Perhaps the subject matter of your work drives you. Making video games, solving impossible accounting nightmares, touching peoples’ lives through social work, or expanding the sum of human knowledge through scientific research — these are all things that just might make you tick. When you love what you do, passion is easy to show.

Maybe the direct result of your job isn’t what drives you. Maybe what you love is solving problems, no matter the source. You could be driven by helping other people grow professionally and/or personally. Or that paycheck that enables your hobbies, your life, and the happiness of your family might be what keeps you going.

Passion is powerful. When everything clicks, you’re capable of achieving nearly superhuman feats. Ever pull an all-nighter because there was something about this project you just couldn’t put down until it was right? Do you find yourself deeply immersed in flow, producing work that you’re innately proud of? Will, skill, and experience all help — but nothing adds flavor to your results like the sauce of true passion.

Are you a development lead aspiring to the chair of the CTO? You’ll have to grow your knowledge of business while you embrace technology. Learn to delegate the tasks you’ve grown comfortable with; your programming team has to write that bug-fix, but by gosh, you’d better know what it is. Never stop learning, researching, pushing your team to new techniques, and discarding the ones that no longer work. To meet your ambition, you need to inspire people to create the new cutting edge, the new state of the art.

Are you a salesperson aspiring to by the VP of Marketing? Always watch the competition, always foster creativity. Search for your purple cow. You’re seeking to lead in a field where success is defined by standing out. Take risks. Fail faster. Start a hallway meeting about that new product TV commercial you can’t get out of your head. Know what’s trending on Twitter and why. Learn from what works — and doesn’t — for yourself and others.

At 3:30 PM, or whenever that mid-day doldrum happens to strike you, stop and review your ambition. Identify a baby step you can take towards it today, now, and take that step.

Do you want to grow a team of the top talent to be found anywhere? Your Motivation may be helping others to grow. Or it may be the thrill of seeking that top talent in the rough.

Do you want to make awesome stuff? Your Motivation may be the act of delivering products or things to people. Alternately, you might be driven by the unleashing of pure creative force.

Do you want the corner office? Perhaps you’re driven simply by bearing the burden of success — or failure. Or it could be that you simply crave power, or money. This isn’t a question of comparative morality or “higher purposes;” identifying your Motivation is a step in focusing your career path.

Use your Motivation to drive your actions. When times feel tough, or your personal energy wanes, seek tasks that reinforce your Motivation. You — and everyone around you — will gain from your improved energy. Rank every decision you make against this important yardstick. (And if you absolutely must oppose your own Motivation, for the good of the business, for the good of the team, to keep your star employee happy, or to appease your own boss, simply keep your original cause close to you.)

I find myself to be a creator at heart. Every time I am unable to create something, it feels like a loss. If my days are spent on the (neccessary, mind you) tasks of politics or administration, they’re days spent not creating anything. Remember that your life is more than your day job. Find ways to use your Motivation inside and outside of the office. If you love helping people, volunteer. If you love mentoring, reach out to community organizations that need leadership. If you love creativity, then play an instrument or paint…

… or write a blog!

Draw a MAP for your career. There isn’t a fixed geography or set of landmarks that you can count on. In fact, there’s nothing promising that the terrain won’t change beneath your feet. Still, there are three poles you can guide yourself on: Motivation, Ambition, and Passion. These poles deserve (and will receive) discussions of their own, but for now, here’s the beginning of an overview.

Motivation

This is the reason why you’re striving to grow. Maybe it’s money — and in all likelihood, it’s at least partially money; that’s just fine! Perhaps you simply relish the challenge of continually stretching your abilities. It could be that you find fulfillment in increasing your personal accountability for success. Identifying your motivation is one step in drawing your MAP.

Ambition

This is what you want to accomplish through putting in the pain and effort to grow. Perhaps you want to be the Wizard behind the curtain, secretly in control. Or, to hell with secrecy, it’s the CEO’s chair you have your eye on. Maybe you want to quietly grow and rise in place, or maybe you’re building your skills portfolio to move on to apply what you know new companies and challenges. From team leadership to public-company executive, knowing what your goal is also helps plot a course along your MAP.

Passion

This is what you love about what you do. Some people love applying the tools at hand (whether that is technology, marketing, process savvy, creativity, or just plain luck) to solve real problems. It could be that you love your specific industry or product so much that you want to build the best widget, ever. Perhaps the complex interplay of navigating politics to get something done is what fires you up. Maybe you enjoy forging teams and helping others to find their way and grow. Passion is the tool that will keep you going when the going gets hard (or harder).

