How to choose a career to get the lifestyle you want

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Sarah Kenny wakes up at 5am six mornings a week to get to Back Bay Yoga where she practices ashtanga — a genre of yoga known for acrobatic lunges, feet tucked behind the head, and almost fifty pushups in one session. After that, she goes to work as a senior operations specialist. For Kenny, both pieces of her life are important. “I am good at my job and I am good at yoga and I had to figure out how to balance both,” she says.

One of the most liberating moments in career planning is to realize that you don't have to get paid to do your favorite activity in order to be happy. One of the constipating situations is to think there is only one career that can be fulfilling to you. Get rid of the idea that the most important thing to a worker is work, and you free yourself to make work just one portion of a fulfilling life.

Kenny's success comes, in part, from the fact that she has structured a life that caters to two aspects of her personality — the organized, office manager type, and the athletic, live-in-the-moment type.

Paul Tieger, co-author of the best-selling career guide, Do What You Are, advises that you pick a career based on your personality type, which nearly ensures that you'll have passion for what you do. Tieger's book helps you to understand yourself very quickly in a way that allows you to nail down your personality type and then find many careers that cater to it. You can even give the system a free test drive.

What is clear form Tieger's system is that a personality is multi-faceted, and a career need only cater the dominant aspects of your personality in order to be fulfilling. The passion you have that you won't get paid for is something you can do in addition to your job, and in the best scenario, each portion of your life caters to a different aspect of your personality.

The key to making this sort of life work, though, is finding a job that leaves room for a life. Kenny, for example, will not work at a company that does not respect her yoga schedule. Leslie Cintron, assistant professor of sociology at Washington and Lee University, says that workers like Kenny are not aberrations, “We have a generation that is clamoring for more balance in their lives.”

But this is a different sort of balance than the baby boomers aspired to. According to Cintron, “Baby boomers were talking about issues that they had to deal with when women moved into the workforce and polices didn't acknowledge that fact. Today one difference is that men in their 20s also are saying they want balance. They want extra space to be able to develop themselves as individuals.” Another difference is that baby boomers asked, “Can we work and have a family?” The new generations ask, “Can we work and have a life?”

For some people, “having a life” means having time for friends or developing a connected relationship. Other people might seek meaningful pursuits outside of work, such as a particular sport or extensive travel. Whatever “having a life” means to you, take solace in the fact that you don't need to get paid for it, you just need to find an employer who will give you room for your personal passions.

Be bold when it comes to getting what you need. Ask yourself what parts of your personality you need to address. Ask your employer to accommodate your non-work needs. The new generation is rife with people like you. Management advisors across the country are warning companies that if they don't make the workplace flexible they will face a shortage of willing workers.

Trust yourself to identify your personality type and your passions, and have the confidence to require that your employer afford you space to grow. Cintron encourages asking, even if it looks like a risk: “There is a lot of untapped flexibility that might be offered if one makes that first attempt to ask.”

Tread very carefully near a company that will not give you enough control over your time to enable you to pursue passions outside the office. Having control over your time and your work are some of the most important factors in job satisfaction; it is almost impossible to be happy in a job that gives you no control.

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Happiness is being with people who aren’t crazy

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After a short blogging hiatus, I made it to Madison. I can’t tell you that my happiness levels have changed dramatically, but I’m optimistic. And, after decidedly UNhappy traveling with two young kids, I’m ready for a little normalcy, which for me is blogging at midnight…

A company fired someone via text message (thanks for the link, Tommie). A lot of bloggers have written about this event, and mostly people complain about the company and how bad it must be.

There is a saying that there is never one crazy person in a marriage. I have found this to be true — that it takes a crazy person to marry a crazy person and just because it LOOKS like one person is crazy doesn’t mean the other isn’t crazy in a more private way.

The same is true for companies. Who takes a job at a company that fires people via text message? And, if you do take a job at a company like that, if you are not crazy, you leave. If you have stayed long enough to be fired by text message you are as crazy as the person who sent the message.

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I’m moving out of New York City

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It used to be that people moved to where their job was. But where you live has a lot of impact on how happy you are. So it makes sense that today people pick a city first and then find a job, and cities maven Wendy Waters thinks this trend will increase. I will be part of this trend on Monday, when I move.

I have spent the last six months studying statistics about cities and matching them with statistics about happiness. This is serious scientific research that is changing how universties teach and how city planners think.

