Yep, that’s right. Guy Kawasaki inteviewed me about my new book. The post is titled Career Guidance for This Century and it’s at his blog, How to Change the World.
During my first job interview, my mom drove me to 31-Flavors while we practiced interview questions.
One question we did not practice was “How much money are you expecting?”
When the ice cream store owner asked, I said, “Well, my parents are cutting off my allowance for the summer so I’d like twenty dollars a week.” That seemed like a lot because I wouldn’t need money for school lunches.
Later, my mom pointed out that I gave a number so low that it would have been illegal. In the end, the owner paid me minimum wage for a 40-hour week, and because I had asked for so little at the beginning, by the time I was a doing the job of a manager I was making less than some scoopers.
So I quit, and moved to a pizza parlor where I got extra money for cutting the salami with the machine that cut peoples’ fingers. It wasn’t until later in my career that I realized there are established strategies for salary negotiations, and if you follow them, you will likely get the salary you deserve without risking the loss of a limb.
I got a lot of practice doing that in my twenties – having about ten jobs in ten years. I got a sense of who would negotiate and who wouldn’t. I learned to read people in business. And then I realized that you can use these skills for a lot more than just salary.
One of my bosses gave me the book Getting To Yes. He said the book would help me manage because every management moment actually has implied negotiations.
When I went to couples therapy with my husband, the therapist assigned us reading. (Who knew therapist assigned books?) But guess what it was? Getting to Yes.
It was a great idea. Because then instead of paying a therapist to entertain our insane ideas of changing each other. We learned how to make the other person feel happy about giving us what we want by making sure that they get something, too.
So I was excited when I had the opportunity to interview the author of Getting toYes, William Ury. He’s director of the Global Negotiation Project at Harvard, and his new book is The Power of a Positive No: How to Say No and Still Get to Yes. Here are his five best tips for doing well in negotiations.
1. Take a break.
Ury calls this “going to the balcony” in order to get a big picture handle on what’s going on so that you are not getting too worked up over irrelevant details. He says, “When we negotiate when we’re angry we give the best speech we’ll ever regret.”
2. Know your BATNA.
This is negotiator-speak for “best alternative to a negotiated agreement.” That is, if you have to walk away, what’s the best you can get? This tells you how much power you have in negotiations. The person who needs the agreement the least has the best BATNA and the most power.
3. Put yourself in the other person’s shoes.
Ury describes negotiation as an exercise in influence. “You need to change someone’s mind, so you need to know where they are right now.” This means listening more than talking. And the first question to ask is Why. You will hear their needs, but you need to know the underlying cause for the need. For example, if your boss wants you to work a 16-hour day. To negotiate with your boss, you need to understand why – what needs to get done in those hours. Maybe you can get it done a different way.
4. Learn to say no.
“In order to get to the right deal, you need to be able to say no to the wrong deal. Saying no is fundamental to the process of negotiation.”
Tip from the department of great-if-you’re-him: Warren Buffet once said that he doesn’t understand “getting to yes” because he just says no until he sees a perfect yes. Buffet says you only have to give four or five great yes responses in his work in order to be a billionaire.
5. Be clear on your values.
For those of us who might not see a perfect yes, deciding on no is more complicated, and we have to be really clear in our own minds about what we value and what we need. Sometimes a no is surrounded by a deeper yes. For example. You say yes to the values, no to the tactics and yes to going forward. Ury calls this a positive no. But he warns that if you’re in doubt, then the answer if probably no.
What I take away from Ury is that good negotiation is a combination of good self-knowledge and good people skills. And, not surprisingly, this is the combination that gets you a lot of things in life.
There are opportunities in each of our lives to practice negotiations constantly — even, as Web Worker Daily points out, in email. You can do it with a spouse, with a boss, with your neighbor who doesn’t clean the yard. The better you get at the small stuff, the easier the big moments of negotiation will feel.
