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Anthony Robbins, Work, Jobs, Careers, and Missions

Harrison Barnes
By Jun 21,2023
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Summary
In this article Harrison discusses that you absolutely and positively need a mission and it is going to change your life. When you find something you are good at, and approach it like a mission, everything changes. A mission is much more powerful than being good at lots of things. Employers want to hire people on a mission. Your career needs to be a mission. This is the most important career advice you will ever receive. The highest state of work is when you are on a mission. The difference between having a job, or career and having a mission is huge. A mission will propel you forward. A mission will bring you everything you ever wanted. A mission will open up opportunities and will transform your life and career. There is nothing more important than a mission. You need to be on a mission.

There have been only a couple of times in my life when I was doing something I truly loved. The first was when I was an asphalt contractor and was out in the field each day doing asphalt work. It made me feel like I was building something and truly making a difference. It made me feel like I was free. I loved the smell of the tar. I loved the sun on my face and body. I loved the people I worked with. I loved going to the asphalt plant each morning. I loved driving the trucks and operating the machinery I did in my business. I loved the work so much that I would find myself getting up each day at the crack of dawn even if I had a few hours sleep the night before so I could go out and work. I wanted to work seven days a week and rarely took a day off. I became very depressed on the days it was raining and I couldn’t work. When it was winter and I couldn’t work, I would look towards the spring with incredible enthusiasm. I simply loved the work I was doing and was very enthusiastic about it in so many respects. It was something that I literally lived for. When I was out with people, the work I did was all I could talk about. I simply loved it with an incredibly contagious enthusiasm. I would sometimes do the work and remind myself every few days that I hadn’t even had anything to eat! I had become so engaged in the work that even eating was something that didn’t matter to me. My heart, body, and soul were so into the work, it is difficult for me to describe.

I loved this work so much that people and customers sensed it. Everyone I came into contact with knew I had a passion for asphalt. I dreamed about asphalt at night. I talked about it everywhere I went. My business grew so fast I couldn’t believe it. The love of the profession and asphalt was like being swept up by a giant wave. It was something I treated as a mission.

There is an incredible strength that can come to you when you treat your job and your career like I thought about asphalt. I know deep down within you there are various times when you’ve found yourself incredibly engaged in something. I’ve seen this so many times before and with so many people. Everyone gets engaged and excited by something. There’s something that lights up every one of us. God has given us this gift to be completely lit up and enthusiastic about something. We all have it.

I remember when I was in high school, one of the worst students in my school couldn’t pass most classes. He had a lot of family pressure and it became almost all- consuming. He felt like a failure and started using drugs, abusing alcohol, and doing all sorts of other self-destructive things to dull the pain. When the time came to apply to colleges, he didn’t even get into the easiest state college, despite the fact that his father had endowed a large scholarship on the school. He was so depressed about this he almost committed suicide and I remember he literally disappeared for a few days and went to a hotel in a bad neighborhood where he sat in a dark room alone contemplating ending his life. He felt like he had no purpose and there was nothing he could possibly do with his life.

He and I had taken a chemistry class together and I had barely managed to earn a C+ in the class. He, however, had easily gotten A’s in the class without even studying. He loved the intricacies of the information and an understanding of chemistry came naturally to him. He just understood it. He understood it better than the teacher and he had some sort of gift. It was as if he knew what she was going to say before she said it. He couldn’t understand how others couldn’t think this way. He didn’t have to try and still did incredibly well in the discipline. He, however, did not think it was that big of a deal.

After my second year of college, I was home for the summer and as I was getting out of my car to go to a party, I walked past him. I didn’t recognize him until he came up to me. Since high school, he’d grown a beard. He was wearing beads and had become a hippie of sorts. He looked like he’d smoked pot several times a day for the past few years and had a “burnt out” look about him. He looked so different, in fact, that I didn’t even recognize him when we passed each other. He recognized me and came up to me and gave me a hug.

