Manoy’s Guide to Happy Career Choices

I wrote this for my siblings and younger cousins when several of them just graduated or were about to graduate from college. They all call me Manoy, which means “big brother” in Cebuano.

Dear siblings and cousins,

Some years back, two of you went into some sort of career path crisis even before starting to work. The two reached their pre- and post-graduation crossroads and they did not know where to go. I had a heart-to-heart talk with one and wrote a long email for the other. Perhaps because of my engineering background, it never crossed my mind to lift their spirits with encouraging words like “you can do it, tiger.” Instead, I came up with a guide for making career decisions, like some technician creating a troubleshooting manual for computer problems. Perhaps I’m a bit wiser now since I do not I try not to automatically solve life problems with engineering methods. Yet the guide has proven useful. I don’t know if it actually helped the two in reaching their now blooming careers, but it has certainly helped me make decisions in mine.

It seems to be working; my decisions have been passing my “deathbed test:” if I imagine myself in my deathbed, I am certain that I won’t regret having done the work I’m doing now. And in those situations that fail the deathbed test, this guide helped me be decisive. My fear of failure, contradictory desires, and self-doubt — all these were cleared-up by this simple guide. So I wanted to share this with you. You don’t need to go through all this existential/professional drama. But if you do, this guide might help. Of course, if you want, I could also confirm that you can indeed do it, and call you tiger or whatever animal you prefer.

The guide is actually just composed of four questions:

• What’s your royal flush?
• Show me the money (Or, what is true, good and beautiful?)
• What’s the car and what’s the road?
• What ice-cream do you like?

But let me explain each of these, because they are not of equal importance. The first one is the most important and the last one the least. I’ll start with the bottommost going up.

What ice-cream do you like?
We have been trained in different ways of choosing all our lives. For instance, when we choose chocolate flavored ice-cream over strawberry, we practice one way of choosing — choosing with the gut. Although this way is suited for choosing ice-cream throughout your life, it may not be the best for making career choices. The implications of choosing the wrong flavor of ice-cream aren’t exactly earth-shaking. On the other hand, a career choice means a commitment that impacts your time, your reputation and your future. It is perhaps best not to rely on the wisdom of your intestines when it comes to career decisions.

This does not mean that you shouldn’t be passionate about your work. But the passion here is not the passion for ice-cream. The passion of the gut is different from the passion of the heart. Gut-passion is that animal reaction to people and things — you just like or dislike certain people or certain things. Although we don’t have a choice with our gut reactions, we are always the masters of our actions (eg, being polite to people whether we like them or not). The passion of the heart is more human and more under your control. You may never like eating certain types of ice-cream, no matter how hard you try. But what I’ve experienced is that you can be passionate about any work you choose to be passionate with.

As several of you know, I’m not exactly crazy about accounting. You would be surprised to find out that I actually did some accounting for three years, and I was not even paid for it. I did accounting for a certain non-profit not because I was passionate about accounting, but because I was passionate about the non-profit. The first six months was hell. I’d spend weekends trying to balance the damn financial statement while cursing ledgers, bank statements, Excel, Bill Gates, the numbers 1 to 9, and anything to do with accounting. I never expected that someday I’d be talking shop with accountants, sharing things like being “in the zone” and being “one with balance sheet.” Having gone from abhorrence to slight case of geekluv for accounting taught me one thing: there is no type of work that I cannot be passionate about.*

(*The footnote here is, of course, that one can be passionate about any type of work as long as that work is meaningful. But I’m getting ahead of myself.)

So if sometimes your work feels like eating the wrong flavor of ice-cream, don’t conclude that you are in the wrong career track. It’s nice to have that visceral satisfaction with your work, but it is the least important consideration in your career decisions. It also true the other way around. Liking something does not mean you should pursue a career around that interest. Let’s say you happen to have an abnormally intense interest in raising penguins. Nothing wrong with that. But that does not mean that you need to build your career around raising penguins. For all you know, you’ll wake up one day realizing that you have an irresistible desire to balance financial statements. Career decisions have to be based on something more solid than what attracts your gut. Otherwise, your interest in your work might melt as quickly as your taste in ice-cream changes. The next three questions, I think, lead us to those more solid bases for career decisions.

What’s the car and what’s the road?
Whether you think life’s about the journey or about the destination, it is always useful to know two things: what’s my vehicle and what’s the road ahead?

