You’ll see, as well, that the strongest force pushing back against the lies, and the force that we all seek to harness in our lives, is the power of our own individuality—that the true power of human nature is that each human’s nature is unique, and that expressing this through our work is an act, ultimately, of love.

The same is true for you. There’s a little bit of you that your organization can never touch, never know, never see, and certainly never feel. And yet it’s this part of you—the loving, feeling part of you—that makes you feel alive at work, able to do things that surprise and delight you, things that are ridiculously good, unexpectedly made, astonishing to your team, and that light you up from the inside.

And what if I pay super-close attention to the activities I love, and I try to do them, I really try, and I discover that I’m still not very good at them?

Yes, that does occur. To a lot of people who enjoy singing, playing basketball, painting. You love the activity, you feel uplifted when doing it, but you just don’t seem to have the capacity to excel at it.

Well, in the world we all live in, we have a word for activities such as this: we call them hobbies.

Thousands of stories from the Harvard Study show us that the good life is not found by providing ourselves with leisure and ease. Rather, it arises from the act of facing inevitable challenges, and from fully inhabiting the moments of our lives. It appears, quietly, as we learn how to love and how to open ourselves to being loved, as we grow from our experiences, and as we stand in solidarity with others through the inevitable string of joys and adversities in every human life.

Of all the sources of fire, I’ve concluded that perhaps the biggest is sheer unadulterated love of the doing. It’s like a personal flywheel within: If you discover something you’re encoded for and you love doing it, then you can't help but want to do more of it, which means you can't help but get better at it, which means you can't help but move toward the intrinsic satisfaction of excellence in what you do, which further reinforces doing what you are encoded for and love to do.