The best career tool is self-knowledge

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Most career questions are actually identity questions. It seems like maybe we need to know which job to take, or which boss is better, or which line to delete on our resume. But really, we need to know who we are.

I learn the most about identity when I’m lost and I have to make a tough career decision. Here’s the first time it happened:

When I graduated from college, I knew I wanted to play professional beach volleyball, but I was actually in Chicago, being a bike messenger in the snow, and I had no idea how I was going to get enough money to get to Los Angeles.

So I answered an ad someone ran for posing nude. I thought I could do it and get enough cash to get to LA. I went to the guy’s apartment. Insane, right? You are thinking this was not a safe move. I know. But I was young and sheltered, and I had never been faced with the problem of not having money.

I knocked.

The guy opened his door, and while I was still standing in his hallway he said, “Nice legs. But I can look at you and see this isn’t going to work.”

I said, “Huh?”

He said, “Well. What can you do? You can’t just stand there. That won’t work.”

“What should I do?”

“See,” he said, “I told you this won’t work.”

He told me to stand on my toes and toss my hair.

I couldn’t do it.

He told me to practice and then come back.

On my way home, I thought. “That guy sucks. And I should be in Playboy. In the centerfold. I could do a great job at the written interview.”

But by the time I got home, I was thinking how stupid it would be to spend my time figuring out how to get into nude modeling. That is only a stop-gap measure. Not a long-term way to make a living.

And I asked myself why I was doing that? Why wasn’t I doing something I’d be more proud of? I realized that the ways I choose to make money reflect who I am and how I see myself, and I need to start seeing myself as smart and clever. I always knew I was smart, but I didn’t present myself that way in the world.

That’s the moment I decided to switch. It seems obvious in hindsight, right? Of course getting paid to be smart is better than getting paid to be naked because it’s getting paid to be who I really am inside.

But we each struggle with this constantly, throughout our careers. How to figure out who we are inside and what career will be right for how we see ourselves now. It’s a constantly shifting alliance — what is our identity and what is the career that will reflect that.

Don’t be so arrogant as to think you do not consider such mismatched career moves for yourself as my nude modelling was for me. It’s very hard to define a career that honors our identity. Identity changes as life changes And it’s hard to know what’s true to us at any given point. It takes a lot of vigilance and honesty and a willingness to shift when we’re totally off base.

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Steps to figuring out your next career move

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Here’s how you figure out what to do next in your career: you line up all the stuff you like to do and you figure out which one will pay best. Don’t complain to me that I’m too focused on money. Really. Just do the exercise. The ones who are complaining the most right now, after reading just this far, are the people who are most in denial of what adult life is about.

Look, figuring out what you should do is actually a hard task. Because you have to start eliminating stuff.

1. Eliminate stuff. Cross off your list all the stuff that you like to do but that pays well only if you have the career-equivalent of winning a double bingo game. Stuff like, being a feature film director, being an opera singer, or being the owner of the Chicago Cubs.

Then eliminate all the stuff that you think would be fun but probably will never pay well: working in a nonprofit, working in local government, being a travel writer.

2. Look at what’s left. If you are a risk-taker, entrepreneurship is left. If you are not a risk taker, then something in corporate life is left. That’s because this is what adult life is for most people. You get up every day and work at a job you never dreamed about doing when you were a kid.

3. Check in with yourself. Do you feel like you are going to die? Have you been writing songs since you were five years old and you cannot imagine living if you don’t write songs? You can still write them. At your house, after work. Have you been skiing every day you possibly can since forever? Then get a job in Aspen and ski at night.

You don’t need to go into journalism because you love writing. You need to write because you love writing. The same is true for everything else you love. Just because you love something doesn’t mean you need to get paid for it.

4. Be honest about what you love. If you’re not making time to do it regularly unpaid, then you probably don’t love it. Here’s the litmus test: Sex. We do it regularly, unpaid, and we love it. Run this test on other stuff you supposedly love. Do you crave it like sex? Then you probably don’t love it that much. You probably love the idea of loving it, the idea of who you are when you say you love that thing.

When I graduated from college, I did all these things that I’ve just told you to do, and it was soul-crushing. The corporate jobs made me ill. But it was very clear to me what I wanted to do: I wanted to play professional beach volleyball. I was ready to commit everything to that. It did not meet the criteria of being something that could probably support me, but I did it anyway, because it was so completely clear to me that that’s what I wanted no matter what.