Your MAP

Motivation tells you why you’re traveling. Ambition helps you know where you’re going. And Passion keeps you moving. Take the next step on your journey by drawing your MAP.

There, I just managed you. It was probably an empty and unproductive action. You could very well ignore what I said entirely. It certainly didn’t lead to any relationship-building, and it won’t develop better habits in you or in me. (Admittedly, it could have had a little bit of one-off attention-grabbing value.)

In its core, most-oversimplified expression, management is the task of telling people what to do. And anybody can do that. Even if a management position is, in fact, your goal, remember that this technique of baldly demanding action is not a unique value proposition that you can bring to the table.

Management isn’t going to get you where you need to be. Leadership will.

The great thing about leadership is that it is, in many ways, orthogonal to management. If you’re a solid senior contributor with eyes on the big chair, you can start leading today. If you’re a manager who typically issues orders, you can always throw a little less management and a little more leadership into the mix. Acts of leadership accomplish a lot:

• Generally, people like being led. Approach it right and your peers will respond positively.
• Leadership actions build cohesive teams, and cohesive teams get more and better things done — even when things get rough.
• Great leaders command personal loyalty.
• Paychecks only go so far for motivation — the only way you’ll realize greatness from your team members is if they are self-motivated to greatness (in which case, you’ve made a great hire) or if you lead them there.

Try leading a little today. It doesn’t even have to hurt!

• Always, always set the example for everyone around you. Be a source of positivity. Don’t just make the Kool-Aid; drink it. (Within reason… see next rule!)
• Be genuine. People are smart, and they can sense when you’re spinning things. Shared pain is a powerful team-builder when times do become unpleasant.
• Use the Team Golden Rule: Treat your teammates (and employees) with the respect and loyalty you’d want from them if your roles were reversed.
• Don’t impose mandates. Seek solutions in collaboration with your team, providing suggestions to guide the process.
• If you’ve applied great skill in hiring, and had solid luck, your team members are probably smarter than you and better than you at doing their jobs. Trust their ideas to outperform yours.
• Take someone out for coffee. Ask how things are going. And now, really listen.

What can you be the best in the world at?

Don’t cheat; this is an important question. Having trouble finding answers? I’ll start you off: you are the best in the world at being uniquely you. If that answer sounds glib, that’s okay because it is glib. But, use this answer to start focusing your thoughts. I’ll wait.

If you’re like me, you may still be having trouble. Here’s another way to start narrowing the field: What can you not be the best in the world at? I have a short list of answers to this one to get you started — and I don’t even know you!

• You can’t work the hardest.
• You aren’t the smartest, and you don’t know everything. Not even in your field.
• You don’t have the best ideas, or even the most original ones.
• In fact, you probably aren’t any “est.” You aren’t the loudest, richest, poorest, hungriest, creativest, …genuinest, …motivatedest, or first… est.
• You can’t always succeed.
• You don’t actually know everyone you need to.

Now that we have those out of the way, how can we use them to help guide us? Some of the following just might be true. Try saying them out loud, and see how they feel.

• I have the unique combination of ambition, skill, and my own creative ideas.
• I bring a one-in-the-world blend of creativity, technical, and business skills everywhere I go.
• I can build consensus among strangers by sharing my vision, along with a glimmer of the path we’ll have to walk to get there.
• I work hard, and I work smart, and I do the best work I can while I do.
• I know more about the problems I’m trying to solve and how I’m going to get them solved than anybody else who is working on those problems right now.
• I know many people who can understand my goals, and we help each other make our great ideas into legendary ideas.
• I am a visionary, and I can make my unique visions into tangible demonstrations that others can see, hear, touch, smell, or taste.

At least one of these probably felt about right. Go tweak it until it feels completely right. I bet it reminds you of two or three more. The sky’s the limit. Don’t try to be the best you can be. Try to be the best in the world.

In academia, of course, there is a long-standing tradition of sharing. Even earning a Ph.D. requires not only coming up with a brand new idea, but doing so by standing on the shoulders of the giants who came before — and then sharing your idea publicly. If free and open sharing is the gold standard for the pure development of knowledge, why would the situation be any different in the development of business, career, or industry-specific knowledge?

There are even massive, household-name businesses based around facilitation of information-sharing. Blogging sites like WordPress, Tumblr, and Blogger facilitate the written word. Picasa and Flickr push images to millions of screens. YouTube and Vimeo allow the sharing of everything from giggling babies to technical screencasts to artistic performances.

Sharing is a scary step to take. Other people might even criticize your ideas! Or, you might accidentally show others how you’ve managed to succeed. Take the risk! If your success is based on a secret sauce, then it is limited by your ability to prevent others from discovering the recipe — but if it is open to share, then you can improve at a speed multiplied by your audience.

