Coachology: Creating a path through your twenties

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The transition from the end of school to the beginning of adulthood is very hard. Today that transition lasts longer than it used to, because there are so many choices and so few tried and true career paths — if any — that work anymore.

Here are five things to keep in mind to make the transition into adulthood a litte easier:

1. Don’t expect things to fall into place too soon.
Today most people use their twenties as a time to search, and then settle down around age thirty. It’s a smart thing to do given the wide range of choices there are for young people today. It’s a great idea to use your twenties to explore — as long as you don’t berate yourself for not knowing what you’re doing. In fact, it’s only a very small percentage of college graduates who know what they are doing with their lives when they graduate. Most start figuring it out when they leave college.

2. Take some risks.
Maybe you’ll move a bunch of times before you figure out the place that will make you most happy. And you’ll probably change jobs three or four times to find something you like. Exploration is common — in a wide range of arenas — and smart. It’s the only way to really know what you like, and this is the time to do it. When you are living in a dump and you hate your job, you can reframe your situation in a way that acknowledges that you are a living in a time where you are trying things to see what works – nothing is permanent and you learn from bad choices.

3. Lookout for depression.
One of the demographic groups at highest risk for depression are people in their early twenties. This is because the transition to adulthood is so difficult. And the time people often feel depression is about a year after graduation, when their work life turns out to be much less interesting than anticipated, and college friends are scattered geographically and making new friends is difficult. Depression is a treatable disease, if you get treatment. Depression is serious — it’s not a time to rely solely on friends and family. Call a professional.

4. Calm down about your debt.
Yes, young people today start out life with more debt than ever before, but this doesn’t have to be a road to disaster. Think in terms of workarounds. For example, most likely your version of the American dream is not about money, so you can fulfill your dreams while dealing with debt. And while you probably want to do work that fulfills you, you don’t have to starve doing that — CollegeSurfing Insider gives examples of how you can pair soul-filling work with good-paying work to find a career that will make you happy.

5. Surround yourself with mentors.
One of the most important indicators of how good you will be at getting what you want in adult life is how strong your network of mentors is. One of the Mentors can be a wide range of people. Your parents count. Your friends count. And your parents’ friends count. But you need to start roping them in early. Mentor relationships require cultivation, and the earlier you start the more support you’ll have getting through your twenties.

So what about Coachology? Hallie Crawford is a career coach who works a lot with young people who are just starting out in their work life. She is donating 90 minutes of coaching (over the phone) to help someone get themselves on track, in terms of where they want to go and how they can get there. You don’t need to set your path in stone, but it’s good to have some path in mind, even knowing that it will change. Hallie can help you find your path by understanding yourself a little bit better in terms of your career.

To get a better sense of Hallie’s ideas, check out her blog. To get free coaching from Hallie, send an email to me by Sunday, March 18, with three sentences describing what you’d like to get from working with Hallie.

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To find a path for your career embrace instability

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The old paths through adult life don’t work anymore. Graduate school is no longer a ticket to a stable career, and in some cases, it’s not even a ticket to a job. Student debt weighs so heavy today that people should not expect to have what their parents have. Technology opens up many types of new types of unstable careers, but slams the door on many stable ones.

Workers today will have no fewer than three careers in their lives, and they will change jobs frequently when young. After that, they will cut back when they have kids, ramp up when they need money, and switch when their learning curve flattens.

The good news is that a large consensus of experts say in today’s world, this kind of living will not necessarily hurt your career. And in fact, changing positions frequently makes you a better candidate in many circumstances. Jason Davis, blogger at Recruiting.com says, “If a candidate has been at the same company for 10 years or more, you should take a red marker [to the resume], draw a big x through it, and throw it in the garbage.”

Today’s worker focuses on finding positions–all the time–that are fulfilling, engaging, and accommodating of personal time. It’s a nice picture, but it’s hard to imagine it’s a stable life.

And, for the most part, people do not like instability. Even the people who you’d think would be risk takers, entrepreneurs, are not, really. Most people are thinking of ways to mitigate the risks they are taking, according to Saras Sarasvathy, of the University of Virginia Darden School of Business.

So what can people do today to mitigate risk in the face of an inherently high-risk workplace? Get good at dealing with transition, because today’s workplace is full of it. The people who are most adept at dealing with transition are the people who will do best in their career and in their life.

