Bill had been going through the motions at work, he knew. His heart simply wasn’t in it. Bill was finding it harder and harder to even go to work. For a while, he was able to put on a good face. But lately, even that was too hard to do. And now, his boss and the company’s owner seemed to know that Bill didn’t really want to be there. Their attitude toward him had changed. They used to be friends, but now it was all business. Bill didn’t know how much longer he could keep it up. Yet he also had no clue about what else to do.
Change
A lot of folks change jobs and careers–multiple times. I’ve done it myself, having had four distinct careers. Career change can be healthy. What a great life to have done several different things, some of them even well and competently! Changes in jobs and careers can also seem like moving toward one’s destiny, the thing at which one might actually be good. And see? Already we’re assuming that changes in jobs and careers have purposes, that one job or career might prepare you for the next job, and that job or career may prepare you for the next one, until you are finally doing the highest-value thing you could do. See the goals that we’re assuming are implicit in the work world? They include competence, good, value, heights, and ideals. These attributes constitute the world in which we live, love, and work, to act out our being. Work can seem like a theater in which we are each on stage, struggling both alone and together to catch the playwright’s sense of each scene and of the whole play, as we move from one role to another. Get a full and dramatic sense of your job and career. A lot is at play in what you do, including your destiny.
Transition
The transitions between work roles are so important to making the most of each scene and of the whole play. In theater as in work and life, timing and order are everything. Linger in one scene, and you’ll miss the start of the next. Skip scenes or get them out of order, and the play makes no sense. You must be ready at just the right moment to leave one scene to change costumes and roles to enter the next. You have to know your part. But where is the script? The playwright guides with a hidden hand. And the director, too, hides behind the screen, speaking a language we must strain to understand. Do we soldier on in our present role, ignoring the whispers and then the demands and finally the screams to move on to the next role? Who is our director, and what does he want us to do? Or are we simply in charge of ourselves, to do whatever we wish, pursuing this thing and that thing at the first whim or, conversely, languishing in place like a pig in the mud, perfectly at home while also feeling sorry for ourselves?
Living
The saving grace of a job and career is that we must make a living for ourselves. If it were not for some degree of accountability to provide for ourselves and our family, we would bear the curse of ease, to forgo all effort and inquiry. Truth is, we could do reasonably well today without making much of an effort. If there were ever a time for just letting others do the work and going along for the ride, that time would be now. You might have to find the right city, but in mine, you can get a free warm bed in a shelter and three square meals, even if you aren’t on disability to pay for it. I’ve spent a good amount of time helping the local street population, and some of them seem happier and more satisfied than the working class. Yet for most of us, living in a homeless shelter wouldn’t be much of a life, which may be why we work, to make a better life. And in the work itself, we find a better life.
Experience
For nearly twenty years, I taught law students while also overseeing two law school campuses, after about twenty years in law practice. Forty years of trying to help people get on in life, first as a lawyer and then as a professor and dean, gave me a good glimpse into what people seek, how they get off track, and how they get back on track. The law students I advised and taught were of all ages, from as young as twenty to as mature as sixty. They came from all walks of life, too, domestic and international, blue collar and professional, city and country, military and civilian, married and single, and with and without kids. You name it. And they came with passions for life, not necessarily for law and justice, but for making a better life for themselves and for others. I so badly wanted to help my school’s law students get on in life that I researched and wrote several books for them, including how to choose a career and how to get a job in that career. Likewise, in my twenty years of law practice I served individual clients of all kinds. And they, too, wanted to get on with a better life, a good life. This guide includes what I learned from them and from serving them.
