Career Zero — A Perspective Change
Sometimes what you need is a perspective change. Mine involved statistics and death.
My career is one big Zero as part of my epic more-than-two-year life Zero. In turn, I feel trapped, unfulfilled, content, anxious, excited, inspired and bored by my work. It’s a chronic tug-o-war in my head with no winner. And both sides are getting tired.
But things have begun to get more malleable, have begun to shift, new ideas are popping up. And one reason for that is a big, conscious perspective change.
Past Perspective: Divining the Future from the Past
In the past I have focused on the past: what skills I learned, what knowledge I acquired, what kind of environment (people, locale, schedule) I liked to work in. And that gave me a lot of insight, but no direction for my future.
Present Perspective: Looking Ahead to the End
There’s this self-development exercise that’s been around for ages: Imagine your funeral. What do you want people to say about you? Write that down in detail and perhaps find your life focus in that.
I found this exercise … difficult. Imagining my death and funeral was simply to abstract. My recent experiences with death and illness have helped me a bit in that regard, but not enough. So being the nerd that I am, I did some research: How long do I have left, statistically speaking?
What do the Numbers Say?
The general mortality statistics say I have up to 38 years on the clock. One mortality calculator said — factoring in my health, relationships, eating and fitness habits — 6 years. Another calculator said 18 years.
38 years is too long to imagine for me, I would be 82 by then. 6 years is too much existential pressure to deal with. So I decided to go with 18 years — and substracted three years for suffering and decline before I die (heart attack or cancer most likely.) So I’m left with 15 good years.
New Constraint = New Questions
15 years is within the reach of my imagination. I’ll be sixty then, 5 years younger than my mother is now. That feels concrete and it’s nicely symmetrical: About 15 years since the start of the millennium, about 15 years left till the lights start to go out. Having this firm figure as a new perspective changed my questions. Or more accurately, it changed the feel of my questions:
- What do I want to do with those fifteen years?
- How do I want to live?
- And most importantly: Who do I want to be(come)?
Intriguing, But Partial Answers
New questions lead to new answers. I’ve only got partial ones so far, but they point into a new direction:
- I want to touch people’s life in a personal way.
- I want to help others to become better versions of themselves, become truer to themselves.
- And I very, very much like people to say at the end of my life, “He helped me. My life was better because of him. I will miss him.”
I don’t know yet how that will play out in practice, but I do know that sitting behind a computer all day, building and supporting project management online courses will most probably not be the way. That’s barely touching people’s life and definitely not in a personal way. And can you imagine someone saying: This project management course I took online changed my life for the better? I really can not.
Over to You: Have you Ever Changed Your Perspective?
And if yes, how? And what were your results?
Bonus question: How long do you have left to live, statistically speaking?
Let me know in the notes and responses.
P.S.: You would make my day by recommending this by pressing the little green heart. This way, more people get to see what I write. Thanks.