1. Have two jobs at the same time.
The easiest way to make a transition is to do it slowly. The old way to change careers is to quit one, leave everything behind, and start everything over new. This is extremely difficult, and extremely risky. An easier transition is to start a new career while you’re doing the old one.

In some cases, you will end up doing the new career most of the time, in some cases, you will find out you don’t like the new idea and you’ll try something else. Recently, though, some people find they like doing both. Two careers makes sense to a lot of people, especially if one is fulfilling and the other pays the bills. Or one is very unstable and one is stable.

Marci Alboher describes the nuts and bolts of having two careers in a way that works in her new book, One Person/Multiple Careers: A New Model for Work/Life Success. She moves between her own set of careers as author/lecturer/writing coach as she tells a wide variety of stories of how people maintain multiple careers successfully.

“It used to be that the only way to transition was to leave your prior career behind. Today’s strivers are learning how to take what comes before and overlay new experiences on top of that. Today a career can be a mosaic.”

Alboher shows this is a path people can use to not only create more stability as they change, but also to follow their dreams as they’re going.

2. Be comfortable with uncertainty.
Eve Ensler, author of the play The Vagina Monologues and also, more recently, the book Insecure at Last:Losing It in Our Security-Obsessed World, thinks one cause of insecurity in our lives is the expectation of being secure. “If you think you’ll get to the point that you’ll be secure, then you’ll be chronically depressed,” says Ensler.

Since we can never really be secure, we should instead learn to be comfortable with that. Getting good at dealing with a world that does not provide security is actually a more healthy way to live than trying to find that one, perfect path through life that leads to a mythical security.

Ensler’s ideas suggest that today’s career paths, that wind and stop and turn and surprise us along the way, may be better for us once we get used to not knowing what’s ahead. “When you start working with ambiguity and living with it initially, it’s scary because there are no signposts. But eventually it seems to be a much more interesting way of living.”

3. Take time to explore.
It used to be people started exploring when they turned 40, and we called it a mid-life crisis. It seems clear, now, that exploration and self-discovery is something to do throughout life, not just when you get sick of your mortgage or your marriage.

But this process requires we take time to check in with ourselves during transition times. Jumping quickly from one thing to another is not as effective as taking time to figure out how you’re feeling, and what you enjoy, each step of the way.

Mike Marriner was planning to go to medical school but realized he wasn’t passionate about biology. He decided to take time to figure out what he should do next.

During this process, he started Roadtrip Nation, which sends teams of students around the country to interview people about their lives and careers. The idea is to provide inspiration or cautions for people as they consider making a transition. “Today there is no transition period,” says Marriner. “Everything is very quick and we are trying to put the spirit of exploration back into American culture.”

Roadtrip Nation has become a book, a summer program for college students, and a PBS Series, all addressing the idea that transition is serious business, and part of moving into adult life is getting good at figuring out where to go next.

To many people, the continuously shifting workplace is disorienting and discouraging, but really, you just need to reorient yourself and develop personal tools for a new workplace. Transition is an opportunity, and today life is full of more opportunity than ever before.

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Branch out to find work you love

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When you look for a job or change careers, what you’re really looking for is a way to improve things in your life. But it’s hard to figure out what will really make things better and what will only make things worse.

There are some things we all know: People who are in love are happier, and people who are chronically unemployed are less happy. But most of us aren’t dealing with such clear-cut extremes.

Most of us ask ourselves on a regular basis, “What’s the best kind of work situation for me?” Yes, we’re all unique, but in truth we aren’t as unique as we think we are. So there are some rules we can all live by when looking for work we’ll love.

Liking What You Have

Forget the deep analysis. Our brains are simply not optimized to figure out what we’ll like. Instead, they’re optimized to figure out how to like what we have.

This helps us on an evolutionary basis: We eat what’s available, we take care of whatever kids we get, and so on. It doesn’t help us in a job hunt, where we have to guess what we would like if we had it.

Daniel Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard, spent his whole career studying this sort of problem and published his findings in “Stumbling on Happiness.” Gilbert concludes that we’re basically unable to know if we’ll like a job until we try it, so self-analysis and market analysis aren’t going to get you very far. Start trying stuff.

You don’t have to quit your job to try things. Try new stuff on the weekend, volunteer for a project part-time, or ask for a temporary appointment to another department, for example. Be creative in how you learn about yourself. A job change doesn’t have to be now or never — it can be a process.

That said, here are some guidelines you can use for deciding what you’re going to try:

• Don’t go to grad school for humanities.