After the party that evening, he and I went to a restaurant together to eat and catch up. He had flunked out of college in Colorado and was living at home. His life appeared to be a huge failure. I remember sitting there and thinking of the guy I’d known five years previous, who was so much more enthusiastic. He wasn’t amounting to anything and it was a very sad thing. His life, to him and me as well, felt like it had no purpose. He was on a path to certain destruction. As we sat there together, I remembered how well this guy had done in chemistry. He’d long since dropped out of college. He wasn’t working. He was living in his mother’s basement and spending most of his day smoking pot, playing video games, and being generally unproductive. It was incredible to me how rundown he was and how little his life had become. In the back of my mind, however, I kept thinking about how good he was at chemistry and how much he liked and enjoyed it.

“You need to study chemistry,” I told him. For the next hour or so a passion came over me and I told him in hundreds of different ways why he needed to study chemistry and how important this was for him and how it would affect the course of his life and everything that happened to him from now on. I told him that he had a gift and moreover that he loved it. I told him that this gift and his extreme dislike for other subjects at a natural, visceral level was God’s way of telling him this is what he needed to be doing and this is what he needed to be studying. I told him with everything I had that this is what he needed to do and he needed to take action and do this right now and start pursuing this direction with his life immediately. Something overcame me and I was so enthusiastic about this that I didn’t even understand it. I followed him out to the car and said goodbye to him. I wouldn’t hear from him or see him for another year.

One year later, I was with a group of guys my age and was back from school again for the summer. We were making our way around, picking people up and we made our way over to my old friend’s house to pick him up. We all went inside to grab him and back downstairs into his mother’s basement. When I got down there I saw sights I couldn’t believe. He had little plastic models of molecules all over and next to his bed. He had huge chemistry textbooks spread around the basement. When he walked out, I noticed he’d shaved his beard off and was wearing glasses. There was an energy about him and he looked much happier. The “angst” I’d seen about him for ages was gone. He looked happy for the first time. The basement was clean and there was no trash and so forth scattered all around as there had been before.

He looked like he had a purpose.

When we went out that evening, he didn’t use drugs and sipped the same beer all evening. I could tell how happy he was. He told me he’d gone back to school and was studying chemistry and loved it. He was also working in a lab. He didn’t know exactly what he wanted to do for a living, but he really loved what he was doing. He’d taken organic chemistry and loved it and had done incredibly well in it. His life had literally changed and he was now doing well. I was incredibly happy for him. He told me he’d followed my advice and found something that energized him. He felt like he was on a mission.

This episode is something that also changed the course of my life. In looking at what happened to my friend, by finding a passion, I was convinced deep down in the body of my soul and DNA that when we find something we are good at, and approach it like a mission, everything changes. Our entire life can change and who we are can change in an instant. Literally, our entire future can be altered by the type of work we do and the feedback we get.

My friend sat in a small $20/night hotel in a bad area of Detroit for two days contemplating ending his life. He had no contact with the outside world during that time and no one knew where he was. He sat there and felt like dying. I cannot imagine how this must have felt for him. He felt like dying, I believe, because all of the input he had gotten from the world had been almost entirely negative and his passion wasn’t ignited by anything.

  • He wasn’t an athlete and couldn’t receive positive feedback from this.
  • He did poorly in every subject except for chemistry and received horrible feedback for this.
  • He couldn’t get into colleges.
  • He was considered a failure by his family.

All of these things conspired to make him feel as if his life had no purpose. He felt like he was a complete loser and he felt this way because almost all of the feedback he was getting from his environment was negative. He didn’t have a passion.

When I was in high school, a couple of years before I graduated, I remember a student in my school with poor grades in virtually every subject and okay test scores had amazed the school and everyone around them by applying to Harvard College and getting in. It was something I’ve heard people talk about even as recently as a few years ago. It’s absolutely legendary because by every stretch of the imagination, this student never should have been admitted. I even remember hearing something about the fact that the school authorities did everything within their power to dissuade him from applying because they thought he would never get in.

However, this particular student had a passion and was on a mission. Since the age of five or six he’d been collecting bugs. He loved bugs and was fascinated by them. He went to conferences. He wrote papers. He spent his summers traveling the world to study different types of bugs. He had rooms of his parent’s house filled with bugs. He was consumed with the study of bugs and thinking about them. He was on a mission and Harvard knew it. Regardless of his grades, the admissions officers of one of the toughest schools in the world wanted him. A mission is much more powerful than being good at lots of things. A mission will take down walls, open up opportunity, and transform your life. You need a mission.

