Carla hadn’t really thought of herself as having a career. She had always worked, except for the brief time of delivering her children. Yet even then, with the help of her husband, parents, and others, she had returned quickly to work, in part to help pay the household bills, but in part because she just felt better about everything when she was working. Carla didn’t even know what work did for her that made her feel better about herself, her life, and others. But as she eased into the middle of her life, and maybe the end of the middle, Carla realized that she had a new urge to take more control of her work. She could see that her work would come to an end, and she had the sense that she needed to be more responsible to what work she should really be doing before that end came.
Sacrifice
Work has the odd feature to it that it demands, at least to some degree and at times a large degree, that you sacrifice. Jobs and careers involve sacrifice. You give up something when you commit to pursuing a career. What you gain may be greater. You hope and presume that it is. You probably assume that your career is providing greater value to you, your family, and your community, especially those whom you serve in your career, than you might have provided if you had not had a career. You may also believe that your career is making for a more interesting, engaged, healthy, and purposeful life. But then one day, you remember the sacrifice. You see what you could have done instead of working, maybe where you could have traveled, whom you could have met, and what you could have experienced and learned but for your career. Your career takes time, discipline, effort, and energy. It can also cost you health and peace of mind, even relationships. Careers require sacrifice.
Gain
Yet don’t rue the sacrifice you’ve made to pursue a career. The world exists through sacrifice. Every act that prepares for the future, whether your future or the future of another, involves sacrifice. And nothing good would exist without that preparation, without giving up something from today for something better in the future. Think of all those who came before you, giving up their present for your present, far in their future. Think of all you’ve given up for your today and all you are willing to give up for not only your tomorrow but the today and tomorrow of your family members and others. And that is the nature of a career, not just something to keep you busy, from which to draw your identity, and from which to draw your pride, reputation, standing, and sustenance, but a grand thing through which you participate in the sacrifice that continually creates the world. And that participation is what makes you want to give your all and give your best to your career. Your career may provide all manner of gains for you, but the greatest thing it does by far is to give you that vehicle through which to take your part in the continual creation of the world.
Definition
Get a clear sense, then, of what a career is. The word career, oddly enough, comes from a Latin term for wheeled vehicle, what would then have been a chariot. You know the verb to career wildly around a track, in modern usage often swapped with careen? Yes, same derivative having to do with a wild chariot race. The archaic use of career was to go in circles on a wild chase. Of course today, the more-common usage of the word career is the noun, not the verb, form. Today, to have a career is clearly one thing, generally to dedicate oneself in a long-term and stable commitment to a field or profession, while to career through life or careen through life (take your pick) means quite another thing, to live on a wild course. Yet do you see the connection? Careers are our attempt to guide our chariots, so to speak, on life’s wild course, in some form of competition, if not with others then with life, our needs, or ourselves. A career involves long-term commitment to, and ongoing development and advancement within, a sector or field, from which we derive income, purpose, and meaning by applying our expertise for the good of others.
One
The prior paragraph’s point is in part not to think of your career as an especially stable thing. Careers are often not stable. I’ve had four of them and faced significant changes during the course of each one. You may have found yourself on the same wild course. A myth exists that in bygone days, one took on a career early in life and remained in it until one’s end. Not so much. People have long changed jobs and careers. Consider Gutenberg, generally credited as the first European to commercially deploy a printing press with movable type, as the greatest invention of all time. He started making jewelry and utensils, had a brief but spectacular run with his movable-type press, and then disappeared into other ventures. Consider, too, the fabulous High Renaissance painter Da Vinci and brilliant mathematician Pascal. They did a little bit of everything. No matter how good one is at something, even a genius, other callings beckon, and fast.
Several
You’ll see data confirming that jobs and careers blossom quickly, like a flower on the first warm Spring day, only to wilt just as fast on the first hot day of Summer. The Bureau of Labor Statistics pegs our average at around nine jobs across a working life. Other figures suggest an average of at least five careers with two or three jobs within each career. Even Boomers, born in the late 1940s and 1950s, averaged several careers and many more jobs within careers. And labor economists see even more careers for individuals entering the fluid workforce today. Many of us work today at jobs that didn’t exist five, ten, or twenty years ago. Many more of us may work tomorrow at jobs that do not exist today. Don’t see a career as necessarily a long-term, stable thing. Keep in mind the other connotation of the word career, too, as you follow your wild worklife course, two hands firmly on the steering wheel but necessarily turning sharply this way and that to navigate the constantly changing course.
