well, you should probably try and find out why. Maybe you're not being innovative. Maybe you're not being creative. Maybe you don't love what you're doing. Maybe you're operating more in fear, right? These leaders learn from other leaders, other people, other team members, other business owners, and they're constantly growing, innovative leaders focus more on the customer experience and their clients needs. They understand how incredibly important that is. That it's not just a we made a widget keep selling the widget? What are the needs? What's the experience they have with us, right? And when they're more of an innovative leader, they're focusing more on that customer experience and client need than their own current product or service offerings. Think about this. When you only focus on the product that you have or the service that you're offering, you're not focused on how it's affecting the people. You're not really digging in to what's the experience with this product? What's the experience with the service, one of the things we tell people all the time business leaders business owners, is to walk through your own sales process. You know, so many business leaders and owners never walked through their own sales process because they're too busy. They're too focused on their current products or their current service offerings, right.
When you walk through your own actual sales process, you might be super happy. And you also might be super disgusted with how you're offering stuff. innovative leaders are able to overcome the typical restraints of the market place. Why? Because they're not shutting themselves down to only what they see in front of them. They think how to fix this, we had a great mastermind q&a Call we do 10 calls a year where, you know, people just jump on and ask me any kind of questions they want to. And we had a great call, because, you know, things are going a little crazy right now. And the world and potential recession ahead of us and all that kind of fun stuff. And, you know, walking through what does it look like to think beyond what you're currently doing? How do you recession proof yourself? How do you think through new ideas, new processes, right? So innovative leaders think that way? Right? They, they overcome typical restraints of the marketplace, and they look ahead to how things will be tomorrow, not necessarily in a positive way. Right? If things are going great, then yes, but one of the things we were discussing about actually, it was in a couple of questions that happened was, Hey, guys, what do we do if things go bad? Believe it or not, that's a very positive side of loving what you do being able to not sit in fear and wait for things to happen, but instead go well? What are new options? What are new opportunities? So creativity and innovation are rooted in a leaders joy for their work? So here's my question for you. Do you enjoy your work, when we come back the third and greatest benefit of loving what you do right after this?

Chris LoCurto 16:32
Hey, folks, a couple of years ago, I was visiting with a client. And the CEO said to me, Chris, we're not going to hit our goal. I asked him what he meant. And he said, We're gonna miss our three year revenue goal coming out of strap plan by a few months, I didn't realize it at first, that he was having a little fun with me by saying they were about to triple their company in less than three years. How freaking awesome is that? Folks, these are the kinds of results that businesses get by coming through our four day strat plan event. On average, we find $2.1 million worth of revenue in the next 12 months that the company was not planning on. And this event is for all sized businesses. If you're small, medium or large, it works for every single business, because it's not industry specific. It's about gaining all the information about all the things inside of your business that are holding you back from success, and then giving you a plan and a process on how to walk that out and be successful in your business.

By discovering the things that are holding you back, it helps you get to all of those goals that you've been planning on for a long time. So if you're ready to get the perspective, you need to solve what's holding you and your business back. So you can grow faster than you need strap plan. To learn more, go to Chris locurto.com/strat plan. That's Chris locurto.com/strapless. The Business News Daily reports that for many working at a job they love is more fulfilling, productive and important than money, it can even lead to a higher level of success. So point number three of when leaders love what they do you know what happens when a leader loves what they do. Point number three is resilience. So one reason for this higher level of success is a higher level of resilience to the wear and tear of leadership. Just think about that for a second. Think about how when you don't love what you do, how ready you are to be done with it. how ready you are to get out of it. Right? There's an old saying, If you don't love what you do 60% of the time, or more is essentially what that means. If you didn't love what you do 60% of the time, you'll hate it 100% of the time. Michael Phillips founder and CEO of coconuts fish Cafe said, when you enjoy your job, it makes it easier to get through the trials and tribulations of business ownership. And I can tell you, you know, this is we're speaking to leaders but business owners or leaders as well.

There's a whole lot of risk and stress that comes with business ownership. If you don't love what you're doing, it makes it really easy to get out of that business. It makes it really easy to want to sell that business. It makes it really easy to pull your energy away from the business, which means that you're pulling it away from your team. That's not where we want to be. Right. We want to make sure that we are doing everything that our team needs to be we want to be the energy that our team needs. We want to be doing the needed A business owner tasks that allows the team to operate into success at their absolute best if they see that the owner doesn't want to be there. Guess what? It's only a matter of time before they start feeling some fear inside. Well, if the owner doesn't want to be here, why do I want to be here, right? It's just a paycheck. Now it's just a gob. So realizing real success as a leader, a business owner, and an entrepreneur goes beyond how creative and innovative that you are. Success is all about enduring. Right? If you cannot endure, you're obviously not going to make it to success unless it's an incredibly short trip. Success is also about stability. in tough times, guys,

