The science behind the idea “Do what you love”

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The reason you should do what you love is because you won’t work hard at it if you don’t love it. And hard work is, in fact, more important in success than raw talent. The guys who wrote Freakonomics also write a column in the New York Times magazine, and this topic is the focus of their most recent column:

“When it comes to choosing a life path, you should do what you love “? because if you don’t love it, you are unlikely to work hard enough to get very good. Most people naturally don’t like to do things they aren’t “good” at. So they often give up, telling themselves they simply don’t possess the talent for math or skiing or the violin. But what they really lack is the desire to be good and to undertake the deliberate practice that would make them better.”

Of course, the difficult part is to figure out what you love. Maybe a better standard, though, is to figure out what you love to practice. That seems to eliminate a lot more possibilities right off the bat.

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Forget the soul search; just do something

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When it comes to finding a career, the huge soul search is hugely overrated. At some point — usually much earlier than people think — you should just start doing something. Anything.

While the soul search is routinely touted in the self-help section of bookstores, it is not the most practical approach. The first problem with the soul search is that it takes forever. Literally. Knowing oneself is not an end game; it is infinite. So there’s no point in waiting until you “know yourself” to pick a career. The other problem with the soul search is that it assumes a soul mate. But with career choice, “there is no one right answer,” says Jennifer Floren, CEO of Experience.com. “The concept that there is one right job for someone is ridiculous.”

Take the pressure off career decisions by reminding yourself that there are many types of work each person could do and be happy. “People have multiple selves,” writes Herminia Ibarra, a professor of organizational behavior at INSEAD in France. Different jobs will address different parts of ourselves at different periods in our lives. “In any of us there’s a part that’s very pragmatic and there’s a part that’s very creative, and there are times in life when we give more time and space and energy to one side than the other. But if it’s in you, eventually it kind of bubbles up, and it wants some airtime.” No one job can satisfy our whole personality, so stop aiming for that.

People coming out of college today will change jobs every eighteen months. That’s a lot of jobs, so choosing one is not that big a deal. If you don’t like it, it’ll be over soon. “It’s a waste of energy to focus on the negative consequences of a job search because there’s no such thing as a wrong choice,” says Floren. “Every step of a job search is a good step because you’re going to grow and you’re going to learn more about yourself and the world around you.”

Another argument for action over analysis is that sticking with the first job you pick is not as beneficial as moving around a bit. So making a choice you don’t like could be good for you. “The trend today is to get a broad perspective from working in different industries. This is a way to build a more layered network that will work for your future,” says Catherine Kaputa, a branding consultant.

When it comes to career schemes, we simply do not have accurate imaginations about what life will be like for us in different situations, said Daniel Gilbert, professor of psychology at Harvard University, when I interviewed him. Our most accurate information about what will make us happy comes from snooping in on other peoples’ lives to see if they are happy. And the best way to watch other people is to be in a variety of offices. Gilbert calls the informal process of judging other peoples’ happiness “surrogation,” and he says, “surrogation is the best way to predict if we’ll be happy. Observe how happy people are in different situations.”

So what DO you need to know before you make a decision? Figure out what was bad about the jobs you’ve already had so that you don't duplicate the problem. Then just start testing the waters — put a toe in the current to see how it feels. Then take a leap, and if you don’t like where you land, reframe your landing pad as just a stepping-stone. And start putting your foot in the water again.

Gilbert says, “We should have more trust in our own resilience and less confidence in our predictions about how we’ll feel. We should be a bit more humble and a bit more brave.”

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Learn to be a leader in tolerance

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Here’s a piece in the Boston Globe about learning how to react constructively when someone makes offensive comments at work. In fact, the majority of people, it appears, will say nothing, even though a comment offends their sensibilities.

Decades of research into bystander apathy shows that people freeze when they are in a group. “In one 1969 laboratory experiment, people were put into a room where they heard someone behind a curtain moaning about a hurt leg. Seventy percent of those who were alone offered help, compared with just 40 percent of those who were with a stranger.”