Let me repeat: You need a mission.

I firmly believe, from the bottom of my hear, this is the most important career advice you will ever receive. A mission changes you and transforms your life and career. There’s nothing more important than a mission.

  • We respect people with a mission.
  • Employers want to hire people on a mission.
  • A mission energizes you.
  • A mission energizes people around you.
  • A mission tears down walls.
  • A mission gives your life purpose.
  • A mission transforms you.

When I was an asphalt contractor, I was energized with passion. It was the most important job for me in the world and I loved it. I had a girlfriend at the time who loved me more than anything. She wanted to get married and worshipped me. She saw the mission in me and was attracted to it. She would have done anything for me. Her father saw the mission in me and also gave me numerous opportunities. I remember when I got into law school and I told her I was going to law school.

“That’s so sad,” she told me. “Most people never find something they love and you are going to be just like the rest of people if you do this. You don’t belong behind a desk all day.”

I remember I was out one evening and having a great time and a bunch of young lawyers from the top law firm in Detroit at the time came up and started talking to her and her friends. When I was around these girls, they appeared to light up. The lawyers didn’t have the same passion I did and they also didn’t appear connected. It’s hard to explain. To a tee, every one of the girls blew off the lawyers. They appeared almost disgusted by them. I was still in college and went up to them and started talking to the lawyers. I worshipped them because they had gone to the best law schools and appeared to have achieved so much. They all told me they didn’t like what they were doing. None of them were happy. They were all quite negative, not just about what they were doing, but about life as well. It was a huge contrast from where I was in my life at the moment.

When I went away to law school, my girlfriend very quickly lost interest in me. I received a couple of phone calls from her and on the last phone call, she had taken over managing the career of a very famous rock star. All she talked about was how he had “passion” and loved what he did. She was attracted to the passion. She could tell when she was speaking with me that I had no passion for school and what I was doing. Despite her incredible love for me at one point, she couldn’t bear spending her time with a man who wasn’t flowering inside and on a mission. We are all attracted to people with a mission.

There are three stages in a development of what you do with your productive time and you need to get to the highest one. The first stage is a job. The second is a career. The third is a mission.

At the outset, I want to note there are arguably four stages and not three to what you do during your productive time. In the first stage, you could put “work” instead of job. Work, however, is something that is so detestable and negative in its connotation that I don’t classify it as developmental at all. Work is something you do in the short-term and not because you’re interested in it or it excites you or even to make a living. Work connotes short-term projects such as mowing a lawn for $10 and doing something which takes you absolutely nowhere but to a short-term reward of a few dollars. Work is detestable and not something that develops you the way you need. Work has a negative and not a positive connotation in all respects. Work is hard. Work is reserved for the most unfulfilled souls in society. Work doesn’t lead anywhere and we know it. Work is there because it’s something we have to do and gives us almost no fulfillment. We don’t think positively about work and we avoid work.

It is for this reason I don’t refer to work as “developmental” in terms of what you do with your productive time. A job, career, and mission connote “showing up” every day. It’s when we begin to “show up” in either a physical or a mental sense on a daily basis that I believe your relationship with your productive time transforms. You need to “show up” daily–or at least Monday through Friday. If your relationship with what you do doesn’t involve you showing up on a daily basis, then what you are doing is “work” and not a job, career, or a mission. You need to show up and move away from work to a higher stage of development. No one should have to “work” because “work” is short-term, un-enjoyable and does not lead anywhere in the way I define it here. Work is looking for short-term projects for hours, days, weeks, or months to pay the bills. Work is the guy standing with a group of other workers on the corner hoping a contractor picks him up to do some manual labor for the day. Work is offering to do some work online that you don’t enjoy. Work is prostitution and selling your body or time for something you detest. No one should have to do work. Work is a horrible thing because it doesn’t take you anywhere and it’s unfulfilling.