Guide
Implied, though, in both meanings of the word career, the settled meaning and wilder meaning, is the clear sense that you are steering the course. The moment you recognize that you have a career is the moment you take charge. That realization actually happens to a lot of us. We fall into our first job as the only thing at hand to do but soon find out that it works reasonably well for us and everyone else, well enough that we begin to think of it as a career. Or we leave one job and career, taking up interim employment while looking around for the next career, when we soon realize that the interim employment is our next career. And that moment is when we take what we’re doing more seriously and earnestly, letting it capture, engage, and shape us more thoroughly, until we begin to think of ourselves, and others begin to think of us, as that thing. Be aware of that aspect of your career, that it is the thing that you accept, acknowledge, embrace, and engage as worthy of you and you worthy of it.
Shaping
Indeed, you may not be satisfied with your current career because you have not acknowledged it for what it is. Either you have not committed yourself fully to doing it, or you have not accepted that it is what you have committed yourself to doing. You’re in, but only halfway. It’s definitely your doing, but you won’t admit it, and thus you won’t let it shape you in the way that it would. That’s the thing with careers, too: they should shape you. That doesn’t mean that you must necessarily conform to all or even most career norms. Just because you’re a dentist, artist, teacher, or preacher doesn’t mean that you must look and act like others in your same career field. Yet professions do define themselves by their customs and standards. Meet the minimum standards, or you’ll pay anyone whom you harm for not doing so. Immerse yourself in your field’s best practices. It’s not a bad thing to be a physician, engineer, designer, or decorator. You may do well letting your field shape you.
Intention
Just try to act with intention. Give your full attention to what you do in your career, not at all times but at least when you’re doing it. Careers happen within communities of practice. You might have heard someone called a teacher’s teacher or lawyer’s lawyer, or whatever else may be their field, as if they’ve distilled what their career holds. You have to respect those individuals who have so immersed themselves in their careers as to take on the full role. If you’ve ever worked in your field with someone like that, then you know the sense of fitness, authority, even power that comes with embracing a career role. That immersion doesn’t just happen. It instead requires intention. Watch a master at something go about their business. Their every act reeks of intention. Make that immersive intention your career goal, whatever you do.
Attributes
Immersing yourself in a career with complete intention generates helpful attributes. Few if any are born with character. We make our own character, deriving it from the intention we direct toward the challenges and opportunities we face. Do not wait for your own attributes to manifest themselves, so that you can draw on them for your next steps. Instead, act with intention to generate the attributes you desire to reflect. Motivate yourself, rather than waiting for motivation. Act with confidence to gain confidence. Reflect tenaciousness, perseverance, and discipline, to acquire those attributes. Act competently to acquire competence, and act likably to be likeable. Intentional actions generate attributes to make a happenstance job into a full-fledged career. Poor, smart, and driven soon makes one fit and productive in a career.
Process
Your process or approach is thus how you turn intention into attributes equating to a rewarding career. Remember what a career is: guided wild onrushing, not aimless wandering. Your process guides you toward, into, and through a career. The old saying that what gets counted gets attention is true. Process makes you notice and count things, maybe not like one, two, three, but at least in the sense of discerning your movement forward or backward, upward or downward. To advance in your present career or toward another career, look for opportunities to put processes in place. Create a spreadsheet, design a protocol, or start a journal to track your actions and what they produce. Then analyze, adjust, and improve. Hold yourself accountable to something, indeed almost anything until you find a better something, and then hold yourself accountable to a better something after that. Stop wasting time. Set short-term objectives, if not yet longer-term goals, and then measure your progress toward those objectives. Soon, you’ll find yourself forming written plans with strategies. Don’t worry yet about the value of your plans. Starting out wrong is far better than not starting at all. Inertia is your enemy. To have a rewarding career, you may need to start careening at least a little. You can shape that energy later.
Journal
The end of the first chapter invited you to acquire a physical notebook or make an electronic Career Journal. Now open that journal, make a new section heading My Careers, and in that section write about the careers you’ve already held. Write anything that comes to mind, but if you need prompts, consider describing who or what got you into the careers, when you realized what you were doing was a career, and what led you out of the career if you’ve already left it. Consider describing what you learned in the career, what you liked about the career, and what you didn’t like. If you haven’t yet had a career, then write down the careers you’ve pursued or considered but rejected, and are thinking about pursuing now. For now, just get something written down. And then, over the next few hours or days, write a little more about your careers as things occur to you. If you have things to correct about what you’ve already written, strike through what you already wrote rather than erase it so that you can see how your thinking about your careers changed slightly or otherwise developed. Don’t hesitate to return to this opening Careers section later on, as you further develop your journal, to add more about your past careers or current career interests. Know yourself to know your future.
Key Points
Careers invite sacrifice, when sacrifice creates and fosters gain.
A career is a job sector or field to which one commits long-term effort.
Individuals often have several careers and more jobs in those fields.
A career implies one’s full commitment to improving in the field.
Careers shape their participants, just as participants choose careers.
Generate your career attributes like engagement and perseverance.
Adopt developmental processes wherever you see the opportunity.