5. Admit if you lack a clear passion. If you don’t have something that is overwhelmingly important to do, then you probably don’t have anything that you’d absolutely rather be doing than getting up and going to work every day. So just start doing that. In any field. And stop deluding yourself that you have so many interests that you can’t choose. Really what you have is no clear interest and only a bunch of things you would consider if you had nothing to do.

6. Get busy. Doing anything. But you do have something to do. You need to earn money. And since you don’t have anything that’s making you feel like you’re gonna die if you don’t do it, go get a job in a cube and stop complaining. The best way to find yourself is to start doing things. When it comes to ourselves, we find by doing, not philosophizing.

When I stopped playing volleyball, I tried tons of different jobs, trying to figure out which one was right for me. I changed jobs every year. And I figured out where I fit.

But all that time, I wrote at night. After work. Marci Alboher writes about “slashes,” those people who have two careers, like, lawyer/actress. But really, we all have two careers. We have the career that is what we do that earns money, and we have the stuff we do at home because we love it. Career is not just your day job anymore—career is how you spend all your time. Spend it doing things that matter to you, and don’t discount that struggling with what it looks like is a necessary phase. Time spent struggling to figure out what matters to you—that something that should be as important to you as sex—is essential to you becoming you.

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What’s the right timing for graduate school?

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What’s good timing for grad school? For some degrees, the best timing is probably never. The benefits of the degree will never outweigh the problems it creates. For some degrees, going fast is key, for others, taking your time can ward off common missteps. Here’s a primer on how to approach a looming graduate application:

Timing for an MBA: Fast
The value of an MBA goes down the longer you wait to get it. At the beginning of your career you can get a jump-start out of the gate with an MBA from a top school. Midcareer, you won’t get that jump-start, because you’ve already started. So at that point, the MBA is just a ticket to play; most large companies like to see an MBA before moving you to the top levels of management.

It used to be that business schools encouraged candidates to wait a few years before applying. But that timeline doesn’t make sense for women who want kids. Today, most young women who want kids want to have them before they’re 35. So if you wait three years to go to business school, and then get a job afterward, you will have very little time to work before you start having kids. And then many benefits of the graduate degree are lost.

In an effort to encourage women to apply to business school, admissions departments are becoming more willing to take candidates straight out of college. For young women, this is a very good option.

But only if you’re sure you need that degree. If you don’t know what you want to do with the MBA, then you probably don’t need it. For people with no clear plan after business school, the burden of school loans to pay for the degree is often more limiting than the number of doors the degree opens.

Timing for other professional degrees: Slow
The cost of going to graduate school when you have no clear plan for afterward is even higher outside of business school. If you get a job in, say, public policy, and then decide you don’t want to go into that field, that degree makes you look unfocused, at best. You might think that more degrees are just more qualifications, but in fact, when you spend years getting a degree in a field where there are no jobs that interest you, you put a red flag up to employers that either you don’t know what you want or you don’t want them.

If possible, you would do best to leave frivolous graduate degrees off your resume so you can look a bit more focused.

Take time to work in the field you’re considering, to make sure that’s what you want to do. Have patience with yourself to learn a bit about who you are. It’s nearly impossible to make a decision as a student about what you’d want to do when you’re not a student. That’s the value of taking time to work in between college and grad school.

Timing for an advanced degree in humanities: Never
Baby boomers have a lock on tenure-track teaching jobs, and those boomers aren’t going anywhere any time soon. My favorite statistic in the world is that you would have a better chance surviving the Titanic than getting a tenure track job in the humanities. Members of the Modern Language Association routinely discuss this problem at the annual meeting, and in trade publications.

So look, if you love French, take a long vacation in Tunisia. And if you love Dante, read him at night, after work. You don’t need a degree in the humanities to enjoy learning.

Timing for law school: Try marketing first
Did you get a great LSAT score? You know what that means? You’ll do a great job in law school. Unfortunately, that is no indicator of how well you’ll do in the real world.