Here are the two guiding principles of my research:

1. People are very bad at predicting what will make them happy.
We overestimate how bad the bad will be, for example. We think we will be really sad if we lose a leg, but in fact, people who lose a limb are not any sadder, as a population, than people who have not lost a limb. I learned this from an interview with Daniel Gilbert, professor of psychology at Harvard, and I quote him so often he is practically my guest blogger.

2. The studies about happiness will most likely apply to me (and you).
This I also learned from Gilbert. He says that even though most people think they are exceptional, most people are normal. Of course. That’s what normal is. But most football players think they are above average (they are not) and most people think they are below average jugglers (they are not). We are all basically average. (You can read more about this in his book, which I also constantly hype.)

Here are the two things that I thought were most important when we talk about the intersection of geography and happiness:

1. People are happy if they earn what their friends earn.
Relative income, rather than any certain level of income, affects well-being, according to Daniel Kahneman, who won the 2002 Nobel Prize for applying the principles of psychology to economics.

I remember a piece I read in the New York Times (which would be a link you’d have to pay for so I’m not even going to bother looking for it.) It was a story about how real estate agents know way too much about their clients. One agent talked about when a husband and wife were looking for summer rentals in the Hamptons. They walked into a five million dollar home and the wife said, “We wouldn’t have to live like this if you’d get a decent job.”

It’s not about how much you have, it’s about how much your friends have. So you should live in a place where you will have as much money as the people you meet. My husband and I are constantly examining our jobs and our childcare setup, so I know we need a city with a low cost of living in order to guarantee that we never fall below the median during our trials and errors.

2. You will like what other people like.
I want good schools because I have two young kids. I checked out lots of school rankings. The more I pored over these different rankings, the more I distrusted them. Every list had different results, and the whole process seemed to be pretty subjective.

Gilbert is doing a study right now that shows that if you want to know if you should date a given person on Match.com, ask the last person he dated. If the last date liked him then you will like him. So I decided that choosing a school district is like dating, and the most important thing in picking a school is that other families love the school district.

Finally, as a tie-breaker, I looked at how economic development experts rated cities. I love the economic development people because their job is to think about how to leverage the community to make life vibrant.

I focused on the rock star of economic development, Richard Florida. He ranks cities according to how creative they are. You can search by topics like how technology-oriented the city is(technology=innovative business), or how gay it is (gay=diversity=open minds for new ideas). Each city gets a score that reflects the level of creative thinking among its population.

So, where did I choose? Madison, Wisc.

Madison is inexpensive, the people who live there love the schools, and the city comes up on best places lists all the time.

For all the research I’ve done, though, I have no idea where to live within the city. So it’d be great if there’s a Madison native out there who could post some suggestions.

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Guest etymologist: My investment banking brother says”

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ASAP: a ubiquitous term coming from senior bankers. You might assume it means as fast as humanly possible, as in an all-nighter if necessary. But this is not always the case. For example, sometimes it seems asap is just a banker’s best effort at using the word please. As in: Leave a printout on my chair asap.

I've taken to differentiating between the lower case asap, which means whenever I can get around to it, and the all caps ASAP, which means drop everything else. I figure if a senior banker makes the effort to put ASAP in caps, he might actually mean it.

And there’s no ASAP like the Sunday morning ASAP: A favorite senior banker trick to make sure the team is pleasing the client is to send out an unsolicited email to the client promising something by a specific time without consulting the people who actually have to do the work. I've been woken up on a Sunday morning to a voice mail saying we've promised the presentation to the client by noon, so I should get into the office and crank it out ASAP. Oh, and there better not be any mistakes.

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Teamwork is a great way to sidestep office hierarchy

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After reading the comments people posted about rankism, it occurred to me that the idea of teamwork is very related. Teamwork that is merely cosmetic (e.g. a department that calls itself a team) reinforces rankism. But real teams are actually the opposite of rankism — they are flat, temporary, and assume equal contribution from everyone, no matter where they fall in the office hierarchy.

One of the defining traits of Generation Y is their penchant, and talent, for working in teams. Enzo Marchio, Antonio DeFabritiis, and Johnny Marchio are equal owners of Enzo and Company, a hair salon, and they are a good example of this team mentality. Unlike entrepreneurs of the past, who were typically loners, uncomfortable functioning in a larger organization, these three would never think of going it alone. DeFabritiis says, “Everything is easier if we work as a team. And it's more fun.” When asked how he learned to work well in a team, DeFabritiis says, “This is how we were brought up.”

