There are lots of ways to make career decisions, and in today’s world there are more forks in the road than ever before. Yesterday I talked to someone who upon graduating from college went to work for a Fortune 500 company and figured he would be there for quite a while. Six weeks after he started, the company got acquired and a few weeks after that he saw many of his colleagues disappear in a layoff. Needless to say, job security isn’t what is used to be.
If I was going to give someone one piece of career advice, and it had to pass the elevator test in a short building, I would simply say, “do the thing that makes you feel most alive.” I realize that actual real-life careers are more complicated than that, and certainly mine was. The longer form, tall-building elevator ride, advice would be to find the thing that you are passionate about, that you are uniquely qualified to do, and that someone will pay you for.
But life, and careers, can get complicated. We can get lost in all of the data and analytics and plethora of actual career options. Anyone who is educated and reasonably competent can do all kinds of different jobs. During my career I was asked to do all kinds of crazy stuff, and I signed up to do some things that I was genuinely really terrible at doing.
In the midst of such complexity, we can get asked to make career decisions quickly and with our paycheck hanging in the balance. We sometimes need to throw out all of the analysis and simplify our decision-making process. Which is where doing the thing that makes us feel most alive becomes an important mindset.
Let’s face it, we’ve all had plenty of workdays where we were plodding through the day. Those days which aren’t about much of anything other than surviving the work week – which is sometimes quite an accomplishment in and of itself. These are the days when we are marking time rather than doing what we love. There’s no need to apologize for this; it happens to all of us. And sometimes it happens because we have things going on in our life which make it impossible to concentrate on work. This happens to all of us too.
But if we can begin to cultivate an ability to observe our own behavior, and especially if we can track what is really energizing and engaging to us, we can start to understand what we really love to do. In their excellent book on careers called Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life, Stanford design school professors Bill Burnett and Dave Evans argue for doing exactly this – for keeping track of what is most engaging and energizing to us.
Psychologists like to call this level of engagement a state of “flow.” (Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience)We know we are in it when we are acutely alive, fully present, and lose track of time. If this doesn’t happen to you all that often, it’s all the more reason to notice when it does.
When in Doubt, Create Something
Most of us have been in organizations where we faced the following conundrum. The problems are piling up, nearly everyone is feeling overwhelmed, and the solutions are less than obvious. Despair is setting in.
In my view, the best course of action under these circumstances is often simply to begin to focus on creating something. The act of creation itself can be very energizing, and especially if it requires – as it usually does – creating a team in order to solve a reasonably challenging problem. The Scottish athlete WH Murray said, “Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.”
The artist Robert Fritz, who became an organizational consultant, wrote an excellent book on creativity in the 1980s called The Path of Least Resistance. Fritz makes the point that all artists work, productively, with the creative tension between the Current Reality and the Future Vision of what they want to create. We can either be energized or overwhelmed by this tension; when we are energized by it, we feel most productive and can even experience the flow state.
Creating something valuable can not only be helpful to the organizations in which we live and work, it can also be helpful to us. It can help us understand when we are most alive.
Get Outside Your Comfort Zone
It has always been interesting to me when hiring managers and recruiters focus on “finding someone with ten-years-experience doing this exact job before.” I’ve always wondered why someone talented and capable would want to do the same thing for ten years in a row.
Earlier in my life I completed ten marathons. I’m not saying this was a rational or even intelligent thing to do. I was definitely outside my comfort zone when running 26.2 miles; it was never a slam dunk. But I must have been very alive when I was doing so, because I can still remember each and every one of those race days vividly.
I believe it’s not only okay to get outside your comfort zone, it’s a requirement. It’s called living.
When we move outside our comfort zone, even a bit at a time, we begin to discover what makes us feel most alive.
Go For The Best Story
One time when I was making a major career decision, a friend of mine advised me to envision myself at the end of my life, sitting in a rocking chair looking back. How would I feel about each choice in the fork in that particular road? It’s common advice, and to be honest I thought it was a little hokey. But it worked well. Mostly because when we look back on our life we are unlikely to regret the stupid things we did, as long as they didn’t harm someone else. What we are likely to regret are the chances that we never took.
There is a fantastic book by John Izzo called The Five Secrets You Must Discover Before You Die. Izzo and his team actually asked wise people at the end of their lives what they thought of their major decisions, looking back. One person said, “choose the best story.” To which I would add the best stories are the ones where we are most alive. Those are the stories that we relish to tell.
You’re Never Done, Until You Are Really Done
I used to believe that I would get to a point in life where I had accomplished whatever I was going to, and that was that. It’s easy to think that way when you are younger. But that hasn’t been my life experience. I’ve accomplished some things that were very hard to do, at least for me, but I’ve noticed that the half-life of living the glory of those accomplishments really isn’t very long. Pretty soon I am looking for something else to try; something that is new and different and intellectually challenging.
Back to marathon running, it turns out that when you climb one big hill you often discover another one just over the top of the hill. It’s just that you couldn’t see that second big hill when you were climbing the first one. You’re not done climbing hills until the race is actually over.
I’ve concluded that it’s the human condition to want more. And the best way to live is to look out the front window rather than fixate on the rear-view mirror.
There are always more problems to solve, and the world has a way of presenting them to us just when we need a few more. And when we wake up and want to work on them, and perhaps make life better not just for ourselves but for others that we care about – maybe even humanity- that’s when we know we are most alive.
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