For many young people today, the most trusted source of career advice is their parents. Unfortunately, a lot of parents are giving a lot of misguided advice to their kids.
Today’s workplace is very different from the one baby boomers navigated. But often they don’t realize that, and think the “classic” advice still applies. It doesn’t. Here are the five worst pieces of advice that parents dole out.
Get a graduate degree
It used to be that people went to graduate school as a surefire way to achieve the American Dream. Today, graduate school generally makes young people less employable, not more employable.
For example, people who get a graduate degree in the humanities have little chance of getting a tenured teaching job.
And when it comes to an MBA, the value of the degree plummets if it’s not from a top school, even though the cost of the degree continues to skyrocket. So instead of opening doors for you, the degree in many ways forces you to settle for a job that pays well enough to pay back your student loans.
Law school results in one of the few graduate degrees that can make you more employable. Unfortunately, it makes you more employable in a profession in which people are unhappy. Law school rewards perfectionism, while law practice rewards good sales skills.
This dichotomy, combined with the reality that practicing law isn’t all that glamorous, means that law school should be something you do only if you’re driven to — it’s not the safety net indecisive career seekers wish it was.
Don’t job hop
The advice parents give about job hopping comes from the days when human resources people were in charge of job interviews, and hiring managers ruled the world. But today, job hopping is standard. Most people will have eight jobs before they turn 30, and that’s a good thing.
Young candidates these days have more power than interviewers because there’s a shortage of people to fill entry-level jobs. Unemployment among the college educated is less than 2 percent, young people routinely have more than one job offer, and 70 percent of hiring managers say they feel like they need to convince candidates to take their jobs. Clearly, this is a time when young people are in charge.
Job hoppers are bad for companies because high turnover is expensive, but switching jobs a lot is very good for employees. It builds skills faster, constructs a network more effectively, and helps you figure out what you like and what you don’t like. Most important, regularly switching jobs helps you maintain passion in your career — which, in the end, benefits companies as much as it benefits the passionate workers cycling through them.
Don’t ask about time off until you have the job
Everyone has a personal life that exists separately from their job. You can’t schedule your cousin’s bar mitzvah around a product launch, and you can’t clear your calendar before you take a new job.
So when you’re figuring out which job to take, be upfront about what sort of time you expect to be taking for yourself. If you want Tuesdays off for kickboxing class, then say so. If you have a vacation planned for two weeks after the proposed start date, then say that. Some jobs have unmovable start dates, and sometimes your personal life will preclude taking a job.
That’s OK. Why bother with the absurd job-interview song-and-dance where you pretend that your personal life doesn’t matter, and that only getting the job matters? You wouldn’t want to work for anyone who had that attitude, so why pretend to have it yourself?
Don’t have gaps in your résumé
It’s so common for people to take time off to explore after earning their degree that universities have people who specialize in helping students find after-college non-work/non-school learning opportunities. As long as you’re learning and growing — and not endangering your life — then gaps in your résumé are merely you finding another way to discover the world. In fact, you’ll be a better employee for that.
The people who don’t flounder at all after college and go straight into a career they stick with make up less than 12 percent of the population today. Research shows that they’re generally less creative in picking a path that’s right for them, and more willing to take paths someone else has established. But each of us needs different things from our work — we have to make our own paths, and we need breathing room to do that.
If there are no gaps in your résumé, it probably means you didn’t take any time in your life for reflecting. Sure, you can do your reflecting in the shower or during a boring meeting or on an invigorating run. But grand thinking requires grand amounts of time.
Often, we need to separate from everyday life in order to see possibilities far outside what we’re doing. So make gaps, and talk about them in job interviews like the learning experiences they are.
Earn enough money to pay rent and buy food
One of the smartest career choices you can make after graduation is to move back in with your parents. This isn’t possible for everyone, but those who can do it have a distinct advantage in their entrance into adult life. It’s why more than half of college graduates are choosing to move back home.
