Job, Career, or...Something Else?

Before we get to the Great Time Excuse - and our poll results (last chance to weigh in!) - we should go back a few steps and discuss terminology. (This is when my Psych 101 students start hurling dagger vision at me but hang in there, this is important). Here's what I mean when I talk about the following:

• Job: The thing you drag your butt to everyday, mainly because you'll get a paycheck to show for it. You may like the company of your co-workers and there might be small pleasures afforded by the job tasks themselves, but by and large, you didn't envision this being your life when your grade school teacher asked you, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" (Your answer:  A Part-Time Impact Team Member at Abercrombie & Fitch? I think not. [Seriously, that's what they're called.])
• Career: A series of jobs in the same field or specialization area, ideally with an increase in rank, status and pay over time. You may invest more of yourself in a career than a job, but there's still a sense of disconnect between your SELF and what you do. In other words, career is a glorified job. At least in my terminology.

So where does that leave us? Nowhere I want to be. There has to be something more. And there is. I just have no idea what to call it.

In The Art of Happiness at Work, the Dalai Lama distinguishes between job, career and calling. His definitions aren't too different from my own. He says job is something you do for money, a career is something you do for status, and a calling is something you would do even if you never got paid.

That sounds great to me. But I find the term "calling" to be problematic in our modern, secular society. I think it scares too many people off from fighting the good fight, from searching for something more in their lives. To be called you need to have a belief in some higher power that's doing the calling now don't you? While I personally hold that belief, most 20somethings I encounter seem not to, which is perfectly valid. (Although I can't reconcile these personal observations with reports that 84% of 20somethings do in fact believe in God or a universal spirit. Go figure.)

I find the vaunted tome of job seekers, What Color is Your Parachute?, problematic for the same reason. In fact, the author, Dick Bolles, was a clergyman, so language like "calling" is sprinkled throughout the text. There's nothing wrong with this - many people may even be inspired by this wording - but I believe a large chunk of our population is being ostracized by our choice of terminology.

So what do you we call the "Something Else?" (Or SE, if you will. Which I hope you won't.)

Do we call it our "North Star?" No, too Oprah.

Out "highest desire?" Too dramatic.

Our "inner essence being revealed through action?" Oh hell no.

Here's what I throw on the table:  calling it our "'All I Want to Be...' Statement." Sheesh, that's way too long. Overlooking that issue for a moment, this proposal does encompass the essence of what I mean by the "something else." I got this idea while reading  Making Ideas Happen:  Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision & Reality. The author, Scott Belsky, includes a photo of the office walls of John Maeda, President of the Rhode Island School of Design. Amongst a million other little notes, Maeda has posted a big sign to himself that says, "All I want to be is someone who creates truly meaningful things."

Ah, isn't that beautiful? (Wait that's not very tongue-in-cheek of me. How about "What kind of crap is that?! Ridiculous!")

After seeing that, I took to drafting my own "All I Want to Be..." statement, whose current incarnation is something along the lines of "All I want to be is someone who facilitates meaningful experiences for myself and others."

Regardless of what your "All I Want to Be..." statement contains, THAT is the essence of the "Something Else" for which I hope we all strive. It transcends work, reaching instead into our relationships, our hobbies, our reading choices, even our miniscule momentary interactions with a "Part-Time Impact Team Member" while buying a pair of pants that we hope will distract us from our crappy J-O-B.

But boy is my notion of "Something Else" huge. Overwhelmingly huge. Good reason to run and make excuses about why we can't ever seek it out. Don't worry, I'll be providing plenty such excuses in future lessons.

Before we wrap up, let's pause to consider one great irony:  my website is misnamed. Strategically so, of course; if we can't put a mutually agreed-upon term on the "Something Else," I certainly couldn't name a website after it. Besides, we're all trained to plan for a career. That's the goal after high school and college and grad school:  the damn career. Which is, on so many levels, wrong to the extreme. But there it is:  we are frightened of the career search when really we should be frightened of something much, much larger (and, indeed, much worthier of searching for).

But back to excuses! The time excuse is next. In the meantime, why don't you try your hand at labeling the "Something Else?" I clearly suck at it. Give me your best.

The Art of Happiness at Work

What's Your Favorite Way to Procrastinate Figuring Out Your Life?

