5 challenging & introspective steps towards a meaningful career
Career Satisfaction Manifesto Part 4, here’s Part 1.
Disclaimer: The title of this post, including the number of steps, is meant to be tongue-in-cheek and aimed at debunking all of these career listicles that flood the internet every day. That “advice” for career development provides steps that appear to be simple and straightforward, but if it really was that easy, wouldn’t we all be superstars happily enjoying meaningful work?
There are a number of skills that are independent of career path that can lead to a meaningful career, and they all involve being willing to, and learning how to, provide out-sized value. One way is by tackling problems that no one else is willing to. The catch? Some of these problems may not actually be solvable and therein lies the risk: failure is a possibility. Your ego might end up bruised and you may not have a shiny, superlative-laden bullet point to add to your resume at the end of it all.
What you will have is actual experience working on a tough problem. What you will have is all the knowledge you’ll have gained that you’ll be able to apply to future challenges. This won’t lead to a simple sound-bite about some meaningless metric you improved, instead, you’ll have the priceless un-quantifiable narrative that describes your problem-solving acumen. And the most important person you’ll relay this story to, will actually be yourself. A meaningful career is one that builds our self-confidence through battles fought, whether we win or lose. Meaningful: as in we care enough to try, we’re invested enough to risk failure.
What does all of this lofty language look like in practice? A simple way to start developing this skill is to work on never saying (or even thinking) “that’s not my job” or “that’s above my pay grade.” Sure, there are things that bureaucratic structures won’t let you sign off on, but you could provide the decision-maker with your suggestion for a path forward along with a clearly thought-out rationale for your decision. In a similar vein, if someone asks you a question that’s outside of your area of expertise, you could do a little searching (company intranets are especially underutilized) to come up with a first draft of an answer that you then clear with a colleague who is the expert/primary point-person.
Your initial reaction to this suggestion might be, “Woah! That sounds like a lot of extra work that I won’t be getting extra pay for.” But…if you’re working at an organization where you are loathe to provide maximum value and improve your own marketability along the way, pay isn’t the issue, maybe where you’ve chosen to spend the majority of your waking hours is.
Being that person who is always willing to roll up their sleeves to help or provide answers or practical advice, means that you’ll be one of the first people to learn about gnarly problems that others are dealing with. This process might take months or years, but this is your career we’re talking about here, something that will span decades.
And while you’re on the lookout for tough problems, how else can you prepare? By learning as much as you can about the type of work your organization does, its place in the industry (this applies to NGOs and governments as well) and who your co-workers are. You focus on communications for a policy advocacy organization? Maybe read some policy analysis and advocacy websites and talk to your colleagues who do this work. You’re an engineer at a tech company? Spend some time learning about marketing and how it differs from sales.
“T” Shaped Knowledge
Your professional expertise should look like a “T”: useful knowledge about a breadth of areas related to your organization/industry and very deep knowledge about the area you specialize in. Go to lectures, read books and articles, attend webinars, get as complete a 360 degree view of your organization/industry as possible, so that when the time comes you have a solid understanding of the landscape and can step up to tackle tough problems.
Note that by developing this “T” shaped expertise you will have a solid understanding of not just your organization but the entire industry and its leading edges as well. You’ll have the appropriate vantage point to see opportunities for career development including non-traditional paths e.g. lateral moves to fast-growing companies, completely novel business opportunities — perhaps as a consultant or service provider to former employers, and strategic moves to adjacent industries.
Emotional Regulation
Another key skill, one that’s been a challenge for me, is emotional regulation. If you can become the person who can decide to be in a positive, energetic, productive mood, regardless of external circumstances; and then through your example and well-timed encouraging words get everyone else on the same page? You will be pure gold. You will develop an excellent reputation that opens a lot of doors. Just like providing outsized value, this skillset is extremely valuable and sought after because it is super hard to develop. If everyone had this skill, it wouldn’t be worth very much. If people could pick up this skill during a weekend course, we would all plop down our money. A skill like this takes time, and progress can be discouragingly slow, but the payoff is so huge that it is worth all the work, and then some.
So, how in the world do you become someone who has mastered emotional regulation? Committing the time — I’m talking years, to develop this skill — surrounding yourself with like-minded and supportive people (we’ll talk more about community in a future post), investing time and effort in meaningful introspection — this can include journaling, meditating, meditative walks, talk-therapy.
Some helpful literature that I’ve discovered over the years:
- Full Catastrophe Living — we tend to live life by treading water, waiting for everything to line up perfectly before we can be satisfied/content. You can tell from the title that this book is all about embracing the chaos that is life, acknowledging everything won’t ever be “perfect,” and this imperfection is what makes life, life.
- Manage Your Energy Not Your Time (p.49) — discusses the importance of taking regular, rejuvenating, albeit brief, breaks away from our desks throughout the day, single-tasking instead of wasting energy by “multi-tasking”, spending more time doing the types of activities we excel at, and the oft cited but rarely implemented practice of expressing appreciation for others.
- Steve Pavlina’s multi-part blog series on Self-Discipline — In this series Steve walks through the five pillars of self-discipline: Acceptance, Will-power, Hard work, Industry and Persistence.
- Do Over: Rescue Monday, Reinvent Your Work and Never Get Stuck — a great book to help get you in the right mindset for taking the difficult steps it takes to have a meaningful career. It talks about the need to be nice, while hustling and maintaining healthy, mutually beneficial professional relationships. The equation used is kinda brilliant:
[Relationships (Gang) + Skills (Awesome) + Character (Nice)] * Hustle (Grind) = Career Savings Account - The War of Art: Break Through Your Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles -another great attitude-adjustment focused book. It explores the idea of “the resistance” and the fact that it’s something we have to be prepared to fight every day.
Do you have any resources I should add to the list? If so, please leave a comment.
Thank you for reading.
If this series has been helpful, I would be honored if you share it with others:
Career Satisfaction Manifesto: Part 1: Living a Meaningful Life | Part 2: We’re Not All Entrepreneurs | Part 3: A Self-Directed Career | Part 4: Towards a Meaningful Career | Part 5: The Role of Passive Income | Part 6: Community — The Importance of your near 5