At present, entry-level jobs don’t pay enough to cover student loans, health insurance premiums, food, and rent in the kinds of cities young people like to live. Parents will say, “When I was a kid, everyone could pay their rent when they got their first job.”
That’s probably true, but since that time, real wages have fallen, school costs have outpaced inflation, and health care costs are astronomical for people who don’t get insurance through work — which is a large portion of fully employed young people.
Young people who need to support themselves without any help from family are necessarily limited in career choices — they have to have a job that pays well in order to live. That’s why 60 percent of graduating seniors move back in with their parents after college.
But the best way to figure out what you really love doing is to try things and worry about pay later, when you know what you like. Moving back in with your parents allows you to take a job purely because it’s a good opportunity for personal growth and self-knowledge.
Many baby boomers stayed in careers they didn’t like for 20 years. A good way to not repeat this in the next generation is to explore many careers before you choose one.
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The people who don’t flounder at all after college or an online MBA and go straight into a career they stick with make up less than 12 percent of the population today.
By Stephen Seckler, Managing Director, Boston Office, BCG Attorney Search and author of the blog Counsel to Counsel.
The cost of a legal education is now reaching stratospheric proportions. Anyone contemplating this enormous investment of time and money should think long and hard before applying.
Here are five common myths about what law school will do for you:
Myth 1: I’ll be able to use the law degree in whatever career I decide to choose.
Go to law school if you want to be a lawyer. But don’t go if you believe it will “open doors” for you. It won’t. By the end of law school you may still have no idea what you “want” from your career; only now you are likely to limited by huge law school debt.
Myth 2: I’ll get a job when I graduate law school.
If you graduate near the top of your class from a top school, then your job prospects are likely to be strong. But if you have an average performance from a second-tier school, finding your first job may be a big challenge.
Myth 3: I’ll get to be in court and try cases.
Most lawyers never see the inside of a courtroom. About 95% of all civil law suits that are filed are settled before trial. Much of the work of a “litigator” involves reviewing documents, preparing court filings and negotiating with the lawyer from the other side of the case.
Myth 4: I’ll be able to advocate for the little guy.
If you are independently wealthy, you can advocate for the poor, fight for environmental justice, defend civil rights, etc. But if you are like the typical law school graduate today, you will finish with substantial debt. Public interest jobs are too low paying to accommodate a heavy debt burden. Some law schools have a debt-forgiveness program for people going into public interest jobs, but the salaries are so low that they are often hard to manage even in light of debt forgiveness.
Myth 5: I’ll have intellectually challenging work.
Early in your career, you will probably spend a lot of time reviewing documents all day rather than tackling great intellectual issues. Even litigators – many of whom go into law to argue exciting, constitutional issues — will spend most of their time researching mundane procedural issues at the beginning of their career.
If you’re thinking of going to law school, make sure you have a clear plan for how you will make that degree useful (and essential) when you graduate. Find some practicing lawyers and spend time with them to find out what they really do for a living.
If you are already in law school and reading this, don’t panic. Rather, start doing some of the harder thinking that you put off and figure out how you want to make the best use of your degree when you do graduate. The work you do now will surely pay off in the long run.
My book, Brazen Careerist: The New Rules for Success, is shipping from Amazon!
Here is tip #21 from the book: Mud Slinging Means You’re Losing Ground
If you want people to like you, give them compliments. I know, that sounds like I’m telling you to brownnose. Instead, I’m telling you to find genuine ways to compliment people, which requires spending a lot of time looking for the good in people.
The difference between a genuine compliment and a desperate brownnosing attempt is empathy and insight, according to Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey, Harvard Graduate School of Education psychologists and co-authors of How the Way We Talk Can Change the Way We Work: Seven Languages for Transformation.
If you understand what worries someone, and what he is trying hardest to achieve personally, then you will easily spot opportunities for praise. Don’t just say “good job” for the sake of it. In fact, don’t just say “good job.” The most effective compliments are very specific. And creative words are more memorable than standard words, according to Mark Knapp, communications professor at University of Texas. The most common types of praise are about possessions “Nice car” or about actions “Great shot.”