In a law firm, there is no clear partner track anymore. You can be de-equitized at any time. And the determining factor for your worth is not how well you analyze a case, but how well you drum up business. Lawyers are part of the service industry, and service professionals differentiate themselves through marketing. So you’d better be great at marketing if you’re going to law school.

Thinking that you’ll do nonprofit law instead? Then you need rich parents or a rich spouse because someone’s gotta pay off those school loans and it’s not going to be the ACLU.

The bottom line for grad school? Try new things, meet lots of different people and use these experiences to help figure out what to do. Take time to get to know yourself, in the post-school world, in the work world.

You need to know who you are and what you want before you start signing those school loan papers. A degree only helps you if it’s getting you to a place you really want to go to.

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Bad career advice: Do what you love

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One of the worst pieces of career advice that I bet each of you has not only gotten but given is to “do what you love.”

Forget that. It’s absurd. I have been writing since before I even knew how to write – when I was a preschooler I dictated my writing to my dad. And you might not be in preschool, but if you are in touch with who you are, you are doing what you love, no matter what, because you love it.

So it’s preposterous that we need to get paid to do what we love because we do that stuff anyway. So you will say, “But look. Now you are getting paid to do what you love. You are so lucky.” But it’s not true. We are each multifaceted, multilayered, complicated people, and if you are reading this blog, you probably devote a large part of your life to learning about yourself and you know it’s a process. None of us loves just one thing.

I am a writer, but I love sex more than I love writing. And I am not getting paid for sex. In fact, as you might imagine, my sex life is really tanking right now. But I don’t sit up at night thinking, should I do writing or sex? Because career decisions are not decisions about “what do I love most?” Career decisions are about what kind of life do I want to set up for myself?

So how could you possibly pick one thing you love to do? And what would be the point?

The world reveals to you all that you love by what you spend time on. Try stuff. If you like it, you’ll go back to it. I just tried Pilates last month. I didn’t want to try, but a friend said she loved the teacher, so I went. I loved it. I have taken it three times a week ever since. And it’s changed me. I stand up straighter. (I’d also have better sex, if I were having it. The Pilates world should advertise more that it improves your sex life: Totally untapped market.)

Often, the thing we should do for our career is something we would only do if we were getting a reward. If you tell yourself that your job has to be something you’d do even if you didn’t get paid, you’ll be looking for a long time. Maybe forever. So why set that standard? The reward for doing a job is contributing to something larger than you are, participating in society, and being valued in the form of money.

The pressure we feel to find a perfect career is insane. And, given that people are trying to find it before they are thirty, in order to avoid both a quarterlife crisis and a biological-clock crisis, the pressure is enough to push people over the edge. Which is why one of the highest risk times for depression in life is in one’s early twenties when people realize how totally impossible it is to simply “do what you love.”

Here’s some practical advice: Do not what you love; do what you are. It’s how I chose my career. I bought the book with that title – maybe my favorite career book of all time – and I took the quickie version of the Myers-Briggs test. The book gave me a list of my strengths, and a list of jobs where I would likely succeed based on those strengths.

Relationships make your life great, not jobs. But a job can ruin your life – make you feel out of control in terms of your time or your ability to accomplish goals – but no job will make your life complete. It’s a myth mostly propagated by people who tell you to do what you love. Doing what you love will make you feel fulfilled. But you don’t need to get paid for it.

A job can save your life, though. If you are lost, and lonely, and wondering how you’ll ever find your way in this world. Take a job. Any job. Because structure, and regular contact with regular people, and a method of contributing to a larger group are all things that help us recalibrate ourselves.

So if you are overwhelmed with the task of “doing what you love” you should recognize that you are totally normal, and maybe you should just forget it. Just do something that caters to your strengths. Do anything.

And if you are so overwhelmed that you feel depression coming on, consider that a job might save you. Take one. Doing work and being valued in the community is important. For better or worse, we value people with money. Earn some. Doing work you love is not so important. We value love in relationships. Make some.

 

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Lines blur between non-profit and for-profit workplaces

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Jobs in the nonprofit sector are growing at a faster rate than jobs in the business sector. But this might not even be the big news. The big news is that the difference between the nonprofit sector and the business sector is shrinking, according to nonprofit veteran Seth Rosen who blogs at technovist.com.