A job is something that most of the world does. When you think about a job, an image you might have in your mind is a man working mindlessly on an assembly line all day. He shuffles this or that back and forth and clocks in each morning. He doesn’t particularly like what he does but does the work because he needs to make money. The work doesn’t give him any particular satisfaction one way or another but he endures it. He looks forward to going home each evening and getting off work. He looks forward to his annual vacations. He calls in sick from time to time just to get out of work. He does his job because he needs to earn money. This is the saddest part about this. He doesn’t do his work because he loves it. If he didn’t need money, he wouldn’t do the job. It’s as simple as that.

One of the greatest fantasies of people who just have “jobs” is that they may one day win the lottery. The fantasy and idea is that if they win the lottery, they will no longer have to do their job. There is a fantasy of having to go tell their boss to “piss off” and moving on and not having to worry about work anymore. There is no need to have to work and they don’t want to go to work particularly. They put in time until they are allowed to retire. They look forward to their lunch hour each day. They know when the next public holiday is coming up. They do their work but have no real interest in it.

For example, people just doing a job will rarely, if ever, make any effort to improve themselves for their work. They won’t study ways to improve themselves outside of work in order to improve and get better at what they do. They won’t take classes to understand what they do. They avoid thinking about their job whennot at work. The priorities of a person with just a “job” are the time they spend out of work and not at work. They do a job because they have to and not because they want to.

It’s important to note that people in an incredible number of professions fall victim to just doing jobs. For example, my dentist was telling me some time ago that most other dentists he knows only do the work they do for money. They don’t care about the work at all. They hate looking in mouths all day but do it because they have to. They go to conferences to learn about the latest developments in dentistry not because they want to but because they have to. Their priorities are being away from the office. They do the work they do but aren’t all that enthusiastic about it.

Incidentally, dentists have one of the highest rates of suicide among most professions. Why do you think that is? It’s due to the fact that they don’t feel a passion for how they spending their time, I believe. The trap of a profession like dentistry as a job for someone who doesnt like it is severe. People who go to school for years to learn how to be a dentist and get out and build up a small practice where they may be making $200,000 a year, suddenly find themselves with expensive car and house payments, perhaps private school tuition for their children, and more. There’s nothing else that they know how to do and they can’t quit because they have too many obligations. They are literally stuck doing something which gives them no passion and makes them unhappy. They feel like they have made a huge mistake with their lives. They report to a job each day and feel trapped.

I know tons of lawyers who are in this trap. It’s a horrible thing for them and they are incredibly unhappy. They do things like fantasize about opening wineries. They fantasize about buying the companies of their clients and doing this. They get fat because they try to fill up with something they enjoy because they are not happy at work. They cheat on their wives and husbands because they are searching for glimmers of happiness and excitement in dull lives. They very frequently abuse alcohol and drugs in an effort to forget and escape something they detest.

My mother had a job when I was growing up. She called in sick every chance she got. She didn’t like going to work every single day. She wasn’t happy and the thought of work made her extremely unhappy. She couldn’t care less how she did at work for the most part. She was an incredibly intelligent, attractive, and capable woman but she reported to a job daily. The first day she qualified for a pension she quit her job. She didn’t want to be there. She didn’t like it.

There are so many problems with having a job that i’s difficult to believe. A job just doesn’t give you the satisfaction you’re entitled to and deserve in your life. I’m sure you know people who are just doing jobs. You may be one of those people. Why are you doing a job? You should never do something you aren’t interested in. There is a huge difference between this and not doing what you want in life.

When I was younger, I remember I was fixed up with a girl that everyone thought had it all. People really liked her and all of the boys I knew thought she was fantastic. I remember when I went out with her I felt zero connection to her. For whatever reason, she was also pushed by her friends to go out with me. We sat there in a restaurant on our first date with absolutely no chemistry, making small talk. It was “work” for both of us being together but we felt like we needed to make it work. There was no connection for either of us, but we both felt we needed to be there. We were there physically but not mentally. So we went through the motions of having an evening together and at the end of the evening, had a long, passionless kiss. I think we both did this because we were “showing up” for something we felt we should. Then we started dating and going out with other groups of people and it was the same thing. We would only hold hands when others were looking. We would talk on the phone at night and both almost felt like it was work. We both knew it, but we were both showing up to something we didn’t really feel in our hearts was for us.