Praise of character is the most rare and most memorable praise of all. But it’s also the most difficult because it requires you to understand the person you’re praising and be thoughtful about how you talk to them. For example, “I appreciated the compassion you showed for the team when you were canceling the project.”
To increase the weight of your compliments, establish yourself as a trusted resource. This means you need to be able to give people bad news as well as good news. I will never forget the employee who told me, “You know how everyone laughs at your jokes at the staff meeting? Well, the jokes are not that funny, but since all those people report to you, they laugh. You should stop with the jokes.”
I was crushed to hear that I was not funny. But it would have been worse if I had been allowed to go on and on. (Though sometimes I tell myself that I really was funny and that particular employee just didn’t get my humor.) Still, this person’s subsequent compliments meant more to me because I knew she was honest.
Complimenting your boss is an important part of building a good relationship. Don’t be shy because you have less experience. In fact, powerful people think that people who praise them are smarter and more likeable than those who don’t, according to Knapp. On top of that, powerful people receive fewer compliments than the rest of us.
I never knew how important it is to compliment a boss until I complimented mine, mostly by accident. My boss gave a speech packed with bad news to employees, and I knew it had been hard on him. So after the meeting, I stopped by his office to tell him privately, “You delivered the bad news really well. People were shocked, but they listened to you, and you made them hopeful.”
His face brightened, and he said, in a surprised voice, “Really?”
I realized immediately how much my input had meant to him. How surprised he was to know I thought he did well and how much he respected my assessment. It seemed pathetic, really. I had thought he was a more confident guy than that. But that’s the thing about complimenting your boss: It’s disarming and makes your boss think of you as an equal.
To make a genuine connection, give genuine compliments, but balance them with insightful criticism. With the right balance people will view you as a smarter person and they’ll take all your comments more seriously.
So concentrate on the good in people, and compliment it throughout the day, you just might feel like you’re actually surrounded by kind, competent, and interesting people. And the research shows that they will find you to be more kind and competent as well.
Most people don’t need to go to graduate school. Sure, you need an MBA to run a Fortune 500 company, and you need to go to medical school to be a doctor, but in most cases, a graduate degree doesn’t provide a ticket to play – because anyone can play – but rather, the degree provides a security blanket.
And at some point, you need to admit that walking around with a security blanket makes you look bad. You can do adult life without one. Wondering if this applies to you? Here are some reasons why you shouldn’t go to grad school:
1. A humanities PhD makes you less employable not more employable.
Most people who get degrees in humanities will not get teaching jobs. And people who are looking for jobs in the corporate world, with a humanities PhD under their belt look like someone who tried to teach but couldn’t. Or, worse yet, it looks like you spent five years getting a degree you had not made a plan for using. Both cases serve to make you “probably not even qualified to run a cash register,” according to Thomas Benton, a columnist in the Chronicle of Higher Learning who is discouraging people from pursuing these degrees.
2. You can shift careers by enrolling in a night-class.
Marci Alboher did this – she was a lawyer and took a class in writing, and now look: She’s writing for the New York Times about, what else? How you don’t need to get a degree to change careers, you just need to take a class. Of course, this won’t work in all circumstances, but the majority of fields require some knowledge, but not a degree.
3. Grad school is a bad way to deal with uncertainty.
If you don’t now what to do, and you go to grad school to buy time, and then you figure out what you want to do, you will always have to answer the question, why grad school? It will be hard to come up with an answer that doesn’t reveal that you went back to school so you didn’t have to deal with adult problems. Better to flail in the work world and learn what you like then put it off. Grad school is too expensive to be a backup plan.
4. People who love to learn don’t need a degree for it.
Don’t go to grad school because you love poetry. If you love poetry, read it. No one dictates to you what you have to do after work. If you want to read poems, fine. Why do you need a degree? What will that accomplish besides putting you into debt? Anyway, a good job allows you to learn so much that it is like a continuation of school anyway.
