Planning to work

How many job seekers have dutifully purchased a copy of the career resource, "What color is your parachute?" Of those, how many have worked through the exercises and done the introspection to determine their dream job? A great many, apparently. This is not a blog for those lucky souls.

I have changed jobs many times. I've talked to a few career counselors along the way. I've joined organizations to help me job search and I have taken many, many tests to better understand my personality. But none of it has every really been helpful.

Choosing a career and getting a job involves a fundamental paradox, a chicken and egg problem in some ways. When we find satisfying work and when we are doing things we are passionate about, it is much easier to connect the dots of experience and see the connections. But when we are not there yet, there are many, many possibilities and, more importantly, many possible interpretations of the same facts, colored by our perspective of the moment. It seems no amount of analysis can effectively capture the significance of the role perspective plays.

Example: When I was in college, in the late 1980s, I found a great option for summer jobs--"temping." I knew how to type, and I knew how to use word processing software. I had taken a semester off from college and literally bluffed my way into my first temp job, saying I had "Mac experience." In reality, I was a kind of computer geek and knew I could figure it out pretty quickly. I did, and impressed people with my ability to get work done quickly and professionally. I was also kind of a "temp ringer," because I was in between semesters at a top university and the temp job was just an easy way to make, at that time, $10-12/hour. I knew it was not going to be my career, but I did not look down on the work at all. In fact, I found it satisfying to have a clearly defined work product and to consistently impress clients with my work. When I graduated and went on to law school, the temp agency threw me a party.

Partly, I guess I enjoyed a feeling of superiority or something, but the main thing I enjoyed was the fact that I was self-sufficient, the people I worked with liked me, and my work, as clerical as it was, gave me an opportunity to impress. Back in those days, desktop publishing was still very new, and there were still a lot of "intricacies" to master, even with Macintosh-based tools like MS Word and Pagemaker. Years later, I would graduate to proficiency in the "Reveal Codes" of WordPerfect. More years later, I would learn HTML and tell people, "you know, this is just WordPerfect 5.1 all over again."

I could draw a line between the seemingly widely-disconnected worlds of temping for $10/hour and being a Directory of Engineering for an internet company, 15 years later. The job was great as long as these 3 basic criteria were met:

1. I was self-sufficient
2. The people I worked with liked me and I liked them
3. I had the opportunity to impress people

There are many other ways I could connect the dots. In doing many of those parachute exercises and other evaluations, I have "glammered" on a lot of big words and ideas like creativity and problem-solving, but I have come to see that there are almost always opportunities to exercise creativity and solve problems. But if I do not have the core elements above, it is hard to find the motivation to see those things. Finding that motivation requires a perspective that allows me to view the work in a positive way, while others might see it as drudgery or "beneath them."

Too many career introspection exercises lead us to seek higher-level explanations, I think. Then, we jump forward and say, well, this career has the right opportunities, so I should be great. The fact is, fit is more important.

The challenge for me is that I have so many potential talents and skills I can fit any career in the abstract. But what really matters are things like:

1. What will my boss really be like?
2. Will the people I work with eat lunch at their desks or go out as a group?
3. What the heck will it take to impress these people?

It's hard to answer these questions from a few interviews.

The purpose of this blog is to begin with a series of personal essays about major choices/events in my life to remember/regain the passion that drove me to a fair amount of success in many endeavors. Currently, I do not feel at all successful in my current job. I need to make some major changes before they are made for me.