First, take a look at your car, the talents you have that will carry you through your journey. After doing different kinds of things for two decades or so, you will notice that there are some things that you do better than many of the people you know. Perhaps you draw better, run faster, speak more eloquently, think more clearly, or organize more orderly than your classmates and friends. It’s also good to know what things you are not good at. Perhaps you totally suck in chemistry (it’s ok; there’s always Architecture), or in P.E. (it’s ok; there’s always Law), or in Filipino (it’s ok; many Manileños don’t even speak Tagalog).

You can then look at your terrain. What opportunities has the world given you? The funny thing with this question is that the same terrain could look like a limitation to one person but an opportunity to another. I met this entrepreneur here in Manila. Interesting story. After working for a decade in Unilever, he started a distribution business involving sari-sari stores as the end-points. They do a lot of training for the manangs that run the sari-sari stores. They teach them how to professionalize their accounting, marketing, inventory, etc. They even give them a common branding: Hapinoy. There’s of course a lot of social impact in this business, so I asked him if he was actually making money — I was still skeptical about social entrepreneurship back then. He said he was — and thus made me a believer. Some other guy could have looked at sari-sari stores and just saw a bunch of manangs waiting the whole day for taxi drivers to buy cigarettes and softdrinks while watching Korean and Mexican telenovelas. But this guy saw instead a ready-made nationwide network of micro-entrepreneurs eager to sell whatever he would distribute. I’m sure you get what I’m driving at. However the road ahead looks like, it’s really up to you to choose whether what you see are opportunities or limitations.

Knowing your talents and opportunities are very helpful in making career decision. Yet, they aren’t essential for making that decision, just like the ice-cream you like. Two decades or so of existence isn’t enough to give you a super-accurate view of your strengths and weaknesses. You might think that you’re driving a Kia if you haven’t yet dared to go beyond a hundred in what turns out to be a Ferrari. What may help in making this more accurate is the advice of people who have lived a lot longer than you. For some reason, each generation rediscovers that mother was right after all. And along with the wisdom of your elders, the best guides, I think, are the next two questions.

(Since I am a few years older than you, let me share more of my imagined wisdom before we look at those two questions. Don’t dismiss something because someone told you that you are not good at it. At your age, you have the right to think that you can be good at anything you put your heart into. Yes, that sounds extremely corny, but it is reasonable. It takes less than a year to be an expert in something easy, and five years to be an expert in something fairly difficult. With your age, you can end up being an expert in dozens of things by the time you have to do the real deathbed test.)

Show me the money (Or, what is true, good and beautiful?)
Many people consider it bad taste to be too blunt about money, but I have to tell you this. The easiest way to find out whether some work is worthwhile is to see how much people are willing to pay for it. The more they are willing to pay for it, the more they value it. Ask yourself, “Among my professional options, where can I earn the most?” And here’s one advice I got from The Godfather, your Uncle Ji, which I’ll never forget: be really good at something few people are good at, and you’ll probably earn well from it. He’s a living testament to the soundness of this advice.

This is not to say that making money is the most important goal in one’s life. In fact, it shouldn’t even be goal; money is merely a means. It’s just like breathing. You don’t live in order to breathe; you need to breathe so that you could live. Likewise, you don’t work in order to make money, period. You work to make money to have the material conditions to reach your life-goals. That’s why this is such an important question. And, unlike the previous ones, this needs to be answered. What does it profit a man to take on a certain job?

It is a mistake, however, to think that the only kind of profit is money. When trying to make a career decision based on profit, don’t limit yourself to pesos, dollars and euros. A more open-minded approach would be to think in terms of the true, the good and the beautiful. These three capture the value of work a lot better than just money. There are some valuable types of work that capitalism just fails to reward. For instance, historians generally earn less than bankers. But that does not mean that history is a less worthwhile profession than banking (the true). Likewise, Mother Teresa probably worked harder than most company executives, and was paid less her whole life than a month’s salary of a CEO. Yet, the good that she did is clearly worth a lot more than their combined paychecks (the good). And if artists do indeed starve, it is not because what they do is without value. I’m looking at my list of favorite books right now. If their authors decided to spend their lives making lots of money instead of literature, what a poor world it would be.