5. Use LinkedIn instead of an MBA.
Okay. I’m sort of exaggerating here, but so many people say they are going to business school for the networking opportunity. Instead, these people should consider spending all that time on networking instead of going to class. Business school makes connections for you, but they might not be for the best; I once read an essay that suggested that business schools are merely headhunters who charge a fee to the employee.
By Ryan Healy — I recently received an email from career coach and corporate consultant, J.T O’Donnell. She attached a link to a new e-learning course that she gives to young employees, and she asked for my input. For days, I debated how to respond. Eventually, I replied and told her that I hate all e-learning.
She said that most millennials she works with dislike e-learning. So, she only designs e-learning tools that are coupled with personal teaching and discussion.
After mentioning my desire to write a post about doing away with e-learning, J.T gave me some great insight. She told me, “It helps save companies thousands in training costs.”
Bingo! Now I know why companies are using e-learning to replace hands-on mentoring and teaching – it’s cheap. Clearly, a company’s main goal is to make a profit, and this means minimizing costs wherever possible. However, training and developing your employees, especially the confused new hires, is not the right area to cut costs.
At orientation, the first time my peers and I logged in to complete an e-learning course, we all looked at each other with puzzled faces. I thought, “Is this serious?” Others snickered throughout the whole assignment and most of us jumped through the course totally bored. Without discussion or one-on-one teaching e-learning is cheap, ineffective and gives the impression that a company does not care enough to invest time or money into training. Which in turn, gives the impression that employees are unimportant.
I don’t necessarily think that loathing e-learning is a millennial trait. My Gen X co-workers constantly complain about the thoughtless “busy work” that comes from e-learning tools. My mother even called the other day to rant about the stupidity of her e-training classes. So who actually benefits from this?
Maybe companies use this cheap training because they expect people to job hop and don’t want to waste budget dollars on employees who won’t be around for long. But in reality, not focusing on personally training and developing entry level employees is probably what causes them to job hop in the first place.
If an e-learning tool can somehow be coupled with actual face-to-face learning or mentoring then I am all for it. Just don’t use it as a replacement for real teaching. I crave the personal connections that come with one-on-one or classroom teaching, even if the rest of my life is spent online.
Ryan Healy’s blog is Employee Evolution.
The topic of should women work or should they stay home is a baby boomer fetish topic, with Leslie Bennetts being the current poster girl.
Joan Walsh, writing at Salon, points out that we are generally sick of baby boomer women telling younger women what to do and what not to do. But we are also generally disgusted with the baby boomer infatuation with the opt-out topic since only 4% of women in this country are so lucky to have both a hotshot career and a husband making enough money to be the sole breadwinner. For the other 96% of us, opting out is about gutwrenching financial decisions, not feminist platitudes.
Nevertheless, women like Bennetts approach the issue of staying home with kids as if many women are considering this option. She says that women who quit working and stay home with their kids will decrease their earning power and put themselves at risk if there’s a divorce.
First of all, we know that baby boomers divorced at a higher rate than any group in history, and today the risk of divorce is only 20% for college-educated women, and the trend is for divorce rates to continue declining. Yet Bennetts writes about divorce among women who can afford to stay home as if it’s an epidemic.
Second, when a woman stays at home the marriage is more likely to stay intact, and when a marriage stays intact, the kids do better. So you can argue forever that a stay-at-home parent (male or female) loses something by not going to work, but clearly their family gains something, so if women want to stop working for a while, fine. Why get all up in arms about it?
The problem is when there is a divorce. Divorce doesn’t just hurt stay-at-home parents, who have to go back to work after being out of the workforce for years. It hurts breadwinners, who, because of child support issues are very limited in the career moves they can make. But most of all, divorce hurts kids.
