How To Choose the Correct Career Path
Once upon a time, I was studying to become a pharmacist. Then, a chemical engineer. Then, a PR specialist.
(If any of you took that career path, then maybe you should also get into MLM…because you’re probably a great liar.)
As you might guess, I got a fair amount of shit from people about those choices. Some of those people genuinely cared, and some just wanted to criticize. Interestingly, the feedback I got from both camps were valid, but what ultimately drove me to write this article was this idea that more people out there than not, actually don’t understand what the purpose of their career is.There are many reasons why people don’t understand their purpose in their career.
Some common examples are listed below:
a) Someone does what they do because they thought it would make somebody else happy (parents, friends, etc.)
b) Somebody who works at their job to avoid a negative consequence (ex. I hate my job, but if I don’t work here, I won’t be able to pay my rent or buy bottles at the club)
c) Somebody who doesn’t totally get where they will be in five years
There’s a ton of bullshit out there about how you can “find purpose” in your career, and it’s probably not written below. You’re better off learning from somebody who’s made a bunch of mistakes in my career path than a perfectionist anyway, so here are some personal, but applicable lessons I’ve learned in the last 3–4 years of my “career” about how to find its meaning.
Here is your five-step process to choose the correct career path:
1) Fill in the blank for the following sentence — “When I die, I want to be remembered for _____.” So, that’s a bit intense and dark, but it’s effective. You can literally write anything, but it has to be genuine. The answer to this fill-in-the-blank is an important precursor to the next most important question, which is actually much more practical in figuring out what you want in your career.
2) Rank the following five career traits in order of importance: Money, Doing What You Love, Pleasing Other People, Opportunity and Corporate Mission: Five fairly standard things to look for in a career. But more importantly, take a look at what you wrote above before you rank these things. For example, one of my friends wrote: “When I die, I want to be remembered for being a loving and caring family man.”
By looking at this sentence, you might think that that person cares about the altruistic things in life, such as working for a company with an amazing corporate mission, right? Wrong. If you want to be remembered as a great family man…put food on the fucking table. In this case, money and opportunity were №1 and №2 on their list.
3) Open a spreadsheet and put those five career traits as headers in headers: Now, what you want to do is also add another header that says “TOTAL”. The TOTAL formula should basically be:
TOTAL = 5* (your №1 choice from Part B) + 4*(your №2 choice from Part B) + 3*(your №3 choice from Part B)+ 2*(your №4 choice from Part B)+ 1*(your №5 choice from Part B)
4) In another header titled “CAREER PATHS” or “JOBS”, and simply start listing out in rows what you think you might want to do: Now, in the ensuing row, you will want to rank the five career traits, again. This time, you will be doing it for a specific job.
At this point, you’re probably fairly confused. Don’t worry, I’ve attached a handy screenshot below…
Note: this person’s career trait rankings from Part B were:
- Money
- Opportunity
- Pleasing Other People
- Corporate Mission
- Doing What You Love
So, as you can see, here is a career ranking list for this person. Notice that it is grossly oversimplified, and really only has a few career paths listed out…but hopefully you get the point.
In this situation, the person should pursue either Finance or Software Development as their career choice. He or she clearly valued money and opportunity above working for a company that “did good”.
5) Share the findings with your five or ten closest people in your life and seek their critique: Ideally, these people would come from different phases of your life. For example, if you were to share the results with five people, you could do…
- 2X family: Mom and Brother
- 1X friend: Your best friend from band camp
- 2X professional: Your most trusted professor and the bar manager at the restaurant you work at
However you want to do it, this works best when you get a variety of opinions. What you are specifically seeking out is not advice, but critique. Don’t get me wrong, if the person’s eyes light up and gush over how accurate this is, that’s great.
If you look at criticism objectively, you can very clearly see how it would benefit you. Let’s suppose that you rated “Money” as your most important priority. Your friends who have known you your whole life disagrees with this, and think that “Pleasing other people” is higher on the list. Why? They have seen you pick up the tab for other people at the bar a few too many times and from their honest point of view, are able to tell you that your true motivation and passion is actually to have the resources to make other people happy. Definitely good food for thought.
