Hi ,

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Last week we said the quiet part out loud: knowing your Sparketype® was never the destination. It’s the trailhead. And I asked you to go looking for the place where your deep gladness meets a real hunger.

My guess is that most of us went looking in one place only.

Our job.

The problem: we expect our paid work to carry all of our aliveness.

We say “work” and we mean “job.” The two have fused in our heads until they’re the same word. So, when the job can’t fully express your Sparketype® (and often it can’t, at least not all day, every day), you draw one of two conclusions.

Either you’re in the wrong life.

Or you resign yourself to feeling half-alive and call it being an adult.

Both of those conclusions are wrong. And they come from the same mistake: loading the whole weight of who you are onto one domain, then blaming yourself or the job when it buckles.

Because work, real work, the kind of effort that can make you come alive, doesn’t only happen at your job. It happens in four domains.

• Paid Work is the one we obsess over.

• Learning is the classes, courses, skills and subjects you throw yourself into.

• Leisure is the craft, the play, the things you do for the sheer love of them.

• Devotion is the roles you give yourself to, as a parent, a volunteer, a carer, a friend, a member of your community.

All four take real effort. All four are work. And all four can be where your Sparketype® comes alive.

Here’s the part that changes everything. When you express your Sparketype® in one of those other three domains, it rarely stays there. It compounds. The skill, the energy, the confidence, the new way of seeing, it comes home. It walks back into your paid work and makes you better at it.

A pursuit you chose purely for joy can end up making your day job better. And sometimes, more valuable.

A thought leader worth hearing on this:

Annie Dillard, in The Writing Life, wrote:

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

The insight: Read it again, slowly. She doesn’t say how we spend our working hours. She says our days. All of them. All four domains. Your life isn’t measured only by your job, which means your aliveness was never meant to come only from your job.

The implication: If your job can’t carry everything, you’re not failing. You’re overloading one domain and starving three. The question you’ve been asking, how do I make my job everything; is the wrong question, and it’s exhausting you. The better question is quieter: where else can my Sparketype® breathe, and how will that breath, come back to my work?

And there’s real freedom in that. Not everyone can be fully sparked by what they’re paid to do, and that’s allowed. A good-enough day job, optimised as far as it honestly can go, plus genuinely sparked pursuits in the other three domains, can add up to a deeply fulfilling life. Better still, those pursuits get to stay pure, because they never have to pay the bills.

In the end, it’s a freedom thing.

How this actually gets solved — in the real world.

Let me show you with my own life, because I’m living this one right now.

I am yearning to learn comedy.

That’s my ‘Learning Domain’ at the moment, and I want to do it properly. I want to work with a mentor so I don’t skip too many corners. And for now, I accept that the work will be unglamorous. It means going through my keynotes line by line, hunting for the places where comedy could make a point land harder, and practising so, I can perform the material in front of real, live, arms-folded audiences.

Let me be honest with you. I’m not funny yet. I’m a beginner, and plenty of what I try doesn’t land. And being a beginner, being genuinely bad at something again, is turning out to be the whole point.

Because watch what’s compounding.

I’m an Advisor primary with a Warrior shadow. My work is guiding people to grow, and gathering and leading them while I do it. Comedy is a crash course in exactly the muscles that work runs on. Timing. Connection. Reading a room in real time. Landing a hard truth, so lightly that someone can actually receive it instead of defending against it.

I choose comedy for joy. And I hope it will sharpen my advisory work, and to make the way I speak, more distinctive. A thing I picked up for love may make my paid work better. Possibly more valuable.

That’s the compounding effect. Live. In my own calendar.

So, here’s how you work it, practically, this week.

Map your week across the four domains. Paid Work, Learning, Leisure, Devotion. Be honest about where your hours and your heart actually go.

Notice which domains are starved. Most of us know before we finish the sentence.

Then pick one non-paid domain and give your Sparketype® one small, regular outlet there. Not a grand plan. One outlet.

Then watch for what starts showing up back in your paid work. An idea. A steadiness. A skill you didn’t go looking for. That’s the compounding, and once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

You’re not escaping your job. You’re feeding the person who does it.

Tie the bow: how each Sparketype® compounds back into your paid work.

• The Maven (I live to learn) studies something unrelated for pure joy, and brings cross-pollinated ideas back to work that no one else in the room could have made.

• The Maker (I make ideas manifest) builds something with their hands at home, and returns to work with the quiet confidence of someone who finishes things.

• The Scientist (I figure things out) takes on a puzzle or a hobby for its own sake, and sharpens the exact mind the day job keeps asking for.

• The Essentialist (I create order from chaos) brings order to a passion project, and carries that calm, clear system straight back to the chaos at work.

• The Performer (I turn moments into magic) joins an improv class for fun, and suddenly their presentations come alive.

• The Sage (I awaken insight) teaches a class on weekends, and comes back to work a clearer, more patient communicator.

• The Warrior (I gather and lead people) leads a community group after hours, and returns a better, braver leader.

• The Advisor (I guide to grow) mentors someone outside of work, and deepens the very craft their job depends on.

• The Advocate (I’m your champion) throws themselves behind a cause they chose, and brings that conviction home to the people they champion at work.

• The Nurturer (I’ve got you) lets their Devotion give something back to them for once, and stops pouring from an empty cup at the office.

Same effort. Ten different ways it comes home.

The Practical Move:

Something to sit with this week.

Which of your four domains have you starved the longest? And what’s one small way you could feed it this week?

Sit with that one. Don’t solve it in your head. Feed it.

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Talk soon,

Mark & The Sparked Team

PS – For more daily ‘sparks’, follow @sparked.next on Instagram

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One more thing, for the coaches, leaders, and people-practitioners reading.

You see this pattern constantly, even if you’ve never named it. A client, a team member, pours everything onto their job, the job can’t hold it all, and they conclude something is wrong with them, or wrong with the work.

Helping someone see all four domains, and the compounding between them, can lift an enormous weight off their shoulders. And more often than not, it makes them better at the very job they were about to quit.

That’s a core part of what Certified Sparketype® Advisors are trained to do. The CSA is a 12-week certification. The current cohort is underway, and applications are now open for the next one, starting in January. .. [Learn more ]​

If this is the work you’re already doing, or the work you want to do, this is built for you.

In a few weeks, something we’ve been building opens its doors. It’s made for exactly this: what you actually do with who you are. More to come.

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