Divorced parents routinely walk around saying that their kids are doing fine and that their kids are better off because the parents are happier. However there is little evidence to generally support either of these claims. Both are very psychological and complicated and parents are hardly good judges of their own case since they have already made the decision and want to feel it was not selfish and terrible to do to their kids.
Here is what there is research to support: Even amicable divorces do permanent damage to kids, yet the media practically ignored this evidence when it came out. Kids with divorced parents do worse in school, and this research is independent of socioeconomic status, and it gets worse if a parent remarries. Also, if you get divorced, you make your child almost 50% more likely to get a divorce.
So here’s what we know for sure, today: Women who work have a higher chance of having a divorce, and women who stay at home are very vulnerable in the case of a divorce.
Here’s what we should do with this information: Start talking about how to keep a marriage together. Making marriage last is a workplace issue because work factors play such a very large role in the equation. Work needs to help us to keep marriages together instead of hurt it. And advice about work needs to focus on improving marriage rather than preparing for divorce.
This issue hits close to home to me because my marriage is under stress right now. We have two young kids, both of whom have special needs. Additionally, I’m at a time in my career when I have a lot of work, while my husband is lost in his career.
Sometimes I think of getting a divorce, and I tell myself I’m not doing it. I tell myself that no one is in love every second of their marriage. I tell myself that this is a really bad time in our marriage and I will have to work really hard to make it better.
And then I think, how will I find time to do that? I actually have very little guilt about how I have dealt with my kids. I spend tons of time with them because my work is flexible. But I have not focused on my marriage. I have focused on my kids and my career and myself.
But what about my marriage? It’s a big part of the equation. I hear a lot of women saying they have a problem keeping their marriage together. And in general the group that shouts the loudest about advice for keeping a marriage intact is the Christian right. (Check out the fourth result on the Google list from the search “how to keep your marriage together“.)
So this is my call for a shift in discussion about women and work. Both men and women need to figure out how talk about how to make better marriages. We need to take all our energy we spend talking about the risks of stay-at-home parenting, and the risks of dual-career families, and put that thinking power toward what makes a marriage strong.
Here are more reviews of my book, Brazen Careerist: The New Rules for Success, which is already shipping from Amazon.
I send a big thanks to each of these bloggers for taking the time to review the book!
Sarah van Ingen at Armchair Interviews
Trunk’s writing is tight, energetic and enjoyable to read. After spending a couple days with the Brazen Careerist, I felt like I had been given a shot of adrenalin for my career. And who isn’t in need of that?
Devin Reams at DevinReams.com
A must-read for upcoming or recent college grads. This is a guide for how successful careers work.
Heather Mundell at lifeatwork
Trunk’s advice is refreshing and her arguments are thought-provoking. She challenges us as readers to take a clear-eyed view of what we want in our careers and consider new ways of getting it.
Jason Alba at JibberJobber
No matter what generation you are in, this book is a must read.
Dawn Papandrea at CollegeSurfing Insider
For anyone making their way through corporate struggles, deciding if they should go for an advanced degree or launch a new business, or discovering a completely new line of work, Trunk’s renegade advice is right on.
Alexandra Levit at Water Cooler Wisdom
Penelope Trunk knows herself, she stands by her beliefs, and she can always be counted on for a unique and often provocative opinion. As she mentions her own leadership achievements and her worst social faux pas in the same paragraph, Penelope’s tone and examples balance confidence and assertiveness with authenticity and a little healthy self-deprecation. It’s a fabulous resource for anyone who’s searching for fulfillment in a career or in life!
Interviews with me about the book:
Audio! Chris Russell at Secrets of the Job Hunt
Allen Holman at Management College
Carmen Van Kerckhove at Racialicious
Toby Bloomberg at Diva Marketing
Previous reviews of Brazen Careerist: The New Rules for Success are here and here.
A job cannot make you happy, but it can save your life. People spend so much time looking for that perfect job, the perfect boss, the salary that will finally make them feel secure. But in fact, the impact a job can have on your life is overrated. Unless your life is completely falling apart. Then a job can save you. I know because I have seen this many times in my own life.