Chris LoCurto 20:51
it's hard. When times are tough to remember that you actually love what you're doing. There is so much negativity going on in the world. There's so much negative self talk negative conversations, gossip, crap, news, crap, political crap, that sometimes it makes you forget that you love what you're doing. I can tell you, I absolutely love what we do. But there's times it's difficult. There are times it's a pain in the butt. There are times that it's painful. There are times that helping folks overcome difficult things, causes them to want to make you their villain, right. So there's times it really sucks, right. And I have to remind myself that I absolutely love the result of what comes out of it. There's times I don't love being in the the conflict, the you know, helping somebody to get over something that they're struggling with. But I love the results when they overcome the thing that they're struggling with. Right?
Sometimes I have to remember that there are times when sales aren't going the way that you want them to. There's times that team members aren't doing the things that you want them to there's times that politicians aren't doing what you want them to do in the economy is going in a wrong direction, and so on and so forth. That it becomes a struggle, it's difficult, it's difficult to keep doing what you're doing day to day, right. If you don't remind yourself that you love what you're doing, and that this is all going to turn around at some point, we'll figure this out. We can solve things. If you don't love what you're doing. The last thing you're going to do is try and figure out how to solve it right? You probably going to find your solution as being just get out of the business. But going through tough times like that, if you remember, hey, yep, this is difficult. Yep, this is painful. But this is only going to be for Season. Eventually, we won't be dealing with this hopefully, then success is around the corner. Success is also about outlasting the competition. So funny thing with this discussion today, this show today is that if you do the things that we're talking about, if you find the ability to love what you do, then the crazy thing is, is you're most likely going to outlast your competition, who isn't loving what they're doing? Right? If you've got competition out there that is hating what's happening on a daily basis, who's struggling through the tough times who's gonna you know, who's not able to endure, then the crazy thing is, you're probably going to outlast them. Your love for what you do, will help you to overcome the struggle that you're experiencing. Right? And help you to outlast your competition, Henry Ford said, unless you have courage, a courage that keeps you going, always going, no matter what happens, there is no certainty of success. It is really an endurance race. So leaders, business owners, entrepreneurs, if you can't find something that you love and what you do, and learn to embrace it for what it is, then you're going to struggle, every time there's a crisis.

And believe it or not, that struggle is most likely going to be emotional or mental. Right? So maybe as a leader, business owner or entrepreneur, you can't always do what you love. But you can always love the things you do learn to embrace it, lean into it, enjoy it and eat the fruit of your labor. For those of us that are believers, God actually put celebrations in place through his biblical festivals. Because he wants us to know how to party on the right things, celebrate the right things. We should eat the fruit of our labor. You should enjoy the fruits of your labor right? When you do I can promise you this. Your team will notice a difference your friend We will probably notice a difference, or kids will probably notice a difference. So even if you're not in your dream job, you can learn to minimize the hate factor and maximize the love. And essence the focus on embrace and lean into the parts that are enjoyable. If you find that there are things to doing that you just don't love, if you find you know, all of this is, is predicated on the choice of finding things that you do and choosing to love them. But what if there are things that you just absolutely hate, right? We have a process called Love, love hate delegate. And one of those things is making lists of what you do love to do. And the things you do not love to do.

Chris LoCurto 25:43
We call it hate because don't like doesn't make sense. Love, don't like delegate, love hate delegate just actually flows better. So when you find the things, if you make these two separate lists, things I love to do, it's a very exhaustive list. It's not something you can do in five minutes, this will probably take you a good amount of time, if you make a list of the things you hate to do, you don't like to do, right? Make those two lists, I'm giving you a very short, fast version of this process, which is actually in our killing the leadership Crazy Cycle lesson. And then you take a look at the Lovat list and ask yourself that question at my level of leadership, my role? Should I be doing this? Or should somebody else be doing this, then if it's somebody else, move it to the hate list? Right? There's many things I've had to give up that I loved, so that my leadership could grow. And then I have to look at the hate list and go, are there things that I should be doing because nobody else can do it? I am the business owner, nobody else can do this. Let me pull that back over the love list. Once you've done that, then the love list is what you're shooting for. The hate list becomes your delegate list. How can I end when can I delegate these things. This is another way to help you to really get to a place and this is for leaders. This isn't necessarily for team members who are you know, hired to do tasks, right? If they're hired to do tasks, they should focus on the tasks. This is so that you can get stuff off your plate so you can actually move on to more important things like leading people incredibly well. Right? But if you got stuff loaded up on your task list that you just hate, that you struggle with, well, it's going to show and it's going to be very difficult for you to make choices to love what you do. So folks, that is all the time we have for today. Hopefully this has helped you a lot to make decisions to love what you do or find things in what you do. And choose to love those things. As always take this information, change your leadership, change your business, change your life, and join us on the next episode.