By: Penelope Trunk
Most career problems stem from the
fact that we are terrible at picking jobs. We think we are picking a good job
and then it turns out to be a bad job. It's almost impossible to pick a good
job on the first try, actually. So don't think you'll be the exception.
Economist Neil Howe says that only
5% of people pick the right job on the first try. He calls those people
"fast starters" and in general, they are less creative, less
adventurous, and less innovative, which makes a conventional, common path work
well for them. So it's questionable whether you should even aspire to be one of those
people who pick right the first try. But, that said, we all
still want to be good at choosing paths for ourselves. So, here are some
guidelines to think about—whether it's our first career or our fifth career.
Don't Believe the Hype
We have a grass-is-greener approach
to professions that are not our own. For example, this award-winnng video from
Chipotle about farmers becoming more animal-friendly pretends that it's just a
mental and emotional evolution for farmers to realize that going back to
nature, and being good to animals, is what feels best, so they should do it.
It's so easy, for example, to take the pigs out of an assembly line.
The Chipotle video is total crap,
to be honest. It's not that farmers don't know that pigs on pasture is nicer.
It's that there is no market for pigs on pasture because consumers won't pay
enough to eat humane meat (without farrowing crates, for example, pork prices
would quadruple). So the idea that being a farmer is so beautiful and
back-to-the land is just absurd. Being a farmer is actually really complicated,
hard entrepreneurial work with very low wages.
Another example of a hyped up job
is a lawyer. You see their exciting life on TV: a gloriously safe path from
college to law school to a high paying job. But behind the scenes, each year
the American Bar Association conducts a survey to ask if lawyers would
recommend their profession to other people, and the vast majority of lawyers
say no.
Pick a Lifestyle, Not a Job Title
Look at the lives you see people
having, and ask yourself whose life you would want. That's easy, right? But now
look deeper. You can't just have the life they have now. You have to have the life
they lead to get there. So, Taylor Swift has had great success,
and now she gets to pretty much do whatever she wants. But could you do what
she did to get there? She had her whole family relocate so she could pursue her
dreams in Nashville.
Do you want a life of such high-stakes, singular commitment?
Look at the successful writers you
read. Most of them wrote for years in obscurity, risking long-term financial
doom in order to keep writing. Do you really want that path for yourself? Marylou
Kelly Streznewski, author of Gifted Grownups, finds that most people who
are exceptionally creative have to give up almost everything else in order to
pursue "creativity with a big C." For most people, that path is not
appealing.
The same is true for startup
founders. It's a terrible life, to be honest. Your finances will be ruined, you
won't have time for anything else in your life, and your company will probably
fail. So when you decide you want to do a startup, look at the life the person
had before their company got stable. Most people would want to run their own,
well-funded company and control their own hours. Very few people would want the
life you have to live to get to that point.
Don't Overcommit
Testing out lots of different jobs
is a great idea. Job hopping is the sign of someone who is genuinely trying to figure out
where they fit. Quitting when you know you're in the wrong spot
is a natural way to find the right spot. A resume with lots of wrong turns is
not cataclysmic. You can hire a good resume writer to fix the resume so it
looks like you actually had focus and purpose. (Really, I rewrite peoples'
resumes all the time. It's about telling a story and everyone has a way to tell
a good story about their career no matter how many times they've changed jobs.)
The important thing is to not overcommit to one path.
Graduate school, for example, is overcommiting because if you don't end up
liking that field, you will have spent four years gaining entrance into the
field. Taking on college debt is overcommitting because you are, effectively,
saying you will ony take jobs that are relatively high paying in order to
service the debt.
Buying a big house has that same
effect: you overcommit to a high-earning field. Very few people want to have
the same career throughout their life. Leave yourself wiggle room to switch
because there is little reason to believe you'll be able to predict what you will
like in the future.
Daniel Gilbert, head of the
happiness lab at Harvard, has shown that evolution has ensured that we are
terrible at guessing what we will like. We guess that we will like stuff that
is possible for us—that looks attainable—which is what makes us keep going in
life. We are generally optimistic that things will get better. This is not
rational because, for the most part, things stay the same in terms of how happy
we are.
Gilbert explains in his book, Stumbling
on Happiness, that we have a happiness set point, and that's pretty much how
happy we are today and it's how happy we will be tomorrow. But evolution has
made us certain that something will make us happier tomorrow. Which means we
are generally poor at predicting what will make us happy since that was not a
necessary trait in preserving humanity.
Gilbert says you need to try stuff to
see what will make you happy. Do that. It's scary, because it's
hard to find out that what you thought would make you happy will not make you
happy. But then, it's true that being a realist is not particularly useful to
human evolution either.
