CAREER

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Your job is not your career. Not the job you have now, nor your next job. Your career is your means of self-expression, or better yet, soul expression. Where you start in life doesn’t determine where you finish. That’s the core idea of the American Dream. We are free to express our design and pursue our desires. We can if we will, determine our destiny. That’s our career.

Originally the path to the American Dream was through the family farm.. It represented personal independence, self reliance, but for most farmers it was a subsistence existence. So, with the birth of the Industrial Age, we went to the factory. Here, raising productivity usually meant raising wages. A better life. We traded our independence for security. By the 1950′s the American Dream was found in education. That was the path to management…the good life.

Today, it’s all upside down. Education guarantees nothing. 54 million Americans have been laid off since 1979. Think about that…54 million! These aren’t just factory workers; today American legal work is being done in India. If your brain is your principal work asset, you are at risk for having your current job out-sourced, off-shored or technologically automated.

Over the past 25 years, corporate America has developed a new social contract with their employees. No contract. We have come full circle.

The path to the American Dream today is the family farm once again. Only now, we are the farm. We need to clear the rocks and stumps from our minds and figure out how we can become indispensable. Otherwise, we are all simply laboring in temp jobs. Jobs that could suddenly end without us having a choice. The way out is a way that creates value. That only comes in one way – becoming conscious of our unique personal design. Your design is the deep structure of your identity. It is the combination of your persistent traits and personal talent. The path to discovering your design is observing what you do extraordinarily well, that you intrinsically enjoy. Simply put, what you love doing and do well is what you were designed to do. These activities give you energy. You don’t tire of them. You naturally seek mastery of them. People compliment you when you are expressing your design. It’s how you add value to the world.

Your design is not trivial. You were designed to fulfill your personal dream. Designed to succeed at what you were designed to achieve. Most of us are clueless about our design; we take our talents for granted and think our traits are universal, so we are stuck in careers that have no meaning. Our biggest trap is finding ourselves in jobs that exhaust us that are high paying. This is being trapped by our own competence. Our competence keeps us from our greatness. There are many things that we can do reasonably well through self-discipline that are simply a waste of our time. They keep us from our dream. We know this is happening when we find ourselves constantly longing for something else. When we are expressing our design, we have no longings to do something different.

Something better, yes. More opportunity, of course. A bigger stage, more impact…sure. But not something different.

So what does this mean for creating a career?

Start from the end instead of the beginning. At the end of your life, what do you want to look back on that will give you feelings of job satisfaction and contentment?
Is there something that you really want to try and would regret not trying if you lived your whole life without giving it a shot?
Remember that careers have stages. Sometimes we do something solely to give us the experience or skills to do something else. Consider the following true story.

A young man we know had long been interested in International Relations. He studied it in college and was a delegate to the student UN. But when he graduated from college what he really wanted to do was design video games. He became a self-taught graphic artist for a top game developer. Several of the games he worked on became roaring successes. In time, he felt unfulfilled. Now he works for the U.S. State Department. He wants a front row seat to the future. He doesn’t for a minute regret the time and effort he invested in video games. It was just something he had to do. Something he would have regretted had he not tried. He is now at the next stage. But it was all part of his career. His career is his dream. Undoubtedly what he learned developing video games is helping him with International Affairs. How? In countless, undetectable ways. We have passions for a reason. It is all part of our design.

4. Change the world and still be home for dinner. When your career reflects your design, you get a high return on effort. When you are doing what you love to do and what you are good at, it is much easier to get results. You accomplish more in less time, have a bigger impact with less effort. You become an expert. And experts create value efficiently. People pay for value. You make more money without having to work excessive hours. This is essential to having a career that supports your relationships and lifestyle. Otherwise, you’ll only have time for your career. That’s a surefire strategy that leads to empty success. The only way to have a satisfying career that fulfills you and enables you to use a live a life you love is to do what you are uniquely designed to do.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, most of us are only productive about 5 hours a day. Working harder is not the answer. Having a career that fulfills our design is.

An older couple we know had just recently retired. They were amazingly charming as so many Irish people are and we just couldn’t resist asking them what they were retiring from. So, they told us. They told us, they closed the wool mill in the early 70′s where we lived. We were newly married then and too naive to be really worried about the future. We decided we didn’t want to move from our little island home just off the tip of the Ring of Kerry. (The Ring of Kerry is on the southwestern edge of Ireland where the warm Gulf Stream moderates the climate enough for palm trees to grow.) We took stock of what we loved to do, they continued. Helen said, “I love to cook,” while Patrick chimed in that he loved to scuba dive.

Scuba dive, we thought, what a strange thing for an Irishmen to love. We learned that they had opened a bed and breakfast that featured scuba diving as the principle activity from March to October. As it turned out they lived a great life for the last 30 years, including a university education for two daughters and making scores of life-long friends from around the world. “Who would have thought we could make a living doing scuba diving in Ireland?” Not us.

But the look of contentment of a life well lived, of a couple who really lived their dream is unmistakable. You can’t fake it. A scuba diving resort in Ireland…who would have thought?

These and other stories can be found in the book, Your Dreams on Fire.

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