You would have had a better chance surviving on the Titanic than getting a tenure-track professorship in the humanities. The competition for these jobs is fierce, and very few corporate jobs give preference to someone who has a master’s in, say, early American history.

• Don’t be a lawyer.

Suicide is among the leading causes of premature death among lawyers. You can tell yourself you’ll be different, but statistically speaking, you probably won’t be. And while most lawyers don’t kill themselves, this doesn’t bode well for law being your dream career.

• Look for control over your work.

You might think that a manageable workload makes for a good job. But stress doesn’t actually make for a bad job. In fact, some people do very well in high-stress situations. Some even do their best work that way.

What drives people to burn out is when they work very hard but can’t meet their goals. The people most likely to burn out from their jobs, then, are those who are supposed to help children in helpless situations (at hospitals, for example) but can’t stop the pain.

Entrepreneurs, however, are known for working 18-hour days, and frequently love their work because they’re accomplishing something that excites them.

So the most important thing about enjoying your work, according to Alan Krueger, a professor of psychology at Princeton University, is having control over it — when you do it, how you do it, and what you accomplish. “People really like to be able to control the thermostat themselves,” Krueger says.

• Work where you can find a friend.

If you have one good friend at work, it’s a really good bet that you’ll like your job, according to a Gallup study published in the book “Vital Friends” by Tim Rath.

Take a look at the place you’re thinking of working. Do the people there look happy? Workplaces that promote friendship are more productive, and more fulfilling.

There are a lot of ways to judge whether or not you’ll be likely to make a friend at a new job. But one factor we often forget is architecture. Office space that promotes collaboration and taking a moment to say hi is space that is good for making friends.

• Don’t work with jerks.

Conversations that are insulting have five times the impact on your day than positive conversations. Unfortunately, we have a great memory for the unpleasant. Daniel Gilbert’s research supports this, but Bob Sutton, a professor at Stanford University, specializes in the jerk at work.

Sutton warns that if you work with jerks, you become one. His book gives advice on how to make sure you don’t end up working with these toxic people, and his web site gives you a way to test yourself to see if you’re a jerk yourself. After all, if you’re the jerk, you’re going to have a pretty hard time finding an office without one.

Work Life vs. Life Life

As you search for your new career, collecting advice as you go, remember that the stakes aren’t as high as you might think. A job is not your life.

Your personal life is your life, and your job supports that. The people who are most overwhelmed with career choices are the ones who think a career makes a life. So don’t be afraid to try a lot of options, and don’t be afraid to relax a little.

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Take the pressure off the process of choosing a career

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Most of us will change careers. Most young people will change careers at least three times — after they find one, when they are thirty. So work life is really about a series of careers, and we all need to get good at the process of choosing a new career. We all need to get comfortable with the inherent uncertainty during the process.

Here are nine ways you can make choosing a career less stressful:

1. Squash perfectionist tendencies and get comfortable in gray areas.
It’s fine to be lost and not sure what you’re doing, so don’t rush yourself to solve the problem. Maybe you can just look at the problem differently, and it won’t look so bad. And, don’t feel like you need to get the right answer in your hunt for the right career. Being right is not important. Just do your best and see what comes of it.

2. Don’t wait for a new career to start being creative.
Every job is creative. Every job presents problems that need solving, and problem solving is a creative act. If what you mean by creativity is that you want to paint with watercolors, then go home at night and do that. Why do you need to get paid to make art? It’s enjoyable and fulfilling and a fine thing to do in your free time, even if you have only fifteen minutes of free time a day. Raymond Carver is famous for writing short, short stories because he didn’t have enough time in the day to write long.

3. Stop looking for a career to save your life.
A job is not a life. A job is something to do with your time that is rewarding and fosters personal growth. A career can’t make you happy. Relationships will make you happy. Figure out what you can get from a career and what you can’t. Once you recognize that you will rescue you, not your career, there’s a lot less pressure in the career hunt realm.

4. Relax about the career choices you make.
Try something. If you don’t like it, try another thing. There are not rules that say you have to stay in the career you choose. In fact, moving from one career to another at a breakneck pace til you love something might be good for you, and taking ten years to figure something out is fine. The life or death decision is about living below your means. As long as you do this, you have lots of choices in life. If you don’t live below your means, you get stuck in a career.

