Simon Sinek argues that loving your work is a right, not a privilege, and that leaders have a duty to create environments of psychological safety, care, and opportunity for growth so employees can develop passion for their work. He contrasts stress (working hard for something you don't care about) with passion (working hard for something you love) and critiques superficial hiring claims about passion.
Chapters
I believe loving your work is a right and not a privilege. I despise the fact, I lament the fact. I curse the fact that so few people get to say I love my job as if they've won some lottery. You know, you go out with your friends and somebody says, I love my job. And everybody goes, oh my God, you're so lucky. Right?
That to me is madness. Everybody, the vast majority, should get to wake up and say, I love my job. It is a right. It is. It is a God given right that we should love where we work and we should demand it. We should demand that our leaders provide an environment in which we want to come, where we want to care about each other, where we feel safe to express our vulnerabilities and our fears and our concerns. That we're open to correction and discipline and feedback, that we're not defensive because we know that it's being given to help us improve and grow. And we want to improve and grow. And in turn, we will help others improve and grow. Because when we feel safe, when we feel that our leaders care more about us than a number, they care more about our lives and our confidence and our joy and our skill set, more than some short term gain, that they care more about our priorities than the priorities of some disinterested external constituency, then we will respond in kind and we will offer our blood and our sweat and our tears, and we will make sacrifices of all kinds to see that our leader's vision is advanced and that this company continues to thrive. Not for them, for ourselves. It becomes deeply personal. It becomes something we love contributing to. I talk about it all the time. Working hard for something we don't care about is called stress. Working hard for something we love is called passion. And I'm tired of listening to CEOs saying we only hire passionate people. You don't even know what that means. How do you know that they're passionate for interviewing and not passionate for working? You know every person on the planet has passion, right? We just don't all have passion for the same things. Give me something to believe in. Give me something to believe in. Give me the opportunity to contribute to something. Allow me to make mistakes and try again, and you'll have passion up the wazoo.
