We’ve all heard the advice: do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.

It sounds inspiring. It looks good on a coffee mug. But it’s misleading — even dangerous — because it oversimplifies how we are truly designed as human beings.

The truth is: love alone isn’t enough. You can love the subject matter and still feel drained. You can love the mission and still find yourself stuck, frustrated, or underperforming. And often, it’s because you’re trying to build your work solely around passion, without understanding the way you are inherently wired to operate.

This misunderstanding is at the root of a lot of workplace problems — disengaged employees, underutilized talent, high turnover, and leadership that can’t quite figure out why their culture feels “off” despite best efforts.

Whether you’re a leader of a team, an HR decision-maker, or a solo professional running your own practice, this is a great place to start making a shift.

The Pattern of Giftedness — Your Real Operating System

Every person has a pattern of giftedness — a unique, consistent way of functioning that shows up in every role, task, and context. It’s not random. It’s not something you “pick up” along the way. It’s part of how you are designed, and it remains the same throughout your life.

MCODE (formerly the Motivated Abilities Pattern) reveals that this pattern has five dimensions:

1. Abilities – The natural competencies you use to get meaningful results.
2. Subject Matter – The topics, materials, or fields you are drawn to.
3. Circumstances – The conditions in which you work best.
4. Operating Relationships – How you interact with others to accomplish goals.
5. Payoff – The specific kind of result that brings you deep satisfaction.

What I love about MCODE is that it’s based on your stories — real situations where you were at your best — rather than hypothetical questions.

That’s a big difference from most assessments.

• Myers-Briggs asks you to choose between being more “introverted” or “extroverted.”
• DISC slots you into a quadrant based on your dominance, influence, steadiness, or compliance.
• StrengthsFinder gives you a list of top traits based on agreement with statements.

Those can all be interesting and even useful — but they’re often about preferences or self-perception. MCODE is about patterns you’ve actually lived out. It looks at how you do what you do when you’re at your best — and that’s far more predictive of where you’ll thrive.

Why Companies Should Care (and Solopreneurs Too)

If companies understood the five dimensions of giftedness and matched people to roles that honored them, engagement wouldn’t just improve — it would skyrocket. Leaders wouldn’t be “motivating” people into productivity; they’d be designing work in ways that naturally bring out people’s best.

For solo professionals, the impact is just as big. Imagine designing your practice, your offers, and your way of working around your actual design, not someone else’s idea of what success looks like.

And yet… many people never get there because of what Gay Hendricks calls the upper-limit problem in The Big Leap. Even when they do find their Zone of Genius, they unconsciously pull back — doubting themselves, procrastinating, or walking away from opportunities that feel “too good.”

That’s why the work isn’t just about knowing your design — it’s about creating the internal capacity to live and work there without sabotaging yourself.

Strategic Alignment Prompt:

What red flags are telling you something’s off? It might be low energy even after rest, constant friction with your work or team, dread before certain tasks, or feeling like you’re working hard but making little progress. These signals are easy to ignore — until they cost you more than you realize.

If you’re out of alignment, everything else in your business and life will eventually be affected — your results, your relationships, even your health. That’s why it’s worth talking about it before the cracks widen. If you’re ready to explore what’s really behind the challenges you’re facing, let’s have that conversation.