5. Don’t wait until you know yourself.
You never really know yourself. It’s a process. If it’s a precondition for finding a career, then you could be learning about yourself forever and never feel ready to choose a career. Forget the soul-search and just try something. Ironically, the best way to learn about yourself is to do things and see if you like them, so the inactive, soul-searching time is, in some ways, counter-productive. Try testing the waters with a lot of lower risk moves, instead.

6. Stop choosing dead-end fields.
All things being equal, you’re better off choosing a career in a field that is growing, not shrinking. Once you identify your talents, focus them on a field that has a future. If you write well, go into interactive marketing — one of the fastest growing fields — and not print journalism, which is in trouble. If you like to help people, go into nursing —huge demand, and not centralized, slow-moving nonprofits, which are falling out of favor with donors.

7. Don’t overlook the good points of the job you have.
You can save the world from almost any job, you can shift from a dead end to a hot spot in almost any field, and you can learn and grow if you get good at managing your boss. These are all things you can control. You don’t need a specific career to accomplish these things. So maybe you don’t even need to pick a new career.

8. Make a lifestyle choice before you make a career choice.
Figure out what you want your life to look like, and then choose a career that will enable that life. If you don’t know what you want from life, how can you possibly know what you want from a career? What we want from life might change. That’s okay. You have to start somewhere. So figure out what you want, and an try out careers that might give you that. If you change what you want from life, you can change your career.

9. Talk about yourself the way you want to be.
To figure out what sort of career will suit you, try talking about yourself like you’re already there and see how it feels. We intuitively know what stories feel right, and we can make a career change more efficiently if we create stories about our process. You might actually surprise yourself by figuring out what you want to do by figuring out what story seems natural to tell.

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The connection between a good job and happiness is overrated

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One of my favorite topics is the science of happiness, which academia calls positive psychology. I love this topic because most of us think of our careers in terms of happiness. That is, we look for work that makes us happy. Positive psychology turns this hunt into a science. And then tells us to look elsewhere for happiness.

I was talking to Richard Florida, about his current research, which blends positive psychology and economic development, and he summarized what I have read in many other places as well: “Your level of optimism and quality of relationships impact your level of happiness more than your job does.” What this means is that asking a job to solve our unhappiness problems is asking too much of a job.

I spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to focus on optimism and relationships so that we don’t feel so much pressure choosing our jobs. To this end, I was excited to see three different introductions to the psychology of happiness in the last month.

The New York Times magazine ran a long summary of the positive psycholgoy movement, titled Happiness 101 (subscription). For those of you who don’t know much about this movement, the article is a good primer.

Martin Seligman, founder of the movement and professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, says, “Postive psychology is not only about maximizing personal happiness but also about embracing civic engagement and spiritual connectedness, hope and charity.”

This is not small stuff, but it’s the stuff that is scientifically proven to lead to a happy life. So when you think about what job to take, realize that this list of things that affect your sense of well-being is not overwhelmingly connected to the idea of doing what you love at work.

One of the most interesting parts of the article is where Daniel Gilbert, the man whose book on this topic was a bestseller, disses the movement as cultish, “I just wish it didn’t look so much like religion,” he says.

It does look like religion, because positive psychology promotes things religion promotes, like showing gratitude at the end of each day. But really, what this tells us is that the things that make us happy are much more basic than doing interesting work with interesting people.

Sonja Lyubomirsky says being happy comes from the way we think at our very core – and that thinking shapes the work we do. Not the other way around.

The Economist jumps on the positive psychology bandwagon in the article, “Economics Discovers Its Feelings.” This report contains some very practical advice. For example:

The traits of work that makes someone happy:
1. stretches a person without defeating him
2. provides clear goals
3. provides unambiguous feedback
4. provides a sense of control

But don’t panic if you can’t find a job like this, because when these traits do not exist in a job, people will often figure out how to add them back in and give the job meaning in their lives. For example, “hairdressers often see themselves as the confidants of clients they like, and they will fire clients they don’t…And there are janitors at a hospital who held patients’ hands, brightening their day as well as scrubbing their rooms.”

Before you smirk at this rationalizing behavior, realize that Gilbert says it actually does create genuine happiness in a job. Check out this video of Gilbert speaking at the TED Conference (thanks, Dennis). Gilbert’s a fun speaker, so it’s worth watching the whole twenty minutes.

Gilbert also says that even if things are not going well, humans have a deep ability to make ourselves think they’re going well. Which is why Gilbert told me that people should not ask other people if they like their jobs, because almost everyone says they do and it has no bearing on how good the job it is.