“As the nonprofit sector professionalizes and the most successful for-profits recruit people with a drive to do something that includes a real public benefit, the culture of the sectors will look more alike. In twenty years the difference between nonprofits and for-profits may simply be their IRS classification.”

One of the biggest issues Generation X and Generation Y have is that they want to have impact. Nonprofit giving among Gen X, for example, has become very grassroots, as Gen X wants to be able to see clearly what change they are helping to instigate. And Gen Y has made it clear that working at a company where they don’t understand how they fit is absolutely untenable – they want to make a difference. Everyone wants to know how they make a difference – whether it’s for-profit or not-for-profit.

In the old model of nonprofits, individuals are removed from the bottom line in a way that undermines the meaning of their work. Take Andrew Broderick, for example. He used to do fund-raising for hospitals. For him, the worst part of working at a nonprofit was how far removed the compensation system was from the bottom line. “I could raise $35 million or I could raise $1 dollar and I’d earn the same amount of salary.”

Recently, he switched to a sales position at Royale Printing, a short- to medium-run printing company in Madison, Wis., where his compensation is a combination of salary and commission. He feels more connected to the bigger picture, “If I make $10 million for the company I’d get paid accordingly.”

Nonprofits are responding to defectors like Broderick. “As there is more and more competition for resources there is clearly an awareness of how to be more efficient,” says Russ Finkelstein, associate director of Idealist.org, a job listing service for the nonprofit sector.

For example, Echoing Green is a foundation that gives grants to social entrepreneurs to create groundbreaking change in the nonprofit arena. The idea that these start-ups are accountable for creating measurable results is much more in line with the values of today’s workforce – no matter what sector they come from. And employees of nonprofits manage their careers with the same focus and drive as someone in the business sector.

Jen Cormier works at Make-A-Wish in Boston. She networks with people in her field, she thinks of herself as a marketing specialist, and she plans her path through a few jobs and then graduate school as carefully as anyone going for an MBA. Similarly, in the old model of the business sector, you earned a lot of money and left the doing-good stuff to the nonprofits. Today, though, companies understand the need to make a difference no matter what sector you are in.

“There are a lot of companies that are doing things that are more socially responsible because creating this sort of work atmosphere retains people,” says Finkelstein. Morgan Stanley, for example, gives employees time off to build houses for Habitat for Humanity. Salesforce.com set up a foundation to afford employees paid time to help in their community.

It’s not surprising that the gap between for-profits and nonprofits is blurring because the search for meaningful work is permeating the whole workforce. People at all levels are looking to learn and grow in their work, according to Jennifer Deal, senior researcher for the Center for Creative Leadership and author of Retiring the Generation Gap: How Employees Young and Old Can Find Common Ground. And while nonprofits have typically been the places to feed one’s soul, the business sector has woken up to the fact that one of the best ways to retain young employees is to help them grow.

One of the most shocking turns in today’s workplace is that it used to be that young people went to the Peace Corps to grow. Now people go to big accounting firms because they are leading the way in retaining young workers, by infusing work with meaning. You get a mentor, you get rotating responsibilities, and you get opportunities to volunteer, on company time. A study by Deloitte found that volunteer opportunities attract a stronger candidate pool in the business sector. And Ernst & Young rewards high performers with a Social Responsibility Fellowship.

Cormier says people discouraged her from working in the nonprofit sector as being unrealistic and a poor career choice. “A lot of naysayers told me wait until you get to the real world.” Other people will view socially responsible business with cynicism – firms providing do-gooder opportunities merely to win the war for talent. But you could also look at this as a sort of version of a golden age of capitalism: Finally, companies are giving back to the community in a way that touches employees at their core, and finally nonprofits are being run efficiently in a way that really does get help to the needy, and this, after all, is good for everyone.

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The real deal about Gen Y: they’re inherently conservative

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The most prestigious place for college grads to get a job today is Deloitte, according to a Business Week story titled, The Best Places to Launch a Career, by Lindsey Gerdes. In fact, the top three choices for Generation Y are all Big 4 accounting firms.

My first thought was, are you kidding me?!?!?!

Because if you ask Gen Y what is most important about work, this is what they’ll say: Flexibility, personal growth, liking the people they work with, and money.

