Ugh, I know. Another article on the internet trying to give you career tips and tricks.
Not really though, since I’m going to steer clear of the superficial stuff and go a bit deeper here.
You already know career decisions are hard and fraught with uncertainty, and no, there is no silver bullet piece of abstract knowledge for you to consume that will change that.
However, you can go about making decisions in that state of uncertainty in a better or worse way.
Thinking and talking about this topic recently, I realized that a lot of confusion in this area comes from not properly separating between two commonly used ‘fixed points’ of career decision making: I call them the ‘Idea’ and ‘Method’ parts that go into imagining and making career decisions.
Put simply, Idea here refers to an area of achievement that one conceives of as appealing. For example, working as an investor. This Idea usually comes with a lot of identity sentiments and a lot of focus on being something. Being an investor, a football player, whatever the case may be. In short, becoming something that you think looks awesome.
Method in turn refers to the actual doing of something. The techniques and technologies of achievement that need to be employed almost every day in order for one to achieve in ones preferred area of professional being. For example, a life dominated by physical exercise and ball control training for a football player, or for a more complex example imagine an Angel Investor who has to use a range of qualitative and quantitative methods in both solitary and social environments for the purpose of making good investment decisions.
I have noticed in myself and others that a couple of biases or traps tend to occur with these two concepts when people make career decisions. Specifically:
Assuming that only the Idea matters. The thinking here is that as long as you figure out who you want to be (generally done as an extension of some Idea about who you are), the methods can be learnt or are otherwise secondary to the desired state of professional being. In other words, don’t worry too much about what people actually do on a day to day basis, focus on the identity that the doing gives them and the rest can be learnt.
Assuming that only the Method matters. Let’s say you have figured out that you want to work almost everyday with physical exercise, or that you really like the conversational methods of business coaching. Great, that’s all that matters. The specifics of the professional area won’t matter as long as you get to centre your life around ‘your’ method.
Mushing the two together to find ‘perfect’ balances between Method and Idea. This is a big one for me. I am notorious for approaching these two as an intellectual challenge whose balance I can create a perfect solution for ahead of time that I can then effortlessly step into followed by happiness ever after. I just need to be delicate and savvy enough about balancing all the components in there. It’s also very important to do this as a once and forever decision, so there’s absolutely no pressure or anything.
Of course, all three of these are bullshit.
In the first, the Idea and it’s focus on identity achievement (being something) is almost always vastly out of kilter with the actual experience of that being, assuming of course you even get far enough to achieve the acceptable identity condition that you’ve set for yourself. This approach is basically how pipe dreams are made, expecting an ‘arrival’ of some sort only to realize that once you make partner at your law firm you’re still going to be a damn lawyer doing what lawyers do. Not only does this set you up for painful striving followed by existential crises on ‘arrival’, it also involves a huge amount of pressure that the one Idea you’ve decided to obsessively follow has. to. be. right.
In other words, it’s really not smart to just focus on achieving an imagined identity condition of some kind without focusing on the enjoyment of doing.
Which brings us to the second thinking trap. In this one the Method becomes a self-enclosed prison where a person who has decided to centre their life around physical exercise should be just as happy working as a gym teacher as they would be being a professional football player for Real Madrid. After all, they’re working with physical exercise everyday so these two professional identities shouldn’t matter to them, right?
Wrong. Professional identity and our dreams about ‘being something' actually do matter after all.
Finally, the third ‘mushing’ trap above is probably the saddest because the punishment here is that either nothing ever happens or, when it does, the perfect plan balancing every component of career choice ahead of time has about a 99,9% chance of being wrong. Either case, this way of going about making a career decision wastes a lot of time in intellectual masturbation about composing perfect combinations between Idea and Method in the abstract.
So what to do? How can separating better between your Idea (an admired professional identity and/or achievement) and Method (the everyday experience and doing) help us make a better decision about careers?
I’m not sure I have ‘The Answer’ here, but I have an idea about the way in which to use both of these to make better career decisions.
First, I think a key reason why we make the first mistake of only focusing on Idea comes from confusing the being of something with the lifestyle of something. Any professional role worth doing will have a lifestyle attached to it. You know, the stuff you actually do at 10.45 on a Tuesday morning and throughout the week. This lifestyle on a moment by moment basis is basically all Method. By confusing and conflating Idea with lifestyle, we assume that whatever looks awesome about the Idea of a professional role will be a 1:1 match with the lifestyle of that Idea. This is assuming wrong.