This is what work is. Have you ever felt passion for someone? Have you ever felt something just click for you? Have you ever felt that something didn’t click, but you did it anyway? It’s when it doesn’t click that you’re doing work. In the case of the lovely woman, we both felt no passion or connection and we wouldn’t have been there had we felt like we didn’t need to be. We were there physically in every sense but neither of us had the heart, soul, and mind of the other.

I keep coming back to the sexual nature, the passionate nature of a job because it’s this “sexual” type charge that you need to have for your work. When a man is committed to a woman and a woman is committed to a man, they think about each other all the time. There is a “charge” there that makes a massive difference. The charge is such that they are one heart, mind, and soul. They want to be together all the time. We all know what this charge is and we feel it when we are near certain people. It’s more than physical–it’s emotional and comes from deep within. It’s this sort of charge that drives many men to achieve to impress women and vice versa. It’s this charge that creates many marriages. It’s this sort of charge that creates new life and often brings children into the world. There’s nothing more important than this charge and this charge is a motivating force of life itself.

When you don’t have this charge for your work, it’s like being with someone you have no feelings for. If you are heterosexual, it’s like trying to make love to someone of your own sex and falling passionately in love with them. If you are homosexual, it’s like trying to make love to someone of the opposite sex. There is no charge and attraction. It is ass backwards.

This is why you need to move away from trying to do a job. Instinctually, we understand this in terms of our love lives and follow it. Notwithstanding, very few people follow this in their choice of how they spend their productive time earning a living each day.

A final thing to understand about a job is that someone doing a job would quit readily and happily do something else if the opportunity presented itself and the conditions were right. For example, my mother seriously investigated taking all of her money and moving my sister and I to Wyoming so she could operate a dude ranch. A lawyer doing a job will happily change what he or she is doing many times if the pay is right. Dentists may quit what they do once they have amassed enough money to live comfortably and then try something else. People who do jobs aren’t committed to them just as I wasn’t committed to the girl I was fixed up with.

The next step up from a job is a career. There is more “attachment” to a career than there is to a job. A career connotes a sense of commitment and something you will be doing for the long-term. I first heard the word career when I was in law school. To give you a sense of the difference between a career and job, I will repeat the episode here.

In my second year of law school, many students were applying for judicial clerkships. A clerkship is when you go to work for a judge and work inside the judge’s chambers for one or two years helping them make decisions on their cases. In the case of federal clerkships, they are extremely prestigious and competitive to get. Because the smartest students were doing this, I felt like I needed to do it too because they seemed to be taking applying for these extremely seriously. I sent my application to around 10 judges in Michigan where I’m from, and two days later a judge called me and asked me to come see him within a day or two for an interview. Less than a week after applying, the judge called me and made me an offer and told me I had to let him know whether I was accepting the offer within a few hours or he was going to make someone else an offer. The job paid around $30,000 a year at the time and I also had another offer with a New York City law firm paying $83,000 a year. It’s easier to get a job with a New York law firm paying this much than it is to get a federal clerkship. I was confused because I didn’t understand why I should take a job paying so much less money.

I called the career services dean of my school.

“This is a career, not a job,” he told me. “If your plan is to practice law forever then who cares about how much money the clerkship pays.”

This is the difference between a career and a job. We think of careers in terms of long-term. The idea is we will be doing them forever. We want to be enriched in a career and we think in terms of the long-term. In my case, I didn’t quite understand what the career services dean of my school meant, but I took the clerkship. I realized there was something profound in what he was saying and I am glad to this day that I listened to his advice.

People doing a career are committed to what they do. There is a level of commitment that’s not present in someone who is simply doing a job. The persons know they are in something for the long-term and are going to make it work.

In India, to this day, there are arranged marriages. I go to India quite often and virtually everyone I know in India is in an arranged marriage. In an arranged marriage, there is typically very little contact between the bride and groom before marriage. They will be introduced after a rigorous screening process by their families and may not spend more than an hour or two together getting to know each other before they are formally married. However, in India, there is almost no divorce and, incredibly, these weddings work out much more than the average wedding in the United States or other Western countries, for example.

