FROM THE HOLSTEE MANIFESTO

7 Career Tips for Students

Want to manage your career? Learn to manage yourself.

Ever since Adam Grant’s book GIVE AND TAKE came out, I am asked regularly by college students what advice I can offer for managing their careers beyond my list of tips on building your network.

First, kudos for asking. Mindfulness is an important quality to practice, and the fact that you’re consciously thinking of career demonstrates that you are mindful in reflecting on important aspects of your life.

Now that we’re in a positive mood, here are 7 things to consider…

1. You’re in school. Don’t worry about your career.
   Worrying will not help your career. LIVING helps your career by giving you life experience, interactions, and opportunities to learn.
   Enjoy school. Love somebody. Spread happiness. Live in the now!
2. Learn to listen to yourself.
   When your intuition is saying something is not right, listen.
3. Learn to manage your emotions and practice empathy.
   Life gives us a lot of time, and success is rarely a straight path.
   Never beat yourself up. Practice acts of compassion. Be kind to other people, especially when they are going through tough times.
4. Learn to deal with failure gracefully.
   If you never fail, you are not taking enough risks. Take more risks.
   That said, be smart and deliberate about the risks you do take.
5. Keep improving, a little every day.
   Skills are progressions. Continual improvements add up over time.
   Do something every day that makes yourself better.
   Bonus: do something every day that makes your world better.
6. Be who you are, as hard as you can.
   You are unique, and by being yourself, and listening to yourself, your intuition will keep getting better the more you practice.
7. Do not worry. You will figure it out.
   Don’t rush it away.Figuring it out is what life is about.

Summarizing the 7 points: success is rarely a straight line.

How did I find my direction after graduating? Slowly. My college career center was no help at all. I waited tables for a while, and kept asking everyone I knew if they heard of any job openings. Eventually a friend of a friend knew of an opening at NASA I could apply for if I also enrolled in a Master’s Degree program — so that’s what I did.

I still could not find a job once I finished that degree so I applied to and entered a Doctoral program — another long, not straightforward road.

I spent my entire 20's in school because I could not figure it my path. By networking, I found an internship every few years — at the Air Force, then 2 years later at Hewlett Packard, then 2 years later at Microsoft.

None of those jobs felt right, and by 29 I could not see my future teaching at a university — which is the main thing a Ph.D. qualifies a person to do. So I left school and tried to start my own business.

And I failed. A LOT.

The bottom line is this: Everyone walks a different path. It’s okay not to know where you want to go. It’s okay to spend many years figuring out where to go by trying different things. And it’s okay to try things and not succeed. How boring would life be if we always succeeded?

There are times that are painful, and there are times that are frustrating. Those times are usually good times to learn, I have found.

So do not put pressure on yourself to decide on a future career path. Instead, commit to the idea that your career path is a long and sometimes difficult journey, and commit to the attitude that you can and will figure out what to do along the way.