Working
These days, I continue to stay engaged in various communities, where I still run into good folks trying to make better lives for themselves and others. And often enough, the opportunities they see for a better life are through further developing their work or changing their work. Work has its instrumental purpose, to provide an income out of which to live while supporting others, beginning with one’s family. Yet work has another purpose, less instrumental and more inherent in its nature, which is to facilitate adventure and, in doing so, promote growth. Work at its essence is not being an acceptable cog in a greater machine of production. Work is instead venturing forth in uncertainty, out of which to discern patterns from which to draw beneficial order. Work is seizing the jewel from the dragon, and the greater the dragon, the greater the jewel. Work not only provides sustenance but also gives one another reason for sustaining. We neither live to work nor work to live, yet work is an enormously valuable and rewarding aspect of living.
Goal
These insights on a proper understanding of work suggest this guide’s goal. This guide should help you confirm or adjust your work to enable you to see and embrace your work as fulfilling its greatest purpose for you and others. You may be doing exactly the right thing in exactly the right work for you at this time, without your discerning its richness. Or you may be doing the wrong work in the right or wrong field, while needing to make major or minor changes. This guide should help you, one way or the other, either to make the changes you need to make or instead to just get on with your good work with a better attitude. And good for you if you’re seeking one or the other, better work or a better attitude. We have these capacities for deliberate thought to help us flourish. Keep looking for helpful answers by pursuing the right questions. And discerning your calling is always a good question. We work all our lives but barely think about why, for what purpose. Confirm your why or what for now, and see how what you learn causes you to adjust.
Structure
This guide’s structure begins with prompts about you including who you are, what made you, who helped you, what you’ve accomplished, what you’ve learned, and what interests you. Answers to these questions can help you with your job and career. Yet this guide’s goal isn’t to help you find yourself. Fruitful work isn’t gained by a navel gazing, by a narcissistic looking inward. We instead find fruitful work outside of us, at the intersection of the ideal and the material. Instead of looking further inward than we already do when unsure of our purpose and role, we must look farther out and up toward ideals, while at the same time looking farther out and down into the nitty gritty of the material stuff through which we interact with the world. That marrying of the ideal and material is work’s gift, exactly as Genesis reveals us and our work, we having been placed in earth’s Edenic garden with divinity whispered in our ears while we dig deep into the garden’s soil to work it. Work connects our soul with authentic opportunities in the real world, freeing us of the disillusionments of fantasy.
Connection
Thus, the second part of this guide involves helping you discern how to better connect yourself with real opportunities in the world. We could have a lot of fun together in this guide, encouraging you to dwell on yourself. You’ve surely lived an interesting life, giving you endless opportunities for self-exploration. But in the end, all we’d be doing is winding you in on yourself, suffocating you like your own boa constrictor. To ensure that you’re not starving yourself with introspection, you need tools and constructs to help you turn yourself outward to opportunities in the world. That’s the purpose of the second part of this guide, to help you discern the opportunities that fit best with you.
Journal
Reading, though, is one thing, while writing and reflecting is another. If you simply let the words of this guide pass before your eyes, you’ll gain a little, but you may not gain what you need. The more you put in, the more you get out. Open a physical notebook with a pen or pencil in hand, or create a digital word-processing file with your computer, laptop, tablet, or smartphone. Title it something clear like Career Journal, Career Planning, or Career Thoughts. And get ready to create a journal tool that will lead you forward on your career exploration, while helping you keep track of the ground you’ve already covered and record what you learned. This Career Journal tool works. Believe me. When I had occasion for a needed career change, I took a dose of my own medicine using this tool, and it led me to a job I didn’t know existed, and a new career late in life that was perfect for me. So get ready to do some fruitful investigation and reflection. A template of the full Career Journal, introduced section by section at the end of each chapter, appears at the end of this guide.
Key Points
In jobs and careers, change is common, even healthy and inevitable.
Making timely and smooth transitions in jobs and careers helps.
Making a living keeps us honest, real, and connected with the world.
Learn from those with experience, on the subject of jobs and careers.
Working both provides needed resources and leads us on adventure.
Understand the deeper purpose and essential grace of work.
This guide helps you learn about yourself and connect with careers.
Start a journal to investigate and record what you learn.