Being part of a team is the best way for today's new workers to get interesting high-level work for themselves. However even though reams of research shows the effectiveness of teams in the workplace, Baby Boomer management has had a tough time with implementation.

Bruce Tulgan, founder of Rainmaker Thinking and co-author of Managing Generation Y, explains that, “There was a big shift in parenting, teaching and counseling in the mid 80s because of research in childhood self-esteem.” These kids are very well-versed in getting along with others, collaboration skills, feeling part of a team, and having good communication skills.

Teams appeal to young workers because they have no interest in boring or ancillary workplace tasks, even at the entry level. Well-constructed teams provide an opportunity to be a decision maker and a key contributor early in ones career. According to Tulgan, “Generation Yers like teams because they are pulled out of the hierarchical structure. On a team it's not about what is your experience but what can you do today.”

Older, more experienced workers are more comfortable in hierarchies, especially since they are the workers most likely to be on top. Often, according to Tulgan, the idea of a corporate team is meaningless; “People just change the sign on the door from human resources department to human resources team.” And, if Boomers do form teams, they are often hierarchical teams where there is one leader who tells everyone else what to do.

Jeff Snipes, CEO of Ninth House, a provider of online education, including optimizing team effectiveness, says a hierarchical, leader-oriented team was appropriate for earlier generations: “Traditionally if you worked up ranks for twenty yeas and all the employees were local then you could know all the functions of the workplace. Then you could lead by barking orders.”

“But today everything moves too fast and the breadth of competency necessary to do something is too vast.” The most effective teams today are competency-based teams, where each person comes to the group with a different skill and they work together for a specific duration on a specific project to build something bigger than themselves. On these teams, everyone is an important decision-maker and is able to make a big difference.

Workers who want to make sure they have the growth opportunities that come with competency-based teams should make sure they are choosing to work at companies that use this sort of team. Snipes suggests that you ask these questions of a company you're considering: (Note to managers: Ask yourself how you'd answer these questions. You need good answers if you're going to attract the good catches in the coming years.)

1. What sort of talent development does the company commit to? There are no good teams without team training. A company committed to team leadership trains people to do it.

2. Is diversity important to a company? When it comes to teams, diverse input makes more effective outcomes. Diversity is important not only in terms of race and culture but in terms of the way people think.

3. Is there a reward system in place for teams? If a company rewards individual achievements, only then will individuals have less incentive to make teams work.

But let’s be real. Not everyone can stomach working on a team. Kerry Sulkowicz, Founder of the Boswell Group and advisor to CEOs on psychological aspects of management, says, “There are different types of personalities and it's not as simple as being part of a generation. There will always be some people who feel constrained being part of a group.” Sulkowicz says to think of it as a spectrum; almost everyone needs alone time, just some people need very little and some people need a lot. For those of you who don't do your best work in teams, take solace in the fact that Baby Boomers still run the workplace, and they're not big on teams either.

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The measures of our success

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It's very hard to tell how you’re doing in the blogosphere. I am, by nature, competitive, so I am always looking for ways to measure success. To this end, I’ve been using Technorati, the grand ranker of all blogs.

So let me just take a moment to say that I made it into the top 100,000 in just four months of blogging. When I told this to my husband, who wonders why I spend so much time on this blog when I am not getting paid, he said, “You’re in the top hundred thousand? Is that good or bad?” I had to remind him that it’s 100,000 out of more than 50 million.

Meanwhile, I was interviewing Robert Wright today, and he mentioned a new way to think about blogging success. He said the letters he receives from his Bloggingheads.tv audience are just as intelligent as the letters he received when he was editor of the (magazine-to-the-intelligentsia) New Republic.

I like that way to measure success because I get such good comments on my blog.

This also seems like a good time to mention that the reason going to work is easier than staying home with kids is that at work, we get structured praise for meeting defined goals. At home, no matter how great a parent you might be, you get screaming kids who break rules. There is no standard way to measure success as a parent, which can be very frustrating.

But everyone needs official recognition for their work and you don’t get it as a parent. In this respect, blogging for no revenue has unfortunate parallels to the worst parts of parenting.

So thank goodness for Technorati. Now I’m aiming for the top 50,000.

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Two office haikus

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One last minute task
My job description expands
Paycheck still itty-bitty

I am a writer
I planned to be a princess
It did not work out.