The reason I believe these marriages work out and what several Indians have told me is that the couples enter the marriages committed. They treat the marriages as something they have to work out. They do not consider other options like divorce and marrying someone more attractive, younger, wealthier and so forth. Their focus and concern is on the fact that a marriage has been arranged for them and they are likely to be together forever with the person. They need to make it work out. Most Indians believe that as the couples come to know each other, they come to love and respect one another and passion develops out of this. Because so much work is involved for both sides in arranging the marriage, it’s near blasphemy for either side to not make the marriage work. Therefore, the couples do everything within their power to nurture one another and care about each other.

I have a great deal of respect for this system of marriage for numerous reasons. However, the largest lesson you can get out of the Indian system of marriage is that it is like the difference between a career and a job. A career is something you are committed to deep down and plan on doing forever. A job is something you only do because you have to. When you do a career, you are willing to ride the ups and downs and make the most of everything, no matter what. You will do whatever it takes. You will try and make it work, even if you are not passionate about it. You will try and learn what it takes to succeed. You see yourself doing this in the future. You try and fall in love.

This is what people do who have careers. They do whatever it takes to make it work because they see themselves doing this in the future and they have committed to it. A career is much better and preferable to having a job. You need to commit to something before it can work. In relationships, you generally need to commit to the other person before they will reciprocate. No person in their right mind will marry someone not committed to them. You shouldn’t do anything you aren’t committed to. Commitment is a hugely important thing. You need to be committed.

Far too many people have jobs and not careers. The reason for this is they do work that is tides them over. They do something out of circumstance and look and hoping for something better. Despite being involved in what they do, they can’t necessarily see themselves doing what they do five or ten years from now. I personally feel that one of the largest problems in the world today is that far few people have careers. They have jobs. Why should anyone simply do a job? A job is boring for you and won’t lead anywhere. You need a career.

You can have a career doing anything. You could be a floor sweeper and have a career. You could be a teacher and have a career. You could be a salesperson and have a career. You could be a doctor, lawyer, or dentist and have a career. You literally can do anything and have a career. People who have careers are so much happier, well balanced, and better off in work and in their social and family lives than people who have jobs. They key to having a career is that you are committed in your body and mind and you see yourself doing something in the future.

I love going into companies and meeting people who have careers. When you go into a company and find people who have been working there 10, 20, or more years, you will find people who have careers. They are often well-settled emotionally. They are happier and there is a certain energy and enthusiasm around them. They could be doing anything. They could work in a warehouse stocking boxes. They could be bookkeepers. They could be doing any number of tasks in the company. The point is, they have careers and they see themselves doing something long-term. People with careers generally have families at home. They generally are well-balanced and people like them. They are supportive of their employers and their employers are generally quite supportive of them.

Far few people have careers. They are not emotionally connected to their work and believe they need to be somewhere else. Persons with careers want to learn about what they do often when they aren’t working. They adopt the attitudes, mannerisms, and ways of being of others in their career. They take a certain amount of enthusiasm in what they do. They are generally good at what they do. Everyone knows who they are and what they do.

The next highest state of development after a job is a career. It is far better to have a career than a job. A career is something you always do and will always do. If you are currently doing a job, the next best thing you can do is have a career.

I recently had the privilege of traveling to Australia from Fiji with the motivational speaker Anthony Robbins. We took a small plane Tony chartered from Tony’s resort in Fiji to Nadi, the capital of Fiji. We were in Nadi to catch a flight to Brisbane, where Tony was on his way to give a seminar called Date with Destiny. Tony is the one who first told me about the distinction between a career, job, and mission about a week ago over lunch at his resort and few subsequent discussions. You may have heard Tony say before things like “Live with Passion!” and understand his true and incredible motivation. As we got off the little plane in Nadi, I looked over at Tony and he was “in state.” His entire body language had changed from what I had seen earlier and even though his seminar wasn’t for the next few days, he was busy preparing for it in his mind. He stepped differently. He pushed his chest out when he walked. He was no longer smiling. The second we had gotten on the small airplane, he opened his laptop and began preparing. You could tell that something had come over him and it was a transformation I had never seen in anyone before. As we waited at the ticket counter, Tony went into an incredible state where his focus and passion were apparent in his body language and energy, despite the fact that he wasn’t even speaking.