I’ve been told many times to become fearless. This advice feels a bit off-target to me. Fear is a natural reaction when faced with uncontrolled, unfamiliar, or threatening circumstances. Feeling fear is fine; allowing it to control your actions is another situation entirely!

The most common root of fear is uncertainty. Face the fear and figure out what you feel uncertain about. A great way to do this is to ask yourself, “What is the worst thing that could happen?” Perhaps your job could be at risk if you don’t meet performance goals. Maybe you won’t get that promotion. It could be that what’s driving your fear is success, and the additional responsibility that could entail. Naming what you face is the first step to overcoming it.

Now that you’ve named your fear, spend some time reflecting on how you can tame it. If the worst thing comes to pass, what can you do about it? If you lose your job, you can search for a new one. If you’re passed over for promotion, you can approach your manager and ask to build a plan for career growth. If you don’t think you can handle more responsibility, you can list out everything that needs to be done and sort out which items are truly important. This is an exercise worth a bit of time — no problem is truly insurmountable.

Do you feel that moment, where you’ve realized that “the worst that can happen” is no more than a temporary setback? Consider that fear faced — for now. It may come back, but if it does, repeat this exercise.

Now that your fear is managed, you’re free to put your energy elsewhere. Don’t stop here. Go put those plans into motion.

I was a young, overweight ubernerd in this class. I was unpopular, a mediocre writer, and a terrible artist — the class wasn’t going to be motivated by a sitcom-style speech from me, and I wasn’t about to write a vision document or throw out some storyboards. But there was one thing I was halfway decent at. I could write simple computer programs. And in those days, the artistic limits of computer games included pixel art with 16 colors; I was no star, but you could recognize things. Frustrated at our lack of progress, I took a weekend to assemble what I’d now call an animatic, showing a take on what our core idea might look like. The weekend turned into a few hours of coding some animations and motioin, many more trying to hammer pixels into recognizable shapes, and even some primitive sound synthesis to liven things up. Monday morning, I sneaked into class early and tried to show this demo to the teacher, who delayed and had me present to the entire class at once instead. And so, a room full of teenagers watched my homespun art for a minute or so.

Time for some honesty: that animatic was pretty much crap, and no bits of it made it into the end product. But seeing stuff moving on a TV screen inspired a couple of more visually-minded folks in the class to attack the storyboards with new vigor. Our class went on to win the regional competition, which enabled us to work with our stellar local PBS station to film the actual PSA spot. Their top-notch assistance and editing helped us win the national competition, and our PSA was shown nationwide. Pretty exciting stuff for a bunch of kids from a relatively backwater town!

The important thing I learned from this experience was that I had a unique voice — one that could motivate other people. The electronic medium turned out to be the way to release it. Your voice may be to carefully write perfect proposals, or you may be that guy who can sketch so compellingly on the whiteboard that how could we not have seen that ourselves already? You are comfortably speaking with your powerful voice; so comfortable that you may not even recognize it when you do. Take note over a few days. When do the people around you react positively? How did you just communicate? Was it spoken, was it your body language, was it a kick-ass prototype demonstration? When you know where your voice comes from, you gain the ability to use it consciously to help everyone you come into contact with.

At a certain point in your career arc, the same thing happens to you. The rules you’ve known no longer apply, and you have to learn to play a new game.

What was it like to be asleep? You showed up at work, arriving before and leaving after your manager, of course. You did your work and you did it well. You tried to be helpful to anyone in range, too. Most importantly, you were aware of your need to learn and improve, and you received guidance from managers, mentors, and even those folks in Human Resources.

And you probably left your career’s direction in the hands of these other people.

I wouldn’t be comfortable driving a car while someone else was steering. It’s not even easy to have someone else advance slides on a presentation without giving up some rhythm and momentum. And yet, I was completely comfortable letting other people decide what opportunities would make the most sense for me. I was asleep at the wheel.

It’s time to wake up!

You’ve realized that you have goals and aspirations. You’ve proven that you have the skill and mettle to advance, or at least to advance this far. Don’t worry or wonder if you have worth — you do, and you’ve already proven it. Decide what you want, or at least what you want next, and take action. Ask for tasks that will help you arrive at your goal. Figure out who can replace you when you’re gone, and put some effort into preparing them. Get training, read some books, go out and network with your peers. Launch a side project, or two, or three. Post-mortem a project that failed, so you won’t make those mistakes again. But most importantly, realize that where you go next is completely in your hands.

That feeling? Excitement, ambition, and not a little fear and uncertainty? That’s the beginning of being awake.