This does not surprise me. I am Jewish but for some reason, bigots do not realize that I’m Jewish. So I hear a lot of slurs against Jews and they always catch me off guard. Once my boss made a comment about getting “Jewed” out of something, and I said, “I’m Jewish.” Certainly, there are better responses — one that would educate, perhaps. But I couldn’t think of one on the spot.

I remember as a kid being told by the “Just say no” campaign how important it is to rehearse beforehand. I think this is true for diversity training as well. It’s very hard to come up with the right thing to say in the moment, but it’s important. To be a leader at work, you need to be a leader at bringing tolerance to the workplace. People who matter will admire and appreciate you for this.

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Stay-at-home parent worth six-figure salary

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In a moment of publicity genius, Salary.com compiled research to determine the value of a stay-at-home mom. The verdict: $134,121 a year.

And then the arrows started flying. The economists complained that the math is sloppy. (By the way, one of my brothers is an economist so I know that economists think everyone’s math is bad except their own.) The working moms who don’t make that much feel slighted. (They actually took time from their busy day to post petty, indignant comments like, “My friend says she spent a lot of extra money when she was home with her kids.”) And men are complaining that no one is paying attention to their contribution. (Take note: Men earn about 25% more than women in comparable jobs, so you do the math.)

But that is not the point. The point is that our society only values work that is paid, and people are not paid to parent, and that is a problem. The discussion should be about how to shift society so that parenting is more valued. That is what we should be talking about.

The Salary.com survey is a good way to start people thinking about how to value parenting.

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The time is right to ask for perks

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The deluge of press about the difficulty of attracting and keeping Generation Y employees is amazing.

Here’s an example of a press release pandering to the media infatuation with the topic. Even the sheep are suffering : “Fewer and fewer people are choosing the sheep and beef industry as a career. There are huge job choices across a wide range of industries and for young people, the world is their oyster.”

Now is a great time to start asking for a wider range of benefits from your employer. Companies are beginning to understand that if they don’t start caving to Generation Y demands then there won’t be quality job applicants.

Ask for flexible schedules and jobs that foster personal growth because that will make the most impact on your life. Pat Katepoo gives good advice on how to ask.

Not that Generation X didn’t want this stuff in a job ten years ago. But Generation X did not have the demographic power to demand it. Generation Y does, and employers are shaking in their boots. Finally.

Stumbling on Happiness

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The most fun I ever had interviewing someone was when I talked to Daniel Gilbert, a psychology professor at Harvard University. It was about a year ago, and I thought I would just ask him a fast question about how much money someone needs to be happy. (Answer, about $40,000 a year. That’s enough to be happy. Money you get after that doesn’t affect your happiness.)

But Gilbert went on and on about how we have no idea what is going to make us happy so we should stop trying so hard to figure it out. His book just came out. It’s called Stumbling on Happiness, and I recommend it. Gilbert has a lot to say about the flawed ways we look for happiness.

Here are things he told me:

1. You can’t predict what will make you happy. People are, in fact, hard-wired to do a poor job of imagining what will make them happy. (This is why we think more money will help, for example.)

2. The best way to figure out happiness is to look at other people. Find people who look happy to you and do what they are doing.

3. You are not special. We are all basically the same. So you don’t need to look for any special code for happiness. Just find people who look happy to you.

To get a sense of Gilbert’s research, here’s an excerpt from his recent op-ed in the New York Times that describes why we are biased when we examine the evidence:

“When our bathroom scale delivers bad news, we hop off and then on again, just to make sure we didn’t misread the display or put too much pressure on one foot. When our scale delivers good news, we smile and head for the shower. By uncritically accepting evidence when it pleases us, and insisting on more when it doesn’t, we subtly tip the scales in our favor. Research suggests that the way we weigh ourselves in the bathroom is the way we weigh evidence outside of it.”

When it comes to picking a career, Gilbert says you should personally try out a lot of different jobs. This is great news for young people today who generally have nine jobs before the age of thirty-two.