However he says that this rejiggered feeling of happiness is just as deep and good a feeling as the happiness when something really is going very well.

One of his pet topics is that what we think will make us happy rarely does. (When I spoke with him he told me this is the reason we should not sit at home and try to guess what career to pick, but instead we should just get off the chair and start trying stuff.)

Gilbert’s research shows that while we think being a paraplegic would be very bad and winning the lottery would be very good, three months after the event, neither really affects your happiness. And this goes back to happiness being a result of how we think at our very core — what Seligman calls our level of optimism. (If you are not buying this, watch the video.)

So you don’t have to make yourself crazy about finding the perfect job. All that stuff about how you need to find a job that you love is overstated. “Some people don’t seek fulfillment through their work and are still happy in life. All options are legitimate and possible,” says Amy Wrzesniewski professor at the Stern School of Business at New York University.

You need to find a job that meets those four basic standards for a decent job. But our brain is hard-wired to figure out how to enjoy it once you get there. So maybe you can lighten up about choosing your next job. There’s good research to show that a wide range of jobs can accommodate you in a way where you can find happiness. And there’s good research to show that finding “the perfect” job will not be the thing to make you happy.

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Be nimble and creative to grow a career in ‘The Conceptual Age’

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As thousands of U.S. companies ship jobs to other countries, the resounding response from young people is, “Who cares? I wouldn’t want one of those jobs anyway.” To the new U.S. workforce many of those jobs look boring, routine and uncreative – the equivalent of a manufacturing job to a baby boomer.

Kris Helenek is a software engineer at Student Universe, an online travel resource for students. He’s not particularly worried about losing his job to someone in, say, India, because he’s involved in discussions concerning product features – something difficult to outsource to someone lacking a deep understanding of the customer. But what about his future? Helenek says, “I’m confident that I’ll always be innovative enough and skillful enough that people will want to hire me.”

We are entering a new age in economic history, and it will elevate those who are nimble and creative. When we moved from industrial economy to the information economy, jobs became more interesting; coal miners were unemployed, tech support centers hired like mad, and secretaries became small-time database operators. Now we’re in the early stages of the “conceptual age” in which data will be less important than creativity, and jobs will be more fulfilling.

Daniel Pink presents this one-minute economic history in his book, A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age. He says, “Key abilities will not be high tech but high touch,” and we will value the ability to make meaning and connections in a world where information is a commodity.

According to Pink, the people who will do best in this economy are those who don’t just take and give orders but also move smoothly between boundaries, like the technical guru who understands marketing or the accountant who speaks four languages. “But,” Pink warns, “you cannot get a move-smoothly-between-boundaries aptitude test, so a lot of this is about self-discovery.”

Here are some traits you need to develop to do well in the conceptual age:

  1. Empathy. Think emotional intelligence on steroids. The most empathetic people have the ability to see an issue from many different perspectives. And work that can be done without infused empathy begs to be outsourced.
  2. Aesthetic eye. Pink says, “Design sense has become a form of business literacy like learning to use Microsoft Excel. Smart business people should start reading design magazines.”
  3. Ability to negotiate and navigate. The conceptual age will be filled with possibilities that point to no single truth. Pink says, “People must learn to do something that is not routine, that doesn’t have a right answer.”

Bottom line: You’ll have to be creative to stay employed. But really, who doesn’t want to be creative? It’s inherently more rewarding to be creative than to be an information drone.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, professor of psychology at the Claremont Graduate University and author of Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, says that, “Being creative is a way in which life becomes richer.

“But if you want to be creative you must learn to do something well. You need to learn a set of skills, and then, once you feel comfortable you can ask yourself how you can make it better.”

Those with no patience for methodically developing a special talent, pay heed: Innovation without a good knowledge in that area is not creativity but dilettantism. Not that dabbling in topics you know nothing about isn’t fun, but that lifestyle will not create the kind of value that allows you to flourish in this new economy. To find what you love to do, Csikszentmihalyi recommends exploration.

“A richer life is one in which you have access to different aspects of the world.” Sure, you need to find your talents to figure out where you will put your creative energy.

But Pink reminds, “Failure is a part of mastery.” So give yourself room for missteps.

This is good news for Helenek. He invested in Boston-area real estate as a way to hedge his technical career. He planned to live in half his duplex and rent out the other half. But after the deal closed a pipe burst, and now Helenek is working on a fixer-upper. Tough work, but the good news is you can’t outsource floor sanding to India.