But here’s what a consulting job offers: Long hours in cities where you don’t live. On-demand work for demanding clients. Days and days of working on a client site where you do not even benefit from the supposedly forward-thinking corporate culture that a company like Deloitte has created. And, finally, isolation from all but a few co-workers who are at the same client as you.

So what’s going on here? Why is generation Y going to these firms when the firms clearly do not meet Gen Y”?s top three goals as well as, say, a smaller company would?

Well, for one thing, the Big 4 are acutely aware of what young people want. Deloitte has been studying generational issues for years and Cathy Benko, vice chairman of Deloitte, just published a great book, Mass Career Customization, that replaces the corporate ladder motif with a lattice; and workers can move laterally or up or down on the lattice depending on their personal goals and career aspirations. The Big 4 get the best candidates because these companies have been the fastest to react to the new workforce conditions that place young people in the driver’s seat .

But here’s what else is going on: Gen Y does not admit it, but their top priority is stability. This is a fundamentally conservative generation. And in the middle of this very long article in Business Week is an important quote from Andrea Hershatter, director of the undergraduate business program at Emory University and veteran of college recruiting:

“There is a strong, strong millennial dislike of ambiguity and risk, leading them to seek a lot more direction and clarity from their employers, in terms of what the task is, what the expectations are, and job progression.”

Hershatter gives a great interview because she explains in detail why young people today are fundamentally conservative in their goals and decision making. Not conservative politically. (In fact, we know they are not conservative politically.) But conservative in their lifestyle. They are not risk takers, not boat rockers, not revolutionaries. Young people today want a safe, nice life, and clear path to that goal.

Things start to look murky because young people are so difficult for older people to deal with at work. Young people seem to be demanding that everyone change to accommodate them. In fact though, young people are merely demanding that the workplace live out the values that the people who run the work place – parents of Gen Y – taught at home: Personal growth (“turn that TV off!”), good time management (ballet Monday, soccer Tuesday, swimming Wednesday…), and family first.

Here are four reasons why members of Generation Y are fundamentally conservative in what they envision for their lives:

1. They love their parents.
Not only do they love their parents, but they want their parents to help them figure out adult life. There is no rebellion. Instead there is helicopter parenting. And there is a near-perfect implementation by Gen Y of the values their parents told them were important. Gen Y are hard workers, achievers, and rule followers.

According to Rebecca Ryan, author of the new book Live First, Work Second, violence, abortion and drug use are down; education, global vision, and career focus are up. A parents’ dream, right? This is not the generation that whose icon will be a guy who protested government policy or who shot himself.

2. They operate in teams.
This is not a generation of mavericks. This is not about self-reliance, it’s about teamwork. But teamwork is inherently conservative because there’s consensus. For example, prom is a group event. And there is not infighting – gen Y hates conflict- which is no surprise because, as Rebecca Ryan points out, that they’ve been learning negotiation skills since they were kids.

3. They are not complainers.
Baby boomers got their start as people who bucked the system to protect their own interests by protesting Vietnam. Who was fighting the war? Baby boomers. But they hated the war. So they argued against it. Who is fighting today’s war? Gen Y. And they hate it. But they almost never complain in a large, public way.

Similarly, young people hold all the power in the workplace today but they choose to be consensus builders. They say, “Talk with us, work with us, let’s understand each other.” Or, as Gen Y blogger Rebecca Thorman, wrote to older people, “How can we work together to fulfill our dreams?” This is a far cry from the “don’t trust anyone over thirty” slogans of the baby boomers.

4. They are not asking for anything crazy.
Gen Y are really hard workers. They have been working harder in school than any preceding generation. And the pace that they sift and synthesize information puts the skills of their elders to shame. So why complain about the demands of this generation? They are great at work and they want to have work that is meaningful and challenging.

And this is exactly what everyone else wants from their work as well. These demands are not new. It’s just new to hear them from an entry-level worker. But in fact, it’s reasonable and fundamentally conservative since these are the values this generation has been taught to live by.

Certainly we can’t fault gen Y for wanting stability. Who doesn’t want stability? Baby boomers wanted it, which is why they worked insanely long hours and surrounded themselves with tons of possessions. Gen X wanted stability, too. We just never got it because we graduated into the worst job market since the Great Depression. So we worked hard to create it for our kids, instead.