This class has been way too lecture-heavy so far. Let's get some student participation going (did I hear a groan?).

How about a poll? Raise your hands and tell me the go-to activity you use to procrastinate a meaningful career search (and the process of finding yourself in general).

I gave a preliminary report of the results on February 10th but the poll is still open - take it and you'll get instant results. Plus I'll do an update sometime in the future.

And, yes, I do award extra credit for creativity.

[polldaddy poll=6871965]

Ryan Gosling. Killer of many a fruitful career search. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Embrace Identity Discomfort

Here’s the dirty little secret about life:  To live well, you have to feel some pain. We’re a culture obsessed with pleasure. With maximizing good feelings and minimizing bad ones. With attaining the yin and not the yang (or is it the yang and not the yin?). Our fixation leaves us frustrated, unhappy, and lost. Especially in the career search.

If there’s one thing we know about forging an identity it’s that the process hurts. Sometimes a lot. And finding a career, if you do it right, is all about finding who you really are.

Yesterday a sophomore came into my office. She looked beat down and unsettled. She told me she’d been thinking a lot over winter break, debating whether her major and minor were right for her; questioning her assumption that her parents’ interests should dictate her own; wondering which of the thousands of careers available, if any, sounded even remotely worth pursuing for a lifetime.

When she finished, I said, “Congratulations. You’re doing the hard work. This is exactly what you should be doing right now – getting confused, feeling lost. I know it feels awful, but congratulations. You’re there.”

She looked at me like I had just named Lance Armstrong Ambassador of Honesty and Integrity.

She may have thought I was crazy but, man, I wish someone had said that to me ten years ago. I thought something was wrong with me for feeling like my student does now. Throughout college, grad school, and deep into my twenties, I had bouts of severe questioning about my path and my passions. It was uncomfortable – to put it mildly – to have no road map before me, and it felt like every time I allowed myself to really touch the questions - to grab them and stare at them and realize all that I did not know - the road before me only got blurrier instead of clearer. I was certain these were signs of depression. I was convinced I was on the cusp of mental breakdown.

Far from it.

Here’s what we know from developmental psych:  to attain an identity - a true, genuine sense of who you are – you have to go through a crisis. There’s no other way to get there. You can try to cheat your way to an identity by stealing someone else’s (e.g., a parent’s), but that doesn’t hold up in the long run. Eventually, at some juncture, you’re going to have to go through a period of actively questioning, of exploring options, of releasing paths that aren’t right for you. That process - and the very notion of "crisis" - get a bum wrap in our culture.

Instead of pushing back in my moments of bewilderment, instead of labeling myself and searching for a “cure,” I should have lived the questions. I should have embraced the fact that clarity comes just after the moment of peak confusion.

Crises are healthy, especially as a twentysomething,. They mean you are developing well.

With any luck, my student’s crisis is the first of many in her life. The people who are most fulfilled, who are living the truest and most complete version of their lives, forge an identity for a time and then, as their life circumstances and perspective change, let it all shake up again. And again. And again. Psychologists call this the MAMA cycle; we enter identity a crisis (called Moratorium) and then Achieve identity, over and over throughout our lives. If we’re doing life right.

In other words, we find meaning and purpose and our sources of flow – the bedrocks of lasting happiness and its plethora of positive correlates – only by sitting in the uncomfortable pit of questioning on a regular basis.

In short, if you want to avoid having a gratifying career, dodge discomfort at all costs. When the questions well up in you, shove them aside, take some antidepressants or alcohol or drugs to dull them, put on a confident show, pretend they’re simply not there. Your career search will end before it even begins.

But if you’re in life to live it, then live it. Crises and all. And congratulate yourself for feeling so damn uncomfortable.

"I beg you...to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer." – Rainer Maria Rilke

Yin Yang Candy (Photo credit: FadderUri)

Chase Happiness

Here’s a counterintuitive one:  If you want to avoid having a fulfilling career (the point of our class, after all), determinedly chase happiness. Now wait a minute, you must be thinking, isn’t chasing happiness a good idea? Isn’t it written into our Declaration of Independence? Isn’t it a fundamental goal in our society?

Well, yes, but it shouldn’t be. At least not the way we practice it.