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Answering the question ‘What do you do?’

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When someone asks me, “What does your husband do?”

I say, “I don’t know.”

This is not an answer our society is set up to deal with. It is not okay to have no idea what you want to do, let alone be married to someone with no idea. We have two kids, and I’ve noticed that the more responsibilities you have, the more unacceptable it is to have no idea what you’re doing.

But the truth is that my husband is trying to figure out what to do. He is an artist, and a former game producer, and a former a lot of things, but right now he is being a dad who wants to be a dad-slash-something but he can’t figure out what.

There is a lot of good advice about how to craft an answer to The Question. Pamela Slim, at Escape from Cubicle Nation has a classic post titled, So, what do you do for a living? about how to talk about your new entrepreneurial escapade while you are still working for your old employer. And Herminia Ibarraha, a professor at INSEAD, shows that if you talk about yourself how you want to be, then you will probably become that person. In both cases, the advice is to answer The Question by focusing on where you are going instead of where you are.

That is excellent advice, for everyone who knows where they are going. But how do you craft an answer if you have no idea where you are headed?

I know my husband is not alone in the world because I do a lot of career coaching for very smart, talented, ambitious people, and many have no idea what they want to do with themselves. Ten years ago, if you didn’t know what you were doing, the typical response would be, “I’m consulting.” Today, you don’t need to do that. It’s okay to be lost.

For people under 30, feeling lost is de rigueur. But if you’re over thirty, it’s okay too, if you believe it’s okay. The first step is to respect the fact that you are in transition and that transition is part of normal life. In fact, with the right attitude, coping with uncertainty can be a positive experience.

The important thing is to be honest about it. If you hedge, and look embarrassed, ashamed or evasive, you will look bad answering The Question. But if you look someone in the eye and say, “I don’t know. I’m trying to figure it out,” it’s reasonable to trust that people will respect you. They will ask you about your process for figuring things out. Maybe they’ll say, “What have you done in the past?” or maybe “What are you thinking about doing?” These are not personal attacks. They are genuine curiosity because we are all fascinated by the process of self-discovery — it’s the basis of our whole literary canon, after all.

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Take the risk of specializing in order to stand out

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Linda Chernoff is decked out in a black, floor-length gown and heels that kill her at the end of an evening. She has the conversational skills of a socialite and team building talents of a top executive. Her resume could start with her prized “people skills” as an entree to almost any career, but instead, she focuses herself more narrowly: Event planner.

Good move. The best way to ensure you’ll always be in demand is to become a specialist.

In Hollywood terms, this means you should typecast yourself. You know, action hero, funny guy, tough girl. Ezra Zuckerman, professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management spent three years studying actors’ careers and concluded that even though actors see typecasting as deadly, it is, in fact, a ticket to a solid career. Actors who get typecast early on get more work, more consistently.

The typecasting rule applies to other careers; specializing is a way to differentiate yourself in a crowd. Many people describe themselves as generalists so as not to eliminate job prospects. However, specializing makes you more likely to be hired and hunted. Zuckerman explains, “Headhunters are specialized and they look for something they can package and sell. Since a candidate search is specialized, the headhunter is not set up to process people who don’t fit into a specialty.”

As with almost all career advice, solid execution requires knowing where your gifts lie. And, like most people, Linda Chernoff was not initially sure. She started out as a law firm administrator, then worked in publicity at Temple University.

Her favorite part of that job was planning events like golf outings and tailgate parties. Now she is development associate for special events at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Specialization is the goal, but be wary of too much or too early. If your specialty is marketing on Mars, you’ll be the only person in your field, but you probably won’t get paying gigs. Even a reasonable specialty can go awry if you limit yourself before you know enough.

Liz Ramos, a partner at the consulting firm Bain & Co., wrote, “At Bain, we think it is more and more important as a business person to develop one or more areas of deep expertise over time.”

The path they’ve laid out for their consultants is useful: In the beginning, the focus is on “learning communication techniques and skills for the job.” After two years at the company, Bain emphasizes learning to “manage one’s job and develop as business leaders.”

Only after three to five years does Bain encourage people to “think about if they want to continue in consulting or go to business school or another opportunity such as an entrepreneurial venture.”

Once you get to that last step, you necessarily take yourself out of the running for some jobs. But if you don’t position yourself as extremely good at something, you will never have a chance at a top position.