Tony is an incredibly passionate man. The first day of his seminar, he spoke for 11 and half hours straight without a break to eat, drink, or use the restroom. He gets teary-eyed when he speaks. His body language changes and he rises up. Tony is the “real deal” and someone who is on a mission to change people’s lives. And you can see it in his results. Thousands of fans cheer for him and millions of people all over the world know who he is. Tony is on an incredible mission and his mission is so strong, I predict people will be talking about him hundreds of years after he dies. His mission is a part of who he is and who he has become. In the coming weeks, NBC will even be making a television show documenting Tony on his mission to change lives.

If a man like Tony Robbins had chosen to be a doctor, lawyer, or a dentist, imagine what would have happened. His passion for changing lives would never have been realized and the incredible accomplishments he’s experienced in his life and for other people’s lives never would have occurred. It’s pathetic to think about this–but this is exactly what most people do.

You need this passion and your career needs to be a mission. You need to go into “state” and you need to find something that takes over your body and your mind and that motivates you to an incredible extreme. What is it that you could do that would make you immortal? What is it that charges you up like being in love for the first time? What is it you could do forever? What is it you would do even if no one paid you to do? What is it within you that gives you the most extraordinary charge you can imagine?

The highest state of work is when you are on a mission. You need to be on a mission. For me, my mission is getting the world jobs. When I looked around me and saw the mistakes I’d made with my choice of work, being a lawyer, and how unhappy this made me, I knew the power of what we do for a living. I’ve seen so many lives ruined by choosing work someone doesn’t like or enjoy. I’ve seen so many people unable to find missions and be unemployed. I’ve watched people commit suicide because they felt rudderless in what they did for a living. I’ve been in loveless relationships and relationships filled with love and gone down my own path of destruction. The difference between having a job or career and having a mission is huge. Look at people like Tony Robbins. Look at the people you respect most in the world and chances are, they are on a mission. A mission changes everything and it will propel you forward.

When I found my mission of getting jobs for the world, everything changed. I’ve read thousands of books about this. I’ve started companies and reached millions of people in my mission. I think about my mission all the time and it just keeps getting bigger and bigger. I love my mission and it’s the most meaningful thing in the world for me. It has transformed my life and I am a completely different person today. I even look different physically.

I’ve watched missions transform the lives of people everywhere. But so few people ever find missions. You absolutely, positively need a mission and it’s going to change your life. A mission will bring you everything you ever wanted, help transform the world, and take you to worlds and dreams you can’t even comprehend–of the body, spiritual, and physical worlds.

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About Harrison Barnes

Harrison Barnes is the Founder of BCG Attorney Search and a successful legal recruiter himself. Harrison is extremely committed to and passionate about the profession of legal placement. His firm BCG Attorney Search has placed thousands of attorneys. BCG Attorney Search works with attorneys to dramatically improve their careers by leaving no stone unturned in a search and bringing out the very best in them. Harrison has placed the leaders of the nation’s top law firms, and countless associates who have gone on to lead the nation’s top law firms. There are very few firms Harrison has not made placements with. Harrison’s writings about attorney careers and placements attract millions of reads each year. He coaches and consults with law firms about how to dramatically improve their recruiting and retention efforts. His company LawCrossing has been ranked on the Inc. 500 twice. For more information, please visit Harrison Barnes’ bio.

About BCG Attorney Search

BCG Attorney Search matches attorneys and law firms with unparalleled expertise and drive that gets results. Known globally for its success in locating and placing attorneys in law firms of all sizes, BCG Attorney Search has placed thousands of attorneys in law firms in thousands of different law firms around the country. Unlike other legal placement firms, BCG Attorney Search brings massive resources of over 150 employees to its placement efforts locating positions and opportunities that its competitors simply cannot. Every legal recruiter at BCG Attorney Search is a former successful attorney who attended a top law school, worked in top law firms and brought massive drive and commitment to their work. BCG Attorney Search legal recruiters take your legal career seriously and understand attorneys. For more information, please visit www.BCGSearch.com.

