Say “No.” to More & Discover Your Dreams
One of the most fulfilling parts of my job is my opportunity to speak on high school and college campuses. When there, I speak about the future of work, the role of entrepreneurship, and how students can accelerate their careers by learning a few important concepts from economics, psychology, and philosophy.
Almost always, without fail, we get to some kind of question like this:
“Should I go to college/grad school/study X major/take Y job?”
“I don’t know. I can’t make that decision for you. Do you want to do the things that require that? Is being Y/a grad student/knowledgable on X one of your goals?”
“I don’t know…”
What?
Despite the fact that these students are often the best performing in their schools and despite the fact that they’ve spent anywhere from a decade to a decade and a half in schools, very, very few of them have any idea what they want to do in the long-term.
In fact, the ones who do know what they want to do are the ones who strike me as standout and odd. When I meet a college sophomore who has a very clear idea of what she wants to do (i.e., who she wants to become, what kind of job she wants to hold, what she wants her life to look like), that’s when I am impressed.
This is not good.
If you strive to become everything you will become nothing.
Recent high school graduates know this feeling. They’ve spent so many years cultivating a “well-rounded” resume and taking classes in science, math, literature, and history that when asked to sit down and do one specific thing for a job, they can’t stay still.
They can’t tell you what Plato wrote but can tell you how to write an Advanced Placement essay with the proper structure to get a 5/5 score. They’re better diversified than an index fund but carry less value to both the marketplace and themselves.
Colleges don’t help, either.
The course catalog is a collection of hundreds of disparate and un-related courses, few stringing together a coherent path of thought when combined and clustered loosely together under buckets like “economics” and “anthropology.” The few courses that do have anything to do with each other are “required courses” for the major and looked at by most students and faculty with annoyance. The rest of the courses mostly exist because they pique the niche interest of faculty.
So, by the end of their educational foray, students know a hodge-podge of mostly unrelated information that provides them with the skills and framework for navigating course catalogs and arbitrarily designed majors.
Yet few know what they want to do with this information.
At the K-12 level, faculty and staff have an imperative to get people “college ready” and the hope is that the colleges will help students discover what they want to do. At this point, though, good students know how to play the school game so well that they keep doing just that. At the collegiate level, most faculty specialize in research and not in “helping students discover their dreams and pursue those,” despite the marketing of the admissions department.
Simply put, the obligation to figure out what kind of life you want to live falls on you at the end of the day.
The Failure of the Self-Help Gurus
The most interesting (and potentially worrisome) thing about people like the students I meet is that they have so much potential. If they focus on a handful of things instead of everything and go after those things with confidence, they can make a huge impact and live out highly effective lives.
And they know they want to do this. Usually by this point, they’re so annoyed with playing the school game. They were told that if they studied and did well in school their lives would unfold before them. Now they’re at the point where life is starting to unfold and the question is “which life?”
Helping them answer this question is not as simple as throwing a self-help book with a goal-setting exercise in it at them.
Asking, “Well, what are you goals?” seems like a logical first step but one that only works if they have goals. Often, with young people who grew up in the light of the Great Recession, their goals take amorphous forms of things like, “I want some security,” or “I want to be able to travel.”
If you sit these people down in a traditional goal setting workshop, you get a collection of things they want (or more often, want to avoid) that looks almost as arbitrary as their college course catalogs. Having this list is better than having no list but the list is often so arbitrary that it makes it difficult to build towards.
If you’ve done a goal setting workshop, you know what I am talking about.
You sit down to write everything you want in a specific part of your life like your job, your romantic life, or your physical life.
You have a big list, and then you circle the top few items.
Great. Having some goals is better than having no goals. But being put under pressure to just generate a list of things that look nice to you is far from an ideal way of crafting a life that relates to the values you’ve developed and work to explicate through your life.
The issue is that “goals that are connected to the values you want to live out” is difficult to put on a self-help cassette or a 3 AM infomercial.
Via Negativa
Long before people in the comfort of their homes stressed about what they want to do with their lives while reading an article on Medium on their $1,000 iPhones, people were asking what the nature of the Divine must be. The Euthyphro Dilemma poses the question of whether something was good because it was Divine or if it was Divine because it was good, prompting investigation into the question of, “what are God and the Divine like?”
It might not look like it but this is a similar problem to asking somebody what they want their life to look like. Most questions of what God and the Divine look like get answers that boil down to, “good stuff!” Most questions of how people want their lives to have boil down to, “good stuff!”
Neither are particularly useful.
So, theologians came up with a better way of framing the question. Instead of asking, “what do God and the Divine look like?” they started to ask, “what do God and the Divine not look like?”
This let them create a picture of God and the Divine by coloring in what sits outside of them. Through a process of elimination, we can get a more detailed, granular, and more useful picture of God and the Divine.
Our goals are not very different. Like the Divine, they should be highly value-charged. You want your life to mean something and to reflect something. You don’t just want to own nice things and go cool places for no reason.
Some self-help starts to get this right by asking readers to imagine the future they want to avoid. Readers paint a picture of the absolute life they do not want to live. They imagine misery, scarcity, and chaos. This is better than nothing but still does not give the reader much to go off of to create real goals for their life.
Instead, it’s better to ask, “what do you not want?” in each aspect of your life.
What do you not want your job to look like? What do you not want to do at work? With what kinds of people do you not want to work?
What do you not want your health to be like? What do you not want your strength to be?
What do you not want your romantic life to look like? What characteristics and traits do you not want your partner to have?
What do you not want your spiritual and intellectual life to look like?
And so on. And then ask, “why?” to each of your answers. Reflect on what’s good about not having these things in your life.
At first, the picture painted by answering these questions will be somewhat fuzzy. This gives you something to work towards avoiding.
For example, you may know that you do not want to work a job that requires you to work shifts. This obviously precludes service jobs but also precludes a lot of medical jobs. Now you know not to work towards working in medicine.
You may know that you do not want to work a job that requires you to commute to an office every day. Now you know that you shouldn’t take a job as a consultant (or if you do, that you should have a very clear exit path).
Over time, as you do this exercise and revisit it, a clear picture starts to emerge of the life that you can build.
You get a stronger sense of your values and the things you want connected to those values. This is when a traditional goal-setting exercise might have a higher payoff.
The really dangerous trap of not having clear goals (or at least, anti-goals) is that you fall into living a life that, had you done this exercise, you wouldn’t have wanted to live.
Imagine doing this exercise and realizing that everything you do not want in your life is what you have now in your life and there’s no exit path.
Imagine if you could go back a few years and avoid getting to that place.
How powerful would that have been?
We owe ourselves better.
Combine with Ambition Mapping to get a clear set of goals and how to build your life towards those goals.
I go into detail about this kind of exercise in my forthcoming book How to Get Ahead When You Have Nothing to Offer. Get some exercises on my email list at www.zakslayback.com and a free copy of my favorite book.