Generation Y is the most conservative generation since the Great Generation that fought World War II. Thomas Friedman just wrote an op-ed for the New York Times in which, predictably, he used his Baby Boomer platform to complain that Gen Y is not more like the baby boomers. Friedman wants hands-on activism.

Obviously, that is not the be-all and end-all for making the world a better place, because the baby boomers are leaving us with global warming, social security, and an image crisis abroad that the US hasn’t seen since the Boston Tea Party.

So how about reframing things a bit? Let’s take another look at Generation Y — as the kids who are going to ensure that the values they were raised by will extend to the workplace. Finally.

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Strategies for survival on an entry-level salary

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Most entry-level jobs do not pay enough to support someone living in a large city. This is a problem for recent grads. They imagine life in a big city as lots of entertainment, crowds of young people for fun, and a great dating scene. But it’s a hard life to fund: The cost of college, healthcare, and housing have gone up, all while real wages have gone down. This generation is facing a gap between wages and the cost of living that their parents never did.

Erica Skov moved to Boston for the opportunities a big city offers, but in the process, she gave up the low cost of living in upstate New York for the steep cost of Boston. Today, she has a job as an analyst, and she has to be careful to stretch her salary to cover both life in Boston and grad school payments.

This typical situation for young people is, on the one hand, full of the promise of an exciting, fulfilling career. But on the other hand there is an absurdly high risk of going deep into debt just to fund oneself in an entry-level job.

Here are some things to consider so that working your first full-time job does not put you further into debt.

1. Go into investment banking.
If you are equally passionate about two careers, and one pays really well and one doesn’t, choose the money. The problem is that most people are not wildly drawn to the high-paying careers. After all, if everyone wanted to do the highest paying work then it wouldn’t be so high paying after a while. But remember that you don’t have to get paid to do what you love. You love sex. Do you get paid for it? No. Impractical. So try to be practical and pick something you love that also pays well.

2. Move in with parents.
Loving what pays well is easier said than done. Which is why more than half of college grads today move back home with their parents. If you move back with your parents you have the chance not only to save money but also to search for the right career.

You don’t need to be an investment banker if you can afford to intern at an art museum. It might not feel so great when you don’t earn as much as your banking friends. But in the long run, the people who take time to figure out a custom career for themselves are the people who avoid the quarterlife crisis. Finding what you love requires lots of experimenting, and the less money you need, the more freedom you have to figure out your life.

3. Get roommates.
In each major city there are areas and/or buildings that function more like a dorm than an apartment building. This is because all the people who live in the building have never lived outside of school before, except in this place. So they recreate school in a big city. It is a cheap, few-frills life, with lots of random hookups. In fact, where you live is not nearly as important as who you are living with. So if you find people you like, it probably doesn’t matter that you are recreating college. It won’t last forever.

4. Skip haircuts and lattes.
The most popular finance advisers online today aren’t always talking about 401(k)s. JD Roth, Trent Hamm, Presh Talwalkar – they give practical advice for people who haven’t had the ability to stockpile for decades. They give advice about tracking expenses and cutting small stuff all over the place, like lattes, and haircuts. This sort of advice resonates with Skov, who says, “We have daily conversations in the office about where to get cheap manicures and haircuts.”

Skov is in no position to take financial advice about six-month CD rates. But she only gets a haircut every six months, which may be the Generation Y equivalent of money management. It adds up, and with a frugal lifestyle you can live in the city of your dreams. It’s just you probably won’t have the lifestyle of your dreams.

5. Move to a smaller city.
The dorm in a not-dorm life is okay, without haircuts, for a while, but you’ll get tired of it. You’ll see that there is a class of people in large cities that can afford to live alone, in their twenties, and you’ll notice a theme: Consulting or trust funds. This is an exaggeration, yes, but not a huge exaggeration. So what can you do? Move to a smaller city.

Minneapolis is very popular right now, and it has that magical combination of low cost of living, good schools, and varied industries. Other cities to consider: Portland, Ore., Austin, Texas, Chapel Hill, N.C., Columbus, Ohio, and Madison, Wis.

6. Work while you’re in school.
Skov is studying communication management at Emerson College, and working full time. It’s not a bad idea. In fact, there are many circumstances when grad school is not worth going into debt for. A degree in creative writing, for example. You probably won’t support yourself with that degree, so start finding a career while you’re in school, and do your writing at night, after work.

