Photo by Jack Anstey on Unsplash
I first became aware of Alfie Marsh a few years ago when I spotted a video of him walking around with a giant purple Spendesk card at the SaaStock conference in Dublin on LinkedIn.
Through his candid videos and uplighting posts, Alfie is prolific presence on LinkedIn, often transparently discussing difficult topics like learning to manage, staying motivated at work and the right way to do outbound sales.
I reached out to Alfie and asked him to talk a little about pursuing purpose at work, why it’s often challenging and how to make sure you’re headed in the right direction.
[Move Fast and Break People] You have talked a lot about passion lately and how to go about finding something to work on that you’re passionate about.
How can people chase those topics in the companies they work for? What if they aren’t part of their job description?
[Alfie Marsh] An old friend once told me ‘Leveraging the workplace to fuel your passion isn’t always a good thing. Sometimes passions are best left outside of work unless you have a decent level of control over the expression of your passion in the workplace”. For example, when I was at Bloomberg I was passionate about trading, but actually working in that environment meant I had less control over how I expressed that passion and ultimately ruined the fun / positive feedback loop for me. I was able to rekindle that passion in my personal life when I left the company and had full creative control.
Having a perfect alignment between your job and passion isn’t always advisable unless you have free control over how you execute. In many traditional ‘jobs’ you have to play by the rules and fit into the system so it's not always a good balance.
[MFBP] Why do you think people struggle to find passion at work?
[AM] I’m a big fan of the way Tom Bilyeu speaks about passion. ‘Finding your passion’ is not the approach. You need to cultivate it. People feel frustrated because they don’t know how to FIND a passion, but the problem is it can’t be ‘found’, you must to cultivate it. Other people who have miraculously found their passion never actually found it, they just cultivated earlier and in a more natural accidental way.
There’s a couple of steps to cultivating your passion:
Initial interest: find what makes you curious
Engagement: engage with it. If you like photography on instagram, buy a camera and start posting yourself
Pursuit of Mastery: interest and engagement can lead to fascination. Fascination fuels the pursuit of mastery and this is where passion starts to come into fruition.
The first big problem is that people don’t spend enough time testing their initial interests. They often lack curiosity and end up doing the same mundane stuff as before.
The initial interest is the first flicker of inspiration, the first spark. It's certainly not enough to be passionate yet, but it's the first step. Now most people don’t get out in the world enough to try new things and they fall at this first hurdle. To find that first spark you need to be curious and constantly putting yourself in new, unknown environments.
In the workplace, you need to test and try things as much as possible. Of course, you need to execute on your day job and fulfil the main objectives of what you were hired to do, but I encourage my team to spend 80-90% on the core job and 10-20% on other activities that still benefit the company but are not in their original job criteria.
This can help a salesperson test out their creativity and work on projects with marketing, or perhaps get more involved into building out the product. These are the first few steps to open up the doors of sparking ‘initial interest.’
In short, spend more time trying things with no expectations attached. You’ll naturally gravitate towards what you like
TOP TIP: don’t focus on testing things you THINK you’re already passionate about ( because as we said, you don’t know what your passion is yet), but instead focus on testing things that make you CURIOUS.
[MFBP] You recently posted about curiosity and its relationship with passion. Do you see being curious as a prerequisite to passion?
[AM] 100% , as mentioned above, curiosity is the first step.
Look at what you spend most of your time looking at on Instagram, Youtube, what articles do you read the most, what books do you gravitate to or are ‘suggested’ on Amazon? Start in the areas that spark an initial curiosity and let that curiosity blossom by engaging in this topic proactively.
[MFBP] What are some concrete steps people can take to find/ discover passion?
[AM] Change the mindset of ‘finding your passion’ to one of ‘how do I cultivate a passion?’
Step 1) Initial interest Search for things that make you curious. If you having seen anything yet, then you need to continue looking. Be open minded and take risks. Its not about being good at something at this stage. You just need to experiment, experiment and experiment
Step 2) Engage: the moment something sparks your interest, engage with it. Buy that camera, book a meeting with the marketing team, go to that meetup on a Thursday night. Start engagement
Step 3) Fascination and the pursuit of mastery: At this stage, your engagement will start a positive feedback loop in areas that feel good. Normally you’ll have this in areas where you have a natural talent that start to produce results that make you feel good. This ‘feel good’ feeling will then spur a fascination in the pursuit of mastery.
Passion is cultivated when you build a skillset in an area that means something to you, that has a positive feedback loop and you can have a positive impact in your life and others.
A little more about Alfie:
Alfie Marsh is the Head of US Sales at Spendesk. Since joining the company two years ago as the #20th employee, he has been leading the expansion of Spendesk in the UK. With their recent $38M Series B from Index Ventures, Alfie will be leading the expansion into the US.
In his spare time, Alfie enjoys photography / videography and Muay Thai boxing. Passionate about building teams and helping people grow in the workplace.
Try This
A truly foundational moment for me in addressing my own mental health at work was reading the book Mindset by Carol Dweck. In a succinct 300 pages, Dweck outlines two distinct mindsets that people often fall into: Fixed and Growth.
The Fixed Mindset is a breathless fight to stay above water, where virtually any social or professional interaction can turn into a test that can be passed or failed.
In this state of mind, people feel constant pressure to perform, succeed and advance. In the Fixed Mindset, the stakes are high. People prone to the Fixed Mindset are often high achievers who wrap their own self-worth into their ability to pass more than they fail.
The Growth Mindset treats those same tests as opportunities to learn. Instead of being obstacles to overcome, people prone to the Growth Mindset interpret these daily challenges as chances to master a new skill, improve in a specific area or get advice from a more experienced colleague.
They aren’t insidious threats to resist but rather areas of pursuit to embrace.
It should be noted that most people fluctuate between these two states. Hardly anyone is only Fixed or Growth in their thinking. The distinction is often a fluid one that can be influenced by a number of factors.
Luckily, there is a handy method to short circuit the Fixed Mindset, especially if (like me) it is your default setting: publicly express your vulnerability.
What do I mean by that?
Let’s say you’re leading a new project that is important for the company but you haven’t done something like it before. As your Fixed Mindset creeps in, you’ll be resisting letting anyone see how nervous you might feel. You’ll be worried that people will know that you don’t know what you’re doing and you’ll stress about the success of the project.
Rather than fighting against that uncertainty, I suggest you try to welcome it and be open about your feelings with the people you work with. Phrases like “This is just my opinion,” “What do you think?” and “This is my two cents” help show everyone that while you might not have all the answers, you’re open to finding them together.
You might be wondering, “That’s great, but what if I have actually made a mistake? I can’t really admit that.”
I think this is exactly what you should do. Seeing how colleagues, friends or family react when you highlight a mistake can be motivating and cathartic.
Opening yourself up to failure prevents it from being a quality that defines you and transforms it into an experience you can learn from.
The next time you feel unsure, don’t know the answer or feel like you messed up, talk about it. I think you’ll be surprised by the responses you’ll get.
Further Reading
My Experience with Burnout as a Startup Founder by Joel Gascoigne (Buffer)
Starting a New Job is Stressful. What if There is a Better Way to Do it?
Thanks for reading!
-Alex