After getting this critique, I recommend adjusting the model in the spreadsheet above. Maybe you’ll need to add a few more career lines, but the more you refine that model, the more accurate it will be.
BONUS STEP: Once you find an ideal career path or two, write out what it actually means to be in that field. The easiest way to become disenchanted with something in life is to not understand its unintended consequences.
What do I mean by this? The concept of “unintended consequences” can be easily explained by one of the most sought-after, but misunderstood career paths in all of humankind: law.
Hundreds of thousands of undergrads in North America apply to law school while applying for millions, if not tens of millions of dollars of undergraduate debt to make their dream of becoming a lawyer happen. An admirable, All-American (or Canadian) goal, right?
Becoming a lawyer in our society has been, for better or worse, ingrained with a few rather positive traits. Being a lawyer is often associated with…
- Making a lot of money
- Meaning you’re smart, argumentative and a whole host of other amazing adjectives
- Academic and societal prestige
As such, the phrase, “I’m going to law school” inspires praise and adoration from most people’s inner and social circles. Your parents are proud of you and your friends are clamouring and liking your Instagram photos of your acceptance letter.
Ten years later, this person is a full-fledged lawyer. And they are completely and utterly miserable.
They work 90 hour weeks. They discover that their $110,000/year annual salary isn’t actually so great, considering that after taxes, student loans, and rent, they’re only seeing about 20% of it. They also find out that their friends selling software for the latest tech startup actually makes more than they do, and they did not have to go to school for an extra three years.
They discover that it’s not like the TV shows; they are not Harvey Specter or Jack McCoy. They’re somebody’s drone, crunching away in a cubicle. If they have to hear the word, “billable hour” one more time, they might kill someone.
They didn’t accept that beyond the “upside” of being a lawyer (prestige, being seen as smart), there are many, dark secrets that they don’t tell you at law school recruitment events.
By the way, I’m not making this stuff up — there are literally consultants and coaches who specialize in helping lawyers escape what they worked so many years to become.
All of these “unintended consequences” seem like a big price to pay when you consider what the person was actually seeking, which is “Pleasing Other People”. This kid went to law school simply because it made his parents and friends respect him or her.
That’s an admirable goal, but what they did not realize is that there are plenty of other careers, if executed properly, could have won that same respect from his or her peers.
If your dream is to be a lawyer, that’s fine. But understand that with every career path valuation has to come to a point where you accept the bad with the good. To avoid any hidden surprises, make sure you do the following whenever you pursue a career path:
- Shadow someone in that industry for a day
- Take at least five people out for coffee and ask how, and if, they would do things differently
- Make a list of tangible reasons why you want to pursue a certain career path
- Make a list of “unintended consequences” and see if they conflict with these tangible reasons
Just so I haven’t spent half the article shitting on lawyers, here is an example of other analys(es) you might do:
- I want to be an entrepreneur because it would be amazing to solve the world’s biggest problems and help people like Gary Vaynerchuk, but I understand that it could cause me crippling anxiety for the first few years.
- I want to be a digital marketer or UX designer because I want to be able to live and work from anywhere in the world, but I understand that at a larger company, salespeople will get raises and promotions ahead of me because they could be seen as more revenue-driven employees.
- I want to be in event operations because I’m an organized person, and I have always loved the brands that Event Agency X works with. However, I understand that I have to deal with crazy, last-minute changes that will make me very angry at times.
As you can read, finding purpose and the right career path is a many-layered, complex process. Entire consulting businesses and startups have been founded to tackle this process alone, and I don’t pretend that one Medium article could solve this.
The only way to find purpose in your career is to look at the consequences of the career that has nothing to do with what’s generally know about it, and make your own critical decisions accordingly. Other people can help, but only you can take ownership and make it happen.
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