– From That Girl Who Writes Stuff via Monster Blog

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Battle cry against power tripping

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Here’s a new word for the workplace: Rankism. File it in your brain next to racism and sexism. And brace yourself for a big change at the office, because rankism is another kind of discrimination we should not tolerate.

What’s rankism, or rankist behavior? It is hiring an intern and ignoring her all summer. Or pointlessly yelling at the receptionist about a manager who is late. Or a professor taking credit for a graduate student’s research. All these are examples of people who think they can treat someone disrespectfully because of their lower rank. The Devil Wears Prada has tons of juicy examples — as well as snappy fashion and a happy ending to make the story acceptable.

But rankist behavior is never acceptable. And Robert Fuller, the man who came up with the word rankism, is on a mission to end it. His big idea is that people have a right to be treated with dignity no matter where they are in the pecking order. He’s part of what’s become known as the “dignitarian movement.” (He’s written two books on this topic: Somebodies and Nobodies and All Rise.)

Wondering if you’re at a job where you’re treated with dignity? You need to receive recognition, humane treatment and a living wage.

If your job doesn’t qualify, you need to speak up, which is hard to do, but having a word to identify the problem is half the battle. “Vocabulary changes thing,” says Fuller. “The Feminine Mystique referred to the ‘problem without a name.’ Sexism was not a word until five years after that book came out. Once the word sexism was available women had a weapon to make demands.”

Fuller wants you to take cues from the success of that movement. Say, “Hey, that’s rankest,” the same way you’d say, “That’s sexist.” But don’t yell: “Having the words rankist and rankism will give workers in every line of action a battle cry. They won’t scream at the top of their lungs. They will mention it calmly and cause the person on top to look at their actions.”

Here are five more steps you can take to combat rankism in your own work life:

1. Get a good read on potential managers.
Management sets the tone of respect or disrespect at work. So sniff out offenders before taking the job. Vanessa Carney works at Let’s Dish, a food preparation company. “The management team here is genuine,” says Carney, “The people who run this company have a good attitude and it trickles down.”

Carney was especially impressed when the owner of the business sat down with her after a few months to find out what, exactly, she wanted to do in her career.

2. Let people know that rankism matters.
Probably those behaving this way are not even conscious that they’re doing it. In one study about harassment, most people who were disrespectful were not aware of it–they thought they were making jokes at the time.

“They are misguided comedians,” says study author Catherine Hill, director of research at American Association of University Women. She also found that people respond to what they perceive as cultural norms. So speak up when you see it, even if you are not on either side of the exchange.

3. Don’t accept rationales for rankism.
Common refrains are “This is the only way the business can work,” (to justify long and unpredictable hours), or “I got through this so you can too,” (to justify hazing-like practices).

Joanna Vaillant is a management consultant — a position known for difficult work conditions. But she did research to find a consulting company that respects its employees: Boston Consulting Group. She recommends talking to people who work in the company about the company. “In business school I talked to classmates who worked at different companies,” says Vaillant. And she chose well. She recently got married and received assignments that would allow her time and headspace to prepare for that big day.

4. Take a bad job.
Working at a low-level job is not just a headache, it’s an integral part of your personal development. A big barrier to fighting racism and sexism is that if you are white you don’t know what it’s like to be black, and if you are male you don’t know what it’s like to be female.

But everyone can work in a low-level job — especially in the service industry where the exposure to rankest behavior from customers is huge.

5. Consider leaving.
One of the scariest things about demanding change at the workplace is the prospect of getting fired. But young people today — those invariably filling up the entry-level positions — switch jobs often. So the risk of offending your current boss for speaking out against rankism does not seem that big a deal.

The workplace is ripe for eradicating rankism. The youngest workers are optimists about their ability to change the world and passionate about valuing diversity. Also, in poll after poll, young people report less interest in money and more interest in the quality of work and the quality of life work affords. So it makes sense that now is the time for the dignitarian movement, and we should all jump on board.

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Make time for big ideas: Twenty minutes

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I interview two or three people a week for the various columns that I write. One thing I have learned from this is that people can tell you the major ideas they have in about twenty minutes. After twenty minutes you end up getting into the details of the ideas — probably more than you need to know.

So it was not surprising to me that the TED conference limits speakers to about that amount of time. What was surprising to me was how much I enjoyed watching the videos of lectures from the conference.

