FAILURE #4: WE ARE LOOKING FOR MORE THAN JUST A CAREER

Conventional wisdom assumes that once we find the “perfect fitting” career-jacket, we will magically be happy. We’ll have magically found our place and our purpose in the world.

HAHAHAHA!

Like anything that assumes our complete sense of identity and fulfillment and passion can ever come from outside ourselves, this notion is— well, it’s kind of silly.

Think about it: there are NBA players who have the sweetest career-jackets in the world– jackets that fit their strengths and aptitudes, that pay (perhaps undeservedly) well, and that they are passionate about– and yet who are nonetheless unhappy and unfulfilled.

On the flip side, there are gas station attendants whose jobs might appear to be less than ideal, but they are happy as clams.

If you think that finding the “perfect” career is going to give you something you don’t already have— an identity or a sense of wholeness or happiness or purpose— then you are mistaken.

Let me tell you something, guys.

This course is not just about finding a job.

This course is not just about finding a career.

This course is not even just about finding a passion.

If we think we’re looking for just a job or a career or a passion, for “that thing we’re supposed to do,” then we are deeply mistaken.

No matter how deeply and how obsessively we search, we will never find the entirety of what we’re looking for within a job or a title.

We’re in fact searching for something much more than this. We’re searching for something beyond definition, something so much deeper.

We’re searching for ourselves— for that person we were meant to become.

The deepest vocational question is not “What ought I to do with my life?” It is the more elemental and demanding “Who am I? What is my nature?”

– Parker J. Palmer

Consider this: Perhaps we aren’t meant to be an artist or a psychologist or an engineer or anything on any pre-existing list. Perhaps we are meant to be— simply, ourselves.

And perhaps when we are most ourselves, a part of this just happens to involve creating art or counseling people or engineering— in that way which only we can do.

There is an eternal landscape, a geography of the soul; we search for its outlines all our lives. 

– Josephine Hart

Remember how Bill Hewitt and Dave Packard, the founders of HP, didn’t start off with a specific product idea in mind? Instead, all they knew is that they wanted to build a great company.

Think of yourself as a company and your career as a product.

Products can come and go— they’re bound to gain and lose relevancy as the marketplace changes and waxes and wanes. Some products might fail; some might succeed.

Products are important, but they are transitory.

A great company, on the other hand— that which holds the space and the potential within which great products might arise, is of far, far, FAR greater importance and worth.

As companies, we may create several products within our lifetimes; as individuals, we may hold several jobs or careers.

But just as a single product failure does not wholly define a company, nor does it doom a great company to failure, neither does a single job or career define or doom an individual.

We may have one product or many; we may have brilliant products or crappy products, but what defines us and what matters most is not the product— what matters most is whether we can became that awesome, amaze-balls, totally unique person of greatness that we were born to become.

If we aspire to be great companies, to be great people, to live great lives, then we can never really fail, and we can never lose relevance.

Our greatest achievement is not a product or a career. Our greatest achievement, our truest pursuit, is to become a person of greatness. Our greatest accomplishment is to become ourselves, that person who we already are deep down.

And the awesome thing is, in order to do this, we need not seek out anything that we don’t already have.

Instead, all we have to do is find effective ways to allow our truest selves to surface.

In the process, we’ll also take actions to help us discover a product (or products) that are in alignment with our truest, realest selves.

Got that?

This is no simple task (until it is), but this is exactly what I’m going to help you discover in the chapters of this guide to come.

WOOOOOT I can’t wait! (Can you?)

QUESTION TIME:

[These are questions to consider for discussion within your group meeting, during your “Knowcation Station” drop-in sessions, and/or in the Facebook community]:

I’ve proposed that perhaps it’s more about who we are than it is about what we are physically doing. Does this mean that the “product“ doesn’t matter at all? Does it mean that what we do is of little or no importance?

Leave your thoughts (& see what others have to say!) out in the private Facebook community.