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4 Responses to “ Anthony Robbins, Work, Jobs, Careers, and Missions”
  1. Avatar Joan says:

    I think it’s really interesting that you mention turning your career into a mission. I am going to be graduating from college next year, and it’s hard to figure out what you want to do, what you’ll love to do and how to make a job into a career and furthermore into a mission, but I also think that maybe it’s something to fall into and keep trying to find. Very inspirational message!

  2. I completely agree. I found something I am passionate about and if I can convince the employer I should be the one with the job… I doubt I will ever leave. I am passionate about the Red Wings and about Social Media. I want to fix one of their websites to make it what it used to be and build a niche audience again. This is what I am passionate about and am a bit confused also about forming my own biz too! I guess this intrigues me too!

  3. Avatar Mike says:

    Harrison,

    I have to say that this is by far one of the best blog posts I have ever read online. Hell, I have never even typed a response to anything I have read online before.

    Don’t mean to be a wise ass in any way whatsoever and can infer what you meant, but in the first sentence of the second last paragraph I think, after having read this entire post, that you should have put careers/missions in place of jobs here “When I found my mission of getting jobs for the world, everything changed.” (Is much more accurate I believe!)

    Anyhow, I just wanted to say that the entire message was extremely inspiring and enlightening. Your short stories and examples both easier to understand the definitions of (work), job, career, and mission and truly brought everything for me to life! There is not a day that goes by in my own life that I think about the differences you describe here and the effect they play in one’s life.

    Currently, I am 22 year old, a year or two from finishing undergrad (due to changing my major so many times), and am in turmoil in regards to what I want to do for the rest of my life. The hardest thing about it is that what I believe that I now want to do (after having changed my major and potential career ideas seven or more times) has nothing to do with what my major is in.

    It is difficult because simply continuing to go to school more for something else costs money and time. I agree with everything that you have said in your article. I even encourage others to truly seek something that they themselves, and not what there parents or others have told them to do, are passionate about…that they could see themselves doing for the rest of their entire lives, making the biggest difference during their time on Earth, and fulfilling the God-given potential that we were made to be!

    In spite of being an optimistic person, I cannot see I can become what I truly want to be, what my mission may be. As a result, I have grown clinically depressed, have been on several meds over the past half a year to deal with everything, and even have felt suicidal at times (no joke). I sometimes ponder over why the hell life has to always be so hard, such a damn struggle. I mean, why the heck can it not be easier finding something you are not ONLY good at, but also LOVE to do?!

    You stated that one should find what they are truly and uniquely good at, correct, and then make a career based upon that? But is that good enough? I pose the questions to you: Would you rather do something for the rest of your life that you are good, maybe even the best at? Or would you rather do something for the rest of your life that you love to do? One would logically assert that if a person finds what they truly Love to do, then the probability that one will become good over time at what they choose to do is very high. However, I have played so many different scenarios in my mind as to what I may want to do one day and so far I have failed with each new idea. It hasn’t happened for one reason or another. And to be honest, I feel that it has greatly contributed to my growing depression…as each idea comes crashing into the ground, one on top of another.

    At this point I feel that, in the state I am currently in, I will be lucky to even graduate from college, let alone go on to graduate school. I don’t want to work a job for a moment of my life, but as of now it looks like it unfortunately is the direction I am heading towards.

    Would you happen to have any advice for me? Don’t want to take up too much of your time seeing as you’re both busy and successful, but figured I’d shoot this to you anyhow. Thanks for writing this…meant a lot to me!

    Mike

  4. Avatar John Elstner says:

    Nice article. I wholeheartedly agree. The trick is finding that mission when its not readily apparent.

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The Importance of Fitting In

By on Jun 13,2024

The ability to fit into your work environment is among the most important parts of obtaining and retaining a job, even more so than your skill level. Fitting in means nothing more than being comfortable in one’s work environment, and making others similarly comfortable. Employers want to hire people who will embrace their approach to business and the world on physical and moral levels, so you must strive to fit in with their worldview.

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