Is your work yours?

Twenty-eight keys have asked what is yours. This one asks whether your work is.

Three newer mirrors for people who make their own way. Roger Hamilton's Wealth Dynamics, from 2006, sorts entrepreneurs into eight profiles and tells you how you create value. Sally Hogshead's Fascination Advantage, from 2014, flips the lens: not how you see the world but how the world sees you, in forty-nine archetypes. And Jonathan Fields' Sparketype, from 2021, asks the question I find most useful: what kind of work makes you come alive? Ten types, free, drawn from half a million responses.

I'll be straight about the three. Wealth Dynamics has the most structure and the least evidence; it's used in founder circles and gives people a story about why their partner drives them crazy, which is useful and should be held as a story. Fascination comes out of branding research and asks the the first month question from the outside: when you walk into a room, what do people reliably get from you? Sparketype is the most grounded. The ten types are the Maker, Scientist, Essentialist, Performer, Warrior, Sage, Advisor, Advocate, Maven and Nurturer, and each person has a primary, a shadow, and an anti-type, the work that drains you.

Fields' finding is the one that stopped me. People often build whole careers on their shadow, the thing they can do well, and starve their primary, the thing that makes them alive, because the shadow paid first. Read that again if you've ever been very good at a job you quietly dreaded.

That's a finding for the first month. If your answer today is "no, my work isn't mine," that is not a crisis. It's a line in the log, and it comes back in the fourth month, when we build your why. For now, the point is just to know.