When we think about a job saving someone, we usually think about people in poverty. For example, Richard Easterlin, an economics professor at the University of Southern California found that earning enough to pay for food and rent can drastically change the lives of people in poverty–and give them the ability to achieve happiness. But he found that anything beyond around $40,000 a year does not have much impact on your level of happiness.
The reason for this is that our happiness comes, for the most part, from the amount of optimism we have. Daniel Gilbert, in his book Stumbling on Happiness, spends 300 pages talking about all the research that shows how misguided we are about our ideas of happiness. The biggest mistake is thinking we can influence it much. Mostly, we can’t. Mostly we have no idea what will make us happy in the future — although we think we do.
What’s the best way to influence your happiness? Personal relationships. People with strong, supportive personal relationships are happier than people who are isolated. The statistic that best shows this comes from Dartmouth College economics professor David Blanchflower.
He says if you go from having no sex, to having sex once a week, you will have a large jump in happiness. This research isn’t about orgasms. It’s about forging reliable, steady relationships that you make time for every week. It’s hard to measure that, but sex is a good way.
So back to the job. Imagine someone who hates her job. If she’s fallen in love, she’ll have that glow about her even though her job is boring. Because love trumps interesting work in the happiness charts. And imagine an inherently optimistic entrepreneur whose business fails? She probably starts another business. Because an optimistic outlook often trumps reality, for better or worse.
Trying to influence your natural set point for optimism is like trying to influence your natural set point for weight. Your body pushes to go back to where it was, no matter how you try. So only the most extreme diet can move an inherently husky woman into skinny-girl mode. And only the most extreme job situation can move an inherently optimistic person into the realm of negativism.
Here are attributes that The Economist reports that your job must have in order to make you feel productive and happy about your work:
1. Stretches a person without defeating him
2. Provides clear goals
3. Provides unambiguous feedback
4. Provides a sense of control
The range of jobs that meet these requirements is wide. And they include jobs you might not expect. For example, hairdressers report they fire clients who treat them poorly, and janitors say that they get feedback from the people who are happy the floors are clean. Conversely, lawyers report having little control over their goals, since the clients frequently change them, and that they have little control over outcome because they are beholden to a judge, jury or ambiguous law.
So a job cannot make you happy, even if you wish it could. But it can save your life. People report that in times of extreme negativism and sadness — depression, poverty, or complete lack of connection to the world — a job has saved them. I have found in my own life, and experts agree, that work can rescue a dangerously unhappy life by providing routine, a connection to other people, and the feeling of contributing to the world.
Martin Seligman is a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, and founder of the positive psychology movement that is behind most of this research. He encourages people — those at the far edge of unhappiness and the more optimistic as well — to spend time and energy learning how to increase their optimism set-point.
He explains how in his book Learned Optimism: “Positive psychology is not only about maximizing personal happiness but also about embracing civic engagement and spiritual connectedness, hope and charity.”
These are the things a job can give you that matter. Wyeth Windham grew up in Montana. His dad was gone and his mom cleaned houses. He was bored in school and hung around with kids who did poorly. He had little future. In his junior year of high school, he started volunteer work with a group that funded youth programs. Six months later, while Wyeth was involved in his work every day, his friends robbed two restaurants.
It was a turning point. Windham saw, maybe unconsciously, a literal example of how work can save you. And he stuck with it. He was the youngest member of the board at his local Boys and Girls club. And an Oprah Winfrey fund recognized his achievement and sent him to college on scholarship.
Today he works at PrintingForLess.com, and recently, he visited Boston for a conference about digital printing. He has a good job, to be sure, but what matters is feeling a part of a larger community, and a spirit of connection to the world. So he skipped out of the conference to walk the historical Freedom Trail of the American Revolution. And this just might be a good little lesson in career happiness for us all.
Contact
penelope@penelopetrunk.com