In reality, professional lifestyle is far better indicated by whatever Method the work requires on a day to day basis, especially taking into account time. But it is almost impossible for us to be realistic in our imaginings here. If we are attracted to being a lawyer we will think of doing cool high-powered negotiations or arguing forcefully in court. We will not sit and imagine ourselves through the 10 hours of paperwork minutiae that precede those 5 minutes of cool. Despite in theory committing a lifetime to this time ratio, how many people actually imagine an entire work day in this way, let alone a week?
And here’s the kicker: They shouldn’t.
Because you don’t know and you can’t know until you try it. The above was just my slightly cynical view of what being a generic lawyer is like, but the point is whatever imagining you make is just another philosophical hypothesis. You have to test your idea. Remember the scientific method? Why is it that we applaud scientific thinking so readily in the workplace but become this guy as soon as we start thinking about our career decisions:
Man deciding career Photo credit: Profitguide.com
If anything and for most professional roles, we should probably reverse these two, be more scientists about finding our career and be more philosophical about doing it once we’re actually in place and trying it out.
Here is my personal career translation of it:
Hypothesis (Idea) = This would be awesome. I bet it is awesome!
Testing (Method) = So...I still can’t tell whether being a Supreme Court Justice is cool as shit, but actually doing this lawyer stuff is bullshit. Unless I want to cling to Trap 1 above I probably shouldn’t torture myself over an Idea that kinda probably involves more lawyering.
Analysis and interpretation = That sucked. Was there anything about my experience of testing this that was a bit funny or can I go ahead and conclude that this lawyer thing ain’t for me?
Of course, a lot of times we might not bother with coming up with an Idea, we might just want to focus on singling out things we enjoy doing and leave it at that. This brings us to the reason why I think we fall into the second trap: over-focusing on Method.
In a word, it’s comfort.
Identifying what style of doing we enjoy without caring too much about what it might lead to can make us feel like we’re cutting to the chase. Forget some Idea or Achievement. Identity-Schmidentity. As long as I do what I love everything will be cool and I’ll be happy.
Not necessarily. A happy professional life does not automatically follow from just doing things you enjoy.
The key here of course is that you need to do both in the right order.
Begin by creating an Idea that is basically a professional identity goal of some sort, but do not get emotionally attached to the idea. This will be hard because you will probably use your emotions to generate this Idea in the first place (for example how cool it looks when a lawyer argues in court on TV).
Once this is done immediately put the Idea you’ve just created aside and as quickly as possible test how comfortable you are with the actual technologies and methods of doing things that are used in whatever area that goal sits (e.g. law, medicine, entrepreneurship, and so on).
If the Methods of working in that area are reprehensible to you, take the L and move on (stands for Loss btw in case sports isn't your thing). For example, if you find yourself hating reading, writing, and dissecting arguments at length then being a lawyer is probably not for you. The really important thing here is that you don’t confuse enjoyment with lack of experience. If you like doing something but are not good at it yet, that’s a good sign. It means you have the enjoyment but just need to develop your skills. If you are good at something but just hate doing it, that’s a bad sign, and in my experience those fundamental clashes with your enjoyment are unlikely to change either.
Repeat several times until you have one or a few areas where both the Idea of it appeals to you as well as enjoying the Methods used everyday to achieve in that area.
Or, to put it as a trendy listical:
Begin with your Identity Goal. Look especially at people and roles out there that you envy or admire.
Try out the Methods (or technologies if you prefer) of that role and do the actual doing of it as fast and as much as possible. Don’t think about it. Actually do it.
Do this with as many as possible of the Ideas that you find highly appealing.
Out of the ones, or one, Methods or doing styles that you enjoy, go for the one where you admire the incumbents the most and where your experience with the Method has been the most positive.
You might think this sounds awfully close to trial and error, and it is. The difference is that everyone does trial and error, but very few actually do it well, clinging either to Idea or Method or getting paralysed by perfectionist analysis. When you understand how to separate out Idea and Method, you are on the way to iterating your way to good career decisions in a disciplined manner that takes time but doesn’t waste it. The point of course is to embark on a career where you find compelling what you do everyday and meaningful what that doing leads to.
And finally, don’t focus too much on happiness as a standalone concept. Trying to lock down emotional permanence in some ‘overall’ sense doesn’t work. If you are fortunate enough to have positive emotions and feel satisfied most of the time in your career it will more likely come as a side effect of doing something that is compelling and meaningful to you and being good at it.
Thank you very much for reading my first post on Steemit, hope you liked it and please upvote and/or follow for more! 
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