You see, we go about chasing happiness all wrong in America, and in most Western countries. The more we chase it, the less happy we are. Witness the drop in happiness over time, of which your generation has borne the brunt.

That’s because there are three routes to happiness and we tend to focus on only one of them. The route we usually pick doesn’t relate to life satisfaction. Instead it makes us keep wanting more.

Here’s the down and dirty:

• When we talk about wanting to be happy, we usually mean we want to feel pleasure. Feeling good is the end goal. To feel good in our society, though, we typically need money so we can buy things (big house, new car, iEverything) and experiences (vacations, pedicures, sporting events, concerts). And having some fame or status doesn’t hurt, either (the Kardashians experience their fair share of pleasure, don’t they? Well, when they're not sobbing over staged divorces and the like). These goals that are outside of us – extrinsic goals – tend to make us feel less satisfied with life and more anxious. No matter how much pleasure we experience, we always adapt to what we have and want more. Psychologists call this the hedonic treadmill.
• You could instead chase happiness by entering a state of “flow” as frequently as possible. Flow is what you experience when you lose track of time and become disconnected from the world around you. Like when you’re, say, aimlessly surfing the web. We experience flow when we’re doing something we enjoy AND that we’re good at. So if you make the time to figure out your skill sets and your interests, you can forge a career – and hobbies, and relationships – where the two converge. People who do this have higher life satisfaction; it’s an effective way to chase happiness. That said, it sounds like a lot of work, doesn’t it? Identifying your strengths? Zeroing in on your interests? Reshaping your life around these? Ugh. Who has the time? If you’re thinking this way, you’re a Career Avoidance 101 superstar indeed.

  

• Finally, you could seek out a sense of meaning, a feeling that you’re doing something bigger than you. This isn’t a popular route in our ego-crazed society, of course. I mean, who wants to take the time and energy to look beyond themselves? Not only that, doing something meaningful often means hard, even painful, work. You often have to forgo pleasures in the day-to-day throes of the work. Like how I was up at 2am the other night while my daughter screamed for no discernable reason for the 10^th night in a row, and I thought, My God, there is no pleasure in this. 25 months of sleep disruptions. I forget what solid sleep feels like. I’m going to go fricking insane. Fricking, fricking, fricking insane. I then proceeded to shout this at my unsuspecting, heretofore-snoozing husband. Is raising a child meaningful work? Absolutely. The trudging, on-the-ground reality of it is not “fun” at all, though. To be sure, the meaningful route to happiness is not what our society portrays as “happiness." It's not all I found my purpose and know what I'm meant to do with my life and now my life is full of rainbows and puppies and fields of glowing yellow sunflowers!!! Hell no. Seeking meaning will piss you off at times. Royally. But the people who manage to do it, who actually work toward happiness through meaning, they’re more satisfied with life, and they even tend to live longer and have fewer health problems. Worth it? You decide.

All in all, it’s easy to chase happiness in an unproductive – even harmful – way. Simply do what society has taught you to do since the moment you were born:  shop your way to happiness, seek out pleasurable experiences at all costs, and focus on big fat ol’ YOU. It’s hella appealing, isn’t it?

Or you could take the hard road. And actually be happy.

If you think you’ve got the guts for the latter (you’re intent on failing this class, aren’t you?!), then start by taking some questionnaires offered by UPenn’s Martin Seligman. These are research-based, psych-tested questionnaires, not some weirdo surveys written by doofuses who want to trick you into spending money to get your “results.” The UPenn questionnaires not only tell you about yourself – such as your strengths (the VIA Survey of Character Strengths), the route to happiness you use (Approaches to Happiness Questionnaire), and your life satisfaction (Satisfaction with Life Scale) - they also tell you how you compare to the thousands of people who have taken the questionnaires (my current pleasure rating? 12^th percentile. Woo hoo, parenting a toddler!) and can track your progress over time. For free.

And here’s some reading/watching to do. This isn't self-help crap. It's real psych. Promise.

Assignments:

Authentic Happiness:  Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment by Martin Seligman, PhD. 2003. Free Press.

Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert, PhD. 2007. Vintage.

Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, PhD (these are the moments I'm so glad this class is online and not in front of the classroom because there I would butcher that name if I had to say it aloud). 2008. Harper.