I’m not saying that a career decision is a choice between the true, the good and the beautiful, or between the three and money (which is just one kind of good). In fact, most careers involve a combination of these. Just take a look at the career options you have been considering. All of them, I’m sure, have different mixes of different types of the true, the good (including money) and the beautiful.

You may ask, “There are so many types of work which are profitable, achievable and a good fit to my abilities. Which among them should I choose?” The obvious answer is that you just choose whatever you like the most. At least you don’t have to curse ledgers for three years. But — you’ll find this out sooner or later — life has a funny way of dealing you a hand that makes all other considerations secondary.

What is your royal flush?
I had a colleague back in HP who had her first child a few years ago. After her long maternity leave, she said that she was a changed woman. She shared how everything was different now. “Life is no longer just about me,” she said. Before becoming a mother, perhaps a bigger salary meant more dinners in swankier restaurants, and a promotion a faster car. Now, after bearing her first son, perhaps a salary increase means healthier food for him, and a promotion a better education. I’m just speculating of course, but meeting project deadlines and managing unpleasant customers must have taken on a new meaning for her. I don’t remember what her pre-maternity desktop background was (perhaps it was a boyband). But her desktop background after childbirth was very telling of what work now meant to her, of what she wanted to be reminded of as she battled through the daily challenges of the corporate world. Her desktop was filled with innumerable photos of a sleeping baby.

This was her royal flush. If you have a royal flush, it does not matter what cards are in the table. If you have something that means more to you than anything, it does not matter what your gut reaction is to you job. It does not matter if you need to work twice as hard as your colleagues. It does not even matter if you need to shift careers and learn something totally new. Everything takes on a new perspective. Failure does not crush your ego, or victory get into your head, because it is no longer about you.

A royal flush does not appear in every hand. Most of the time, opportunities and profit are perfectly sufficient criteria for making your decisions. And if you have several equally profitable and equally possible options, you can even pick the one you like most. But when your royal flush appears — parenthood is just one example — everything else is just background noise.

In any case, work in itself is meaningful
Even without having something as life-changing as motherhood or fatherhood, work in itself is meaningful. Let me share a secret with you. You have to promise not to divulge this to anyone: I’m a bum. If I’m not careful, that lethal combination of couch, TV and junk food can transform me into a remote control zombie.

Work is the only reason why I have not slid down the downward spiral of bumhood. The more you work, the more your capacity for work grows, and the more your couch potato tendencies are lessened. It’s almost like muscles; the more you repeat a physical movement, the more it becomes easier and the stronger your muscles become. I never thought I’d say this back when I was seven years old, but I’m sure glad my parents persevered in having me do my school assignments despite my guerrilla tactics.

Work truly makes us better humans. All the good things in our characters came about from some repeated usage of our character “muscles.” We don’t notice most of it because the people around us have been trying to make us flex those character muscles since we were born. Whatever ability we have to get things done and be nice to people got developed from those innumerable trials and errors and following people’s examples in our childhood. I’m sure that Rizal would not have been able to face his death like a man if years of work amidst suffering and deprivation had not steeled his character. Work not only prevents us from becoming bums; it prepares us for becoming heroes.

Most of us will probably find it difficult to get shot by a firing squad these days. But each one of us will someday be given an important responsibility. The best way to prepare for that is to strengthen our character muscles though our ordinary day-to-day work.

Aside from making us better humans, work also makes the world a better place. All the good things that civilization has to offer came about through work. For instance, I’m philosophizing about the meaning of work right now, and in the next second you are reading it wherever you are — Cebu, Vegas or Mogadishu. What made this possible is the work of countless of individuals, each stacking a contribution on top of another. A lab rat may have spent decades for one key invention that made the internet possible. An entrepreneur may have staked everything to commercialize this tool we’re using to communicate. And a developer surely had spent countless hours making sure that this is as easy as pointing and clicking, and dragging and dropping. As long as you don’t do evil, whatever work you’ll choose to do will also contribute to whatever is true, good and beautiful in the world.

It’s certainly interesting to see what you guys will make out of your lives. Of course, there’s so much more to life than just work and career. Yet, the richness of this part of life called work just shows the richness of the whole thing. (And we have not even touched on the more awesome, more cosmic meaning of work). I wish you all the best in your careers — the best choices, the best wins to profit from, and the best failures to learn from!

-Manoy

Originally published at www.corazo.org.