Opera singer Stephanie Chigas knows this intuitively. She is a Boston-based mezzo-soprano at the beginning of her career. While other opera singers accept chorus roles for supplemental income, she does not. “Some people will say, ‘I’ll do anything that comes my way,’ but I don’t want to do that. I have different goals for myself. It may sound a little snooty, but I want to be a solo singer.”

Snottiness is paying off for Chigas. She’s performed with the Boston Lyric Opera and she’s sung at Carnegie Hall. In fact, snootiness is part of specializing, because committing to a path requires an implicit revelation that you think you’ll succeed.

Conversely, generalizing often looks weak, lacking direction or commitment. Zuckerman says, “Generalizing could be useful as a hedging strategy if you are in a volatile industry.” But if you see yourself going to the top, you need to sell yourself as a specialist, not someone hedging for a darker day.

Of course, it is scary to specialize because there is the chance you’ll choose something in which you can’t succeed. But you can always try again. MIT’s Zuckerman offers hope in the form of Bette Davis. Her career began in the 1930s as a blond bombshell. But there was no spark. So her studio recast her as a vampy, man-slayer type, and she was a hit.

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Game plan for peaceful coexistence of kids and career

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When Carin Rosenberg and Erik Lawrence got married, they had already done a lot of planning. They had a plan for a baby (lots of hands-on parenting) and careers (no out-of-control hours), and while each were earning advanced degrees, they had no plans for high-powered jobs.

For Generation X, super careers are out and shared parenting is in. What used to be mistaken for a “slacker” work ethic (by media dominated by workaholic boomers) is actually a generation-defining concern for work-life balance. A report from Catalyst says that professionals in Generation X “place more emphasis on personal goals than on those related to work.” Both parents expect to be closely involved with the children, and full-time childcare is widely rejected as not consistent with the core values of the generation.

When children enter the picture, there are three possible paths for dual-career couples:

First path is where one partner leaves the workforce to run the household. This is the path that made men’s careers soar for years, and it was the most popular choice when women had no choice. The second path is where both partners work full time and outsource running the household. This was a popular choice when women thought they could “have it all.” But the women entering the workforce today know better, and most want no part of that lifestyle which now appears to be impossible.

The third path is what Generation X aims for: Reconfigured work around the needs of family. According to Lisa Levey, Director of Advisory Services at Catalyst, most people starting out in their work life say they want a union of equal careers and equal parenting. But most people are unrealistic about what this setup requires. “This is a tough situation to establish because the paradigm has shifted but the jobs have not.”

Most career-worthy jobs are prepackaged for a 40 hour (or more) workweek, which makes little room for two careers and dual parenting. According to Levey, “Five years after business school, only 60% of women are working outside the home. Women look ahead and the path seems impossible. You can’t have two people gunning in their careers, and women are more likely to quit when there’s a problem.”

Phyllis Moen, professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota and author of the Career Mystique: Cracks in the American Dream, warns that “What happens with two high powered folks is that it becomes impossible and one bails out, typically the woman.” But she offers encouragement in that, “Cracks provide an opportunity, a way to rewrite the script. And Generation X is poised to do that.”

Levey offers a game plan: “You need good planning that starts in one’s mid twenties. You need to have a very substantial conversation about it.” When it comes to choosing a third path, “you have to really want it – seek it out, plan for it over a long period of time.”

That last piece of advice is difficult. Rosenberg and Lawrence know they both want to have family dinners, but neither is sure who will be home at 6pm to do the cooking. “We’ll talk about logistics when we are ready to have a baby,” says Rosenberg. But for optimum chance of success on the third path, the couple should talk about it way before they’re ready for a baby.

Here are some guidelines for early conversation and planning:

1. Build expertise to gain flexibility.
Moen reports that a lot of young people “Say they won’t go for high level jobs but will go for one that allow them to have more time. But that is shooting themselves in the foot because all jobs are demanding but some have more resources than others. If you think you are taking a job that would give you more time, talk to people in that job. We have in our mind that lower status or lower paying would be easier to balance, but this is not the case.

Levey recommends that you focus on building value. “It’s very hard to get a part time job off the bat. If you’re pregnant it’s late to think about part time. Usually you have to earn the opportunity to work part time. Work at the same company for a while, and develop a certain niche. Over time, you can craft something that will work for you.”

