In 2013, the renowned educationalist Sir Ken Robinson told Big Think a story about a man who was perhaps the unluckiest farmer in Australia. For generations, the man’s family had farmed the same land, scratching out a living from soil that gave just enough back. Then the rains failed one year too often. The family abandoned the farm and moved to Perth.

Years later, near the end of his father’s life, the man suggested they visit their old place one last time. They drove for hours. Pulling up, the dirt track they remembered was now a paved road. The old farmhouse sat surrounded by buildings, trucks, and cranes. A sign read: “The Western Australian Nickel Company.” A government-commissioned geological survey had discovered a huge seam of nickel running 18 inches below the topsoil. It was worth millions.

The son looked at his father, expecting shock. 

“[The father] just burst out laughing,” Robinson said, “because he realized they had spent years, generations, picking out this thin living from this farm, and right beneath the surface there was the treasure trove that would have, you know, set them up for life if they’d had — if they had only dug down a bit.”  

What’s possible if you dig deeper? What capacities are you walking over every day because you’ve never done the excavation?

“Just like the earth, it seems to me, human resources are often buried deep beneath the surface,” Robinson told Big Think. “You can spend your whole life completely oblivious to some talent you may have because the opportunity never showed up for you to discover your resolve to develop it.”

These are questions I often think about when I see people exhausted in their professional lives. I work in leadership development, and I’ve seen it in everyone from C-Suite execs in biopharma to factory-floor workers in breweries. I’ve seen people craving success, and often finding it, but still searching for something to belong to that’s bigger than themselves. 

I’ve had jobs I’ve loved. I’ve had jobs I’ve hated. The difference between the two mirrors something that Sir Ken Robinson articulates: Finding your place in the world requires a two-way journey. You have to explore the outer world of opportunities. These are the jobs we aspire to hold, the salaries we desire to reach, the places we want to live, etc. The second part, which I’ve found is often missing, is that we have to simultaneously excavate our inner world of aptitudes, values, and what actually energizes us. Most people exhaust themselves with the first journey chasing and chasing endlessly, and skip the second entirely.

The pattern

Robinson describes finding your element as exploring two territories simultaneously. The inner world contains your private consciousness, your aptitudes, and the values and interests that guide your choices. The outer world presents opportunities to test these out and reveal new aspects of yourself.

Your inner landscape filters every opportunity, choice, and possibility. If you don’t develop this inner sense, you chase what looks good because you have not developed the capacity to recognize what feels good. Writer Anais Nin captured this when she wrote, “I don’t see the world as it is. I see it as I am.” 

Most people spend their energy exclusively on outer exploration. I did, and it’s still easy for me to slip into the habit. It feels productive to apply for jobs, take courses, switch industries, and move cities. Still, none of this addresses the challenge of discovering what we are actually looking for. 

I think of one of my dearest friends, Jake, who pursued engineering in college. He hated it but succeeded in his studies anyway, slowly learning to tune out his internal response. The system rewarded the override of his own emotions to “fit in,” not greater attunement to the truth of his inner world. And if he had kept going to graduation, he would have mastered suppressing the very feedback that could guide him toward work that he would love. Fortunately, he realized the path he was on, and he left his degree. It was not for him, and he is much happier and much more fulfilled as a result. In his journey, Jake had to find an alternative path because the system didn’t ask those questions.

How many people never get off the track, staying in a world and a job that requires them to shut off from everything inside of them? I worry that too many of us know people like that, and that too many of us have been (or are still) those people. 

The practice 

Instead of mindlessly pursuing external opportunities, the cycle that I’ve found actually works looks like this: Test something, listen to what happens inside you, reflect on what got revealed, and test again with new information. It is the ‘street version’ of the scientific method and running experiments. 

Most people evaluate their work in binary terms: good job or bad job, love it or hate it. But what if you broke a role into its actual components? Instead of “I hate my job,” you might notice: I hate the reporting structure, love the problem-solving, and feel neutral about the team dynamics. Instead of “I should quit,” you might ask: Which pieces energize me? Which drain me? What would a role look like that amplified the first and minimized the second?

For designer Ayse Birsel, this kind of deconstruction requires you to hear signals you’ve trained yourself to ignore. To start creating more sensitive hearing, Birsel asks people to start by drawing your life as a circle. Who takes your time? What fills your days? Now divide that circle into four quadrants: emotion, physical, intellect, and spirit. Where do your activities cluster? What patterns emerge? What’s missing entirely? What’s overrepresented to the point of crowding out everything else?

The patterns may reveal things you haven’t consciously processed. Maybe all your energy goes to intellectual work while the physical and spiritual quadrants sit empty. Maybe you’re emotionally drained because nothing in your week replenishes that capacity. The map shows you where the imbalance lives.

Now, when you encounter external opportunities in the world, you have something specific to evaluate them against. Does this role let me use these aptitudes? Does this organization’s purpose align with these values? Does this path serve these priorities?

With what you’ve learned, your job is to create one small test. It can be tiny. Pick an opportunity to use a strong aptitude or explore a suspected line of passion for you. There is no failing here; our job is just to collect data. After the test, reflect on what got revealed. What energized you? What drained you? What surprised you? Use that information for the next test. Your radar gets more sensitive. What you’re looking for becomes clearer because you’ve built the capacity to recognize it when it appears.

What’s next

Work-life integration happens when inner excavation meets the outer opportunity you find yourself in. This requires careful attention to what a particular kind of work reveals about what you’re capable of and what you value. But once you’ve done that work, the outer exploration becomes exponentially more productive because you’re drawing on a ‘clean’ fuel source of your inner inspiration, strengths, values, and essence.

The excavation work is learning to dig repeatedly through your experiments, building capacity to recognize signals you’ve been trained to ignore, and calibrating your radar to tell the difference between what looks good and what feels true.