To Watch (available streaming on Netflix):

Happy by Roko Belic. 2011.

This Emotional Life, hosted by Daniel Gilbert, PhD. 2010. (Watch it all - it's great - but if you're pressed for time, dive right into Episode 3.)

Be happy (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Awash in Choices

I remember the exact moment when Career Paralysis struck. I had just left graduate school orientation – a somber, lackluster affair compared to the grand show of college orientation; this one seemed to announce, “there’s no more fun – the coming years will simply suck” – and sunk onto the hand-me-down couch in my cinder block apartment to sort through the barrage of information. I quickly landed on the Cornell University catalog. I should have stopped right there. Right there. Because I already knew what I was going to study. I was at Cornell to pursue a PhD in developmental psychology. End of story. And yet how could I resist the thick, creaseless, shiny catalog lying in my open hands? It called to me in urgent whisperings. Go on, open me. Glimpse the many paths untaken. You know you want to.

So I did.

I started by flipping to the list of majors in the university’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. I’d come from a liberal arts college, where the most exotic major is Art (alright, Women's Studies...), so to say I was blown away by the list before me is an understatement. The majors weren’t just foreign, they included terms I didn’t even know. Entomology? Biometry? Viticulture and Enology?

I stopped breathing then and there. Well, for a few seconds; I’m no world class breath holder or anything. All I could think was, If I don’t know about all of the possible career paths out there, how could I possibly have landed on the right one?

And that was it. Career Paralysis had taken hold, soon followed by Internet Addiction (Subtype:  Ceaseless Career Research). Before long, I was a graduate school dropout working a plum job I wasn’t sure I wanted.

I share my sordid story because, alas, I am not alone. There’s no better way to stymy progress and undercut contentment with the choices you make than to consider all of your options. It turns out psychologists have known this for a while. They find that the more choices we have, the less likely we are to make a choice and the more likely we are to be dissatisfied with our eventual choice, should we make one.

The classic study on this so-called paradox of choice was conducted using homemade jam. One day the experimenters set up a table that offered grocery store patrons tastings of six types of jam. On another day, their table offered 24 types of jam to taste. Lo and behold, they sold much more jam when there were fewer varieties available to taste. In fact, only 3% of the people who saw the large jam display bought a jar, compared to 30% of the people exposed to the small jam display. Which may mean that if you follow my advice and consider all of your career options, only 3% of you will end up actively choosing a satisfying career (i.e., failing this class). Now wouldn’t that be something?

Follow-up studies have found that having more choices also makes us less satisfied with our eventual decision. We inevitably come to regret our choice, thinking longingly of all the roads not taken. If only I’d pursued animal husbandry, my life would be lined with gold.

The advice psychologists offer, then, is to limit the choices you consider before making a decision. Don’t look at the array of options out there, look only at the options that are meaningful and feasible for you.

If I’d been honest with myself while lying on my crusty grad school couch, nothing in an agricultural school would ever remotely interest me. I’ve never gotten a houseplant to survive more than two weeks, let alone bred crops and reared animals. In truth, the majority of that expansive Cornell catalog was not in my realm of possibility, due to my interests, skill sets, experiences, and optimal work environments. I should have been considering those first (we’ll talk about how to do this – er, how to avoid doing this – in future lessons).

I’ll tell you, though, conducting unending research on all possible careers is a terrific fake out. Not only can you tell yourself you’re being super-productive – you’re researching careers, after all, isn’t that what you’re supposed to be doing in your twenties?! – but your parents will be pretty darn proud of you, too. All the while, you’ll be decreasing your chances of ever finding a fulfilling career. Triple score!

So the long and short of it is, if you want to avoid choosing your career for as long as possible, and to hate your career once you finally pick it, peruse some university catalogs, breeze through the lists of careers at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Google the many thousands of graduate degrees you could possibly earn.

And if you have time in amongst all of that, do this week’s assignment. You’ll be too inundated with information, too awash with paralysis, to let Barry Schwartz’s practical advice sway you. Go ahead, read the book. I dare you.

Assignment:

Read The Paradox of Choice: Why Less is More by Barry Schwartz, PhD. (2005, Harper Perennial).

(Or at the very least, watch his TED talk)

The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less