2. Live below your means and forget the big house.
If you choose an unconventional path then you need to expect your income to oscillate as each partner steps on and off different career tracks. Levey warns: “People get stuck because they can’t imagine decreasing their financial lifestyle.”

Moen zeroes in on the house: “The one thing that people seem to equate with adulthood is buying a house. In the past – for boomer generation especially – advice was to buy the best house you can afford. But now that house is an albatross, especially because today that purchase is based on two peoples’ salaries.”

Jessica DeGroot of the Third Path, and non-profit that coaches couples in creating a work-life balance says that in addition to homes, people also scale back vacations and maybe even family size in order to afford to reduce work hours.

3. Marry someone whose career aspirations are consistent with yours.
“If one person has a 60 hour/week job and one has a 40 hour a week job, the person with fewer hours at work will do most of the work at home,” says Moen. Similarly, if only one person has flexibility to come home when a child is sick, then that person will come home every time.

4. Talk all the time.
Most people know if the person they’re dating wants to have kids, and they have some sort of idea of how many and how soon. Most people also find out the career aspirations of the person they’re dating. But the intersection of kids and careers is usually in a don’t-ask-don’t-tell paradigm.

People say they can’t talk about how to manage kids and careers until the kids come because they don’t know what they’ll want. But you could say that about everything. And you don’t. So when it comes to the combination of kids and careers, you don’t have to have the perfect answer, but you have to have something you’re shooting for, together, or you won’t have any control over the direction you’re going.

This is true when you are dating, but it’s also true during the course of your whole relationship. An ongoing, engaged discussion of kids and careers is the best way to make sure they work well together for your family.

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Start looking for summer internships now

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Good internships are treasure troves no matter how old you are. They give you the opportunity to make a new start –figure out where you fit, switch your career path, or just find someone who cares enough to help you make good decisions.

That said, the big internship business comes from college students. Eighty-two percent of graduating seniors will have completed at least one internship, according to Mark Oldman, co-founder of Vault, a media company for career information, and author of Best 109 Internships. “In the United States an internship is no longer an optional benefit but an essential stepping stone for career success.”

The time to start looking for a summer internship is now. Some industries, like finance and journalism, typically have deadlines in the fall. Other industries have spring deadlines. But regardless of deadlines, the earlier you start the better an experience you are likely to have.

Brown University holds meetings in November to get students started on the internship process. “Internships are a really important part of career exploration so you should start as early as possible,” says Barbara Peoples, associate director in the Career Development Center at Brown University.

No matter what your age, an internship can help you to know as much about what you do like as what you don’t like. It’s very hard to tell which sort of job you’ll be happy in, and Daniel Gilbert, professor of psychology at Harvard University, says working summers in a few different industries is a good way figure it out. “Don’t ask people, “?Does your career make you happy?’ because most people will say yes. Instead, observe people in their work to see if you think they look happy.”

Oldman points out that the benefits of an internship extend way past college. “Increasingly recent college grads and even career changers of all ages are doing internships. They are a great way to ignite career interest. But they are also a low risk way to sample a new industry without committing yourself.”

No matter what age you are, you should follow the same advice for evaluating opportunities. Here is the list of characteristics that make for a good internship, according to Oldman:

Substantive work.
Mentoring opportunities.
Some sort of pay.
Chance for gaining permanent employment.
Good quality of life.

So, how do you get one of these plum internships? For everyone, the best source is, of course, your network. But in most cases, people have not been great at networking before they need an internship.

For college students, the next best resource is the campus career center. A career center measures its success by how many students actually get jobs, so they have a vested interest in making sure you get an internship since that makes you more likely to get a job when you graduate. Besides, one of the most important aspects of succeeding in a career is learning to ask for help, so get started now, when the stakes are not so high.

It might seem that you cannot go wrong in the internship department, but it is not without controversy. Many internships are unpaid — toeing the line of labor laws and sometimes even crossing it. And some internships pay, but not nearly as well as, say, a summer job in construction, or a job corralling ten-year-olds at overnight camp. For people who do not have parental funding or a nest egg of their own, subsidizing an unpaid internship is often out of the question.

But Peoples says that even if you are not doing unpaid labor in the field of your dreams, you can benefit from your summer work. You should “know what you are seeking from a summer experience. Even if you are working at a summer camp, think about goals like becoming a supervisor or working in a different area.” Peoples says that “everyone should have learning goals.” And in fact, the process of crafting goals for personal growth on the job might be the most important internship lesson of them all.

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