Or, according to recruiting firm Challenger Gray & Christmas Inc., if you are not at a top 10 business school, your increased earning power is so little that it is not cost-effective for you to stop working to go to school. Besides, the best way to keep your options open after graduate school is to have as little debt as possible that you have to pay back.

7. Accept that it’s normal.
It’s OK if you can’t support yourself after college. Most people can’t. Not today. The people who can do it are often high and mighty, but ignore them. Because there is no evidence that supporting yourself right after college leads to a happier, productive life. And there is good evidence that people who experiment with a lot of career choices in their twenties are more likely to find something that suits them very well.

And for those who are dealing with debt and looking around, Skov has the type of outlook that lays the groundwork for success: “I’m a well-rounded person and I could do a lot of things. You have to look at what’s out there. It’s not so much what exactly you’re doing but who you’re doing it with.”

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Twentysomething: The safe route is overrated

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By Ryan Healy – Safe for me is a cushy, decent job that pays well. Safe is making a steady paycheck that will cover my student loans, rent and living expenses with a small amount left over to put in the bank. Safe is having the spending money to eat out on Tuesday, go to happy hour on Thursday and buy a couple of rounds at the bar on Saturday.

Safe sounds really fun. So why do I find it so boring?

I have an intense desire to know what its like to scrounge for a month’s rent. I want to know what it’s like to say I can’t afford to eat out tonight, and really mean it. I truly do believe that living like this builds character, and everyone should probably experience it at some point.

But more importantly, I want to know that every action I take can result in my success or my failure. A safe job does not provide this dynamic. If you make a great presentation to a group of stakeholders for your company, you may receive a pat on the back and your boss might consider you for promotion. If you bomb the presentation, chances are you will still receive your paycheck every other Friday.

It sounds a hell of a lot more exciting to make a great sales pitch to a group of investors and convince them to fund your business for the next six months. Or you could bomb the pitch and be forced to get a part time bartending job just to pay rent. If that’s not motivation, I don’t know what is.

Many people my age feel the same way. They think safe is boring and they want to take a risk. The problem is, safe is comfortable and risk is scary. Not many people can handle dropping everything and starting a business with no immediate source of income. Many people don’t even want to run a business, but they still want some excitement from their jobs.

So I think there can be a compromise. Most young, single, ambitious people would probably do a little gambling with their salaries if the opportunity arose. It would be a lot of fun and incredibly motivating to wager $10,000 of my salary on whether or not I can bring the company an extra $50,000 in revenue through my actions. Systems would have to be set up to measure this sort of thing, but the increase in output could definitely cover the costs. Not to mention the massive savings from increased employee retention rates.

Maybe this option is a little too out there for most employers, but the bottom line is a safe, steady, paycheck leads to boredom for entry-level workers. Boredom leads to job hopping or uninspired work, both of which affect a company’s bottom line. If companies can figure out how to make a paycheck a little more interesting, and the job a little less “safe,” they will undoubtedly gain some more inspired, productive employees.

Ryan Healy’s blog is Employee Evolution

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New guest blogger: A.J. Jacobs, from Esquire magazine

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There’s a new guest blogger on Brazen Careerist: A.J. Jacobs. He is an editor-at-large at Esquire, and from what I can tell, it’s one of the cushiest jobs in the world. He doesn’t go to meetings, he seems to have some sort of tenure-track thing where he would never be fired, and he doesn’t even have to write for every issue.

So you want to know how he got such a great job, right? He specializes. Which you need to do, by the way, if you want to have control over your career. And one of the best ways to find a specialty is to find what area you excel at that pays well, and find what personality traits of yours make you quirky. If you can place your career at the intersection of those two things, you’ll have a successful, specialized career.

So anyway, about A.J.’s specialty. He’s a great writer. But there are plenty of great writers who don’t have great careers.

Surely A.J. could write well in a lot of situations. Like, he would be great at writing ads for used microwaves — in fact, I might even subscribe to a daily dose of those ads from AJ because they’d be so funny. But the market for this would be very small.