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Expand your opportunities by finding a specialty

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I spent two hours this week writing an article about autism. My son was diagnosed with autism and I could write five hundred pages about dealing with the diagnosis. But then I reminded myself about specializing. About focus. Specialists get a lot of good things in this world, and people who dabble in everything get nothing.

Dabbling is fine, to a point. I mean, you have to dabble to figure out what you want to be a specialist in. But let’s be real. I write a career column. I have a book about careers coming out. I speak at universities about careers. I am not an autism writer.

So I trashed the autism article. Because it’s not going to help my career in a focused way. Sure, it might help in a haphazard way, the way playing basketball at the park helps your career because you never know what will come of anything. But the only way to reach focused career goals is to have focused efforts.

I stick to writing about careers because specialization is the ticket to freedom from boring and inflexible work. Let’s say you want to have every other Wednesday off to go to a yoga class. If you are a specialist who would be hard to replace, your boss will be more likely to say yes than if five hundred entry-level people can do what you do.

The more you need, the more this rule applies. Moving in and out of the workforce is easier once you’ve established that you’re great at a specific thing. And entrepreneurship is easier as specialist, too, because one of best ways to gauge aptitude is if that person has a strong knowledge base and network in the field of the proposed business.

You don’t have to specialize right away, but you should see your work path as a quest for specialization. View random corporate jobs as possible apprenticeships. You don't need to know what you’ll specialize in, but you need to be open to it when it comes. Specialization often creeps up on you, like a friend who you never expected to turn out to be a friend.

When I first started writing columns, I had no idea that I would write about careers. I was hired to “write about what it’s like to be a female executive.” I tried lots of different types of columns. I wrote about software development (my specialty at the time). I wrote about consumer products (definitely not my specialty). Those columns flopped, and so did most of my columns that were not, in some way, about careers. I learned by trial and error that I was a career writer.

It is always scary to specialize because there are so many jobs that become out of your focus. But there is good research to show that you will have an easier time staying employed if you specialize.

Specialization is also scary because we think we need to address all aspects of our personality with our work. But no work can do that. Autism, for example, is important to me right now, but it doesn’t need to be important in my work. In fact, work is sometimes a nice break from that aspect of my life.

My son was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome, which is a type of autism that occurs when someone has a very high IQ but a large deficit in social skills. His teachers taught him a way to leverage his specialty — memorizing — to learn rules for socializing that other people know intuitively.

I learned many lessons from watching him do that. One is that once you have a specialty, you can leverage it to add things that are not necessarily your specialty, but you still want to have them in your life. In that way, a specialized path is one of the most diverse and rewarding paths you can choose.

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First step in a new job is to figure out what it is

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Most jobs turn out to be very different than what you were told about in the interview. So your first task in your new job is to figure out what the job really is. Most people don’t do this which is why there is a whole cottage industry of people who coach for the first ninety days of a job (here’s a book and a web site for starters).

You must realize that each new hire has political motivations. It’s your job to uncover the politics behind your position so you can figure out what you should really be doing instead of relying on your official job description.

A good example of this situation came up in Fortune magazine this week. Garry Betty, CEO of EarthLink said, “Google only has three engineers working on Wi-Fi. [CEO] Eric Schmidt laughingly told me in a meeting that the best hires they ever did was when they hired those three Wi-Fi engineers and put out a press release. The market cap went up $10 billion.”

In fact it was never Google’s intention to be a huge Wi-Fi provider. But Wall St. Analysts loved the idea that Google hired some top Wi-Fi engineers. By hiring three people, the stock price went up significantly. Certainly enough to justify the three salaries. So in fact, these three engineers didn’t need to do anything. For these engineers to thrive at Google, they needed to understand this situation, and decide where to go from there.

So before you get giddy about your new job, don’t get too attached to the job you think you got. Spent the first ninety days figuring out what people really want from you but couldn’t tell you in the interview.

And then, instead of complaining about bait-and-switch, recognize that it’s part of corporate life – it is, in fact, very hard to predict exactly what someone might do once they get to an office. So just do the job that needs doing. If you do it well, you should be able to finesse your position into something you like in no time at all.