Before I go on, though, let me just say that TED is totally elitist, and the selection of speakers is absurdly imbalanced among men and women. But when it comes to your career, you should take advantage of all opportunities to converse with very smart, interesting people. I have noticed that I learn an incredible amount from interviewing interesting people — more than when I just read an article about them. Getting a chance to see the lectures at TED, (for free!) is not a conversation, but it’s better than reading about it.

So, each night or so I am watching one video. I don’t have the attention span to just watch, so maybe it’s good that I didn’t go to the conference. I answered email during Tony Robbins, but still, you can’t say he’s not inspiring. I was riveted during the Majora Carter video. She’s a great speaker (I shed a tear) and she talks about the politics of green space in urban areas. I didn’t know anything about this topic and I can honestly say she showed me a different way to look at things.

I found out about the TED videos from Guy Kawasaki’s blog. I check his blog out a lot because he writes about big ideas. There is so much to read online, but it’s easy to surf and surf and never get to a big idea. Force yourself to find them — that’s how you’ll grow.

How much money do you need to be happy? Hint: Your sex life matters more

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How much money buys happiness? A wide body of research suggests the number is approximately forty thousand dollars a year. I interviewed Daniel Gilbert, professor of psychology at Harvard University, and he says once you have enough money to meet basic needs — food, shelter, but not necessarily cable “?incremental increases have little effect on your happiness.

Aaron Karo, comedian and author of the forthcoming book, Ruminations on Twentysomething Life, responds to the number with, “If you want to draw a line in the sand, happiness is having enough money so you don’t have to move back in with your parents.”

To someone who just spent four years in college living off nine-thousand-dollar loan stipends, an increase to forty thousand means a lot — moving from poverty to middle class. But it’s a one-time rush. After you hit the forty-thousand-dollar-range money never gives you that surge in happiness again.

Twentysomethings who are looking for happiness from their careers will benefit from research about their parents’ choices. Richard Easterlin, professor of economics at University of Southern California says previous generations have proven that our desires adjust to our income. “At all levels of income, the typical response is that one needs 20% more to be happy.” Once you have basic needs met, the axiom is true: more money does not make more happiness.

So then one asks, what does matter? The big factors in determining happiness levels are satisfaction with your job and social relationships. And in case you found yourself slipping back to thoughts of salary, according to Easterlin, “How much pleasure people get from their job is independent of how much it pays.”

Unfortunately, people are not good at picking a job that will make them happy. Gilbert found that people are ill equipped to imagine what their life would be like in a given job, and the advice they get from other people is bad, (typified by some version of “You should do what I did.”)

Gilbert recommends going into a career where people are happy. But don’t ask them if their career makes them happy, because most people will say yes; they have a vested interest in convincing themselves they are happy. Instead, try out a few different professions before you settle on one. For college students, Gilbert envisions this happening with part-time jobs and internships at the cost of “giving up a few keggers and a trip to Florida over spring break.” But even if you wait until you enter the workforce, it makes sense to switch from one entry-level job to another; no seniority and scant experience means you have little to lose. So it’s an ideal time to figure out what will make you happy: Use a series of jobs to observe different professions at close range to see if YOU think they make people happy.

It’s simple, proven advice, but few people take it because they think they are unique and their experience in a career will be different. Get over that. You are not unique, you are basically just like everyone else. Gilbert can, in the course of five minutes, rattle off ten reasons why people think they are unique but they are not. For example: We spend our lives finding differences between people to choose teachers, band mates and spouses, so our perception of peoples’ differences is exaggerated… And then Gilbert gets to grapes: “If you spend seven years studying the differences between grapes, no two will look the same to you, but really a grape is a grape.”

So your first step is to stop thinking you’re a special case. Take Gilbert’s advice and choose a career based on your assessment of other people in that career. You next step is to focus on social relationships, because in terms of happiness, job satisfaction is very important but social relationships are most important.

And by social relations, most researchers mean sex — with one, consistent partner. So consider giving your career aspirations a little less weight than you give your aspirations for sex. For those of you who like a tangible goal, David Blanchflower, professor of economics at Dartmouth College says, “Going from sex once a month to sex once a week creates a big jump in happiness. And then the diminishing returns begin to set in.” He adds, to the joy of all who are underemployed, “It’s true that money impacts which person you marry, but money doesn’t impact the amount of sex you have.”

Maybe all this research simply justifies the twentysomething tendency to hold a series of entry-level jobs and put off having children. Says Karo: “All we really want is to get paid and get laid.”

 

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