Instead, A.J. decided to go the route of immersion journalism. The immersion journalist that you probably know is Barbara Ehrenreich. She does things like work in menial job for a year in order to write about how hard it is to live like that. Ehrereich does important work, to be sure, but I don’t think anyone would call her fun.

Though A.J. has never worked as a hotel maid like Ehrenreich, he wrote about outsourcing his life to a team of people in Bangalore, India, (reprinted in the 4-Hour Workweek), and he spent a year reading the encyclopedia and writing about it in his book titled, The Know It All. This book is hilarious and endearing, and every time I go to the book store I pick up a copy and read a few pages as a pick-me-up.

What I love about A.J.’s writing is that he is immersing himself in something crazy but he does not sound like a crazy person. His book reads like hanging out with a good friend. Who happens to read the encyclopedia for a living. He is working at the intersection of what he is great at (writing) and what makes him quirky (his ability to create a weird life for himself and write about it in a way we can all relate to).

No one with A.J.’s great sense of career management would be blogging without a purpose. This week he’s blogging about the encyclopedia, but in the coming weeks, it’ll be the Bible. That’s his new book, A Year of Living Biblically, which he is promoting, of course. He spent a year living according to the Bible. Literally. So he followed the Ten Commandments, but also the lesser known laws of the Bible, like don’t wear clothes of mixed fibers. And stone adulterers.

Sometimes I read A.J. to remind myself what is important about work. What A.J. does that no one else can do is write on insane topics with sentences full of joy. He is smart and funny but the thing that makes me absolutely adore his work is that everything he churns out is bubbling with enthusiasm and fun. And I think that, on some level, this is what we all want our career to be about.

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Do you have a good job? Take the test

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Today’s job market favors employees. The attitude of most workers is that they should have a job that makes them happy. So it’s no surprise that at any given time 70 percent of the workforce is job hunting, according to the Wall St. Journal.

Everyone is looking for the right position. But what exactly does that mean?

Here is something it’s probably not: Prestigious. People who chase fame and prestige are generally not as happy as other people. If you’re after fame, you are setting goals that are dependent on other peoples’ approval. Conversely, goals about self-acceptance and friendship make you happy because you have more control over them.

You might think you’re different – that you have a legitimate shot at fame. Ninety percent of young workers think they are in the top 10 percent of all workers, according to Business Week. Also, 40 percent think they will become famous. The reality is 1 or 2 percent ever achieve a modicum of fame.

A good rule of thumb when choosing a job to make you happy is to pick one that is based on the following list of attributes.

To test a job to see if it’s good, give the job points for each attribute it has:

1. A short, predictable commute – 1 point
The problem with a long commute is that it is long in a different way each day. Sometimes it’s the rain, sometimes there’s an accident. Sometimes traffic is backed up for no apparent reason. Humans can acclimate themselves to a lot of traumatic stuff – even being a paraplegic, according to Daniel Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness. But you cannot acclimate yourself to something that is bad in a different way every day.

2. Workflow you can manage – 1 point
This is not about doing work. This is about managing your personal life, which you cannot do if you have no control over your workflow. You need to be able to predict when things will be difficult and when it’s safe to focus more on your personal life. This is why management consultants are generally happy – they oversee their own schedule. But those who hold client-heavy jobs, such as lawyers or financial analysts, have to jump at a clients’ whim.

3. Clear goals that are challenging – 1 point
Goals that are not challenging result in boredom, not happiness. But challenging work without a clear goal is a bad job waiting to happen because people want to know how they’re doing. But you can’t get feedback from a boss who does not set clear goals to manage your progress.

It is worth noting that the primary cause of workplace burnout is not the amount of time spent working, but whether the work you did can make a difference. For example, nurses on the pediatric burn unit have high turnover because it is exhausting to be taking care of children without being able to stop their suffering. Conversely, entrepreneurs are typically happy because they have so much control over workflow and goals.

4. Two co-workers you’re close friend with – 3 points
If you have two good friends at work, you are almost guaranteed to like your job, according to Tom Rath, the author of Vital Friends. This is, in part, because you can process the bad parts of a job more productively with friends by your side to help you.

So finding a job you like or turning a bad job in to a good job might actually be totally under your control; you can decide you are going to be likable and make friends, or not.

Test results:

0-2 points, probably not a good job

3 points, probably a good job

4 – 6 points, probably a really good job

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