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Star performance doesn’t trump interpersonal problems

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Movie mogul Mark Gill, the guy who produced blockbusters on a shoestring like “March of the Penguins” ($77 million at the box office) and “Good Night, and Good Luck” (six Oscar nominations) has been fired. Well, officially resigned, but really he was pushed out because he can’t get along with his boss.

The New York Times reports that, “Mr. Gill’s personal style continually clashed with that of Jeff Robinov, Warner’s president of production and Mr. Gill’s boss.”

About a year ago, Gill knew there was a problem and said, “I definitely had to make some adjustments to fit into this culture.” But he obviously did not make the necessary changes. No surprise. The more you feel like a star, the more you feel like you don’t need to change.

But don’t kid yourself that doing great work for your company means you don’t have to adjust your attitude and behavior to fit in. Even a guy who produces the most popular documentaries of the year has to get along with his boss in order to keep his job.

This is not revolutionary management. In fact there’s a Harvard Business Review case study (that you have to pay for) called “What a Star – What a Jerk” that discusses the need to fire people who perform well but don’t mesh with the organization.

But, like most case studies about interpersonal skills, you don’t need to read twenty pages to know the truth: If you don’t like someone, nothing else about them matters.

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My adventures in shared-care parenting

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My husband and I both want to be home with our kids while they are young, and we downsized our standard of living enormously to do that.

I made a career change from software company executive to writer. This has been great for me. It’s a career that can grow big, but there is lots of flexibility for working around my personal life.

My husband ended his entertainment industry career and downshifted, slowly, first to the nonprofit world, which we found surprisingly inflexible for parenting, then to stay-at-home dad.

You know how you hear about the dads in the 50s who folded under the pressure of having to support a family with no financial help from a partner? I am sorry to say that I felt like that — especially living in New York City.

But, like most people who want jobs with flexible hours, my husband was not able to find one. And a standard job would mean leaving at 8 a.m. and getting home at 7 p.m. which are pretty much the hours our kids are awake. So, he had to choose between working nights or not seeing the kids. He chose working nights.

There are not a lot of options for working nights. Especially if you don’t have the talents to work at a nightclub. So my husband is answering phones at a car service. He takes down the time the person wants the car and some other information and a computerized system dispatches the car. My husband does the same thing, over and over again, for eight hours a day.

To give you a sense of his co-workers, the woman next to him slammed down the phone the other day and said, “The customers are so outrageous! This guy wants a car in a quarter hour. How am I supposed to know what a quarter hour is?”

In between calls, his coworkers play brand-name Internet-based games that my husband produced in his former career. He doesn’t tell anyone. He tries to fly under the radar.

But the customers, investment bankers at the most chic-chic firms in the city, notice something is different about my husband. Two or three times a week, someone will say to him over the phone, “What are you doing at this place?” One guy said, “Is this your real job?” My husband said yes and the guy pushed until my husband explained our situation. The guy said, “That would have never happened when I was your age. Men couldn’t do that.”

The hardest part about this life is that very few people understand what we’re doing. You can imagine what a conversation killer it is when someone asks my husband the great American question: “So, what do you do?”

Although I overheard one woman say to him, “Your kids are so lucky,” the best support system I’ve found is learning from other people who are thinking seriously about this topic.

I particularly liked The Bullshit Observer’s rant this week about how difficult it is to manage career aspirations and be a hands-on parent. He has some interesting statistics as well as insights like this one:

“American parents have two very fundamental responsibilities at war with each other every single day. Those who’ve chosen the path that goes up the ladder appear to have chosen not to be parents. Those who’ve chosen the path that leads to the diaper bin have chosen not to move up.”

One organization that publishes a lot of information on changing the situation is the Third Path. This organization helps couples move beyond the idea that one parent is the primary caretaker and toward a mindset of “shared care”.

Third Path offers mentoring to couples who are trying to implement a shared care arrangement in their home. Though this path is not easy for anyone, the stories of what people have gone through to make shared care work are inspiring.

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