Snoop on other people’s careers to gain self-knowledge

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We are bad at predicting what will make us happy, so the best way to pick a career is to study people to see if you like what their life is like. If you do, then try their career.

This is not very efficient, though. I mean, you can’t study that many people. So New York Magazine’s Watching the Clock is a gift for all you career searchers. You can read a minute-by-minute account of each person’s day.

Of course, it’s an account of their best day. No one reports anything like “1:36 pm put head on desk and worried about failure.” But still, you can learn a lot from reading about how someone really spends their day.

Also, you can learn about yourself by watching how you read the pages — you will read carefully what seems like the most fun to you. When I read, for example, I went first to the publicist, and relished every minute of his day. I even took pleasure the relentless pitching he did, within this piece, for his client, Bombay Sapphire. I skimmed the location scout’s day, and the contractor’s day. I read five scattered words about the chef’s day and they were all about food (who eats porchetta anyway?) and I couldn’t bring myself to read anymore. So no cooking school for me. Ever.

What if you like reading all of the profiles equally? Maybe you should be a librarian.

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The official announcement of my blog

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Today is the official announcement of my blog. I actually started blogging three months ago, when I was doing interviews for my recent column about blogging. It became clear that anyone who is very serious about their career should have a blog, and I didn’t have one.

It turns out, it is not that easy to blog. Well, it’s easy to write a blog for an audience of six best friends and your mom. But if you want to be seen as an expert in your field by making a significant contribution to the daily community discussion, then you need to think things through a bit.

Fortunately, I’m a person who loves to learn something new. Here’s what I did:

1. I called all the people I knew who were bloggers and asked them about their technique.

2. I spent two hours a night for a month reading other peoples’ blogs. I read hotshot blogs, like Lifehacker and smaller blogs like Communication Nation.

3. I started blogging furtively. I told only my blog mentor and my brother (who said “You should get a better picture of yourself.”)

Today is the last step: Announcing the blog to everyone else.

It turns out that I really love blogging. It appeals to three very big aspects of my personality: I love to write, I love routine, and I’ll read anything. This last thing is genetic, I think. My mom will read anything, too. My mom has an amazing memory, and she was on the game show Jeopardy. I don’t have her memory, but I’m a good synthesizer of information, and blogging is a great outlet for that.

According to the guys who wrote the best selling book Freakonomics, the idea of talent is overrated. What makes people stand out — concert pianists, Olympic athletes (and probably big-time bloggers) is that they love to practice. They love to do it day in and day out and so they get really good at it.

This is the reason that people should do what they love — because that’s what they’ll be really good at because they’ll do it a lot. So I’m happy to have found something I love.

For those of you who are still looking for something you love, you should know that I did not know that I would love blogging before I tried it. In fact, before I tried it, I thought blogging would be a daily pain in the butt. But I took a risk because I know you can’t find what you’re really good at without trying a lot of things.

Blogging is a very big time investment. And it’s not like I'm getting paid to do this. But you cannot get paid to do everything in life. I have made almost all my big career steps by doing something that I did not get paid for. I have written business plans with no assurance that they’d be funded (I got the money). And I have contributed time and ideas with no assurance that I’d get credit (I got a job).

In this case, I’m not really sure where the blog will lead, but I feel strongly that I need to be doing it, to contribute to the online conversation about work and life. Some days I worry about how much time I spend on the blog, but I tell myself that good things happen to those who take risks to do things they love. So, I’m doing that. We’ll see what happens.

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Get married first, then focus on career

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Women who want to have kids should make it a high priority in their early twenties to find a partner. This week’s Newsweek cover story, Marriage by the Numbers, says is okay to wait until after 35 to get married. Newsweek is revising the saying that a woman has more chance of getting hit by a truck than getting married after age 35.

But the article ignores one of the most pressing issues facing Generation X: Infertility. No generation of women has had more trouble with fertility than this generation who received the terrible advice, “Wait. You have time. Focus on your career first.”

In fact, you have your whole life to get a career. This is not true about having a baby.

Even if you are past your early twenties, or not heterosexual, if you’re single and want to have kids with a partner, you need to find one now. Take that career drive and direct it toward mating because your career skills will outlast your ovaries.

In case you think you’re waiting for “the right time,” there is no evidence to show when in a woman’s career is best to have kids. At any point, she is thrown off track. At any point when a woman has kids, statistically she will start to earn less money even if she takes no maternity leave whatsoever. There is no evidence to show that it’s easier to take time out of the workforce at a certain point in a career. People just plain don’t know.

Phyllis Moen, professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota, told me in an interview, “Don’t wait until the right time in your career to have a child or it will never come.”

However there is lots of evidence to show that a woman’s biological clock takes a nose-dive at age 35. I know, because that’s when I started having kids. The geneticist showed me and my husband a graph of Down’s Syndrome and we nearly keeled over when we saw the cliff at 35. We had no idea. That Down’s Syndrome cliff, though, is a stand-in for everything, because a huge percentage of fertility statistics get bad at 35.

There is also lots of evidence to say that having kids at least two years apart is best for the kids. However there is a distinct advantage for first-born kids. They are richer, smarter, and as if that’s not enough, year after year 90% of Harvard’s incoming freshmen are first-born. You can mitigate the impact of birth order on your second child by having three years between kids.

If you start when you are thirty-one, you can have two kids, three years apart, before you’re thirty-five. But this plan does not take into consideration that about 20% of pregnancies end in a miscarriage. This means you have almost a 50% chance of having to go through three pregnancies to have two kids, which means you should start when you’re thirty.

If you want to have babies when you’re thirty, then you probably want to be married when you’re twenty-eight. This is good news because if you marry very young you’re more likely to get divorced, but the statistics get much better if you wait until you’re twenty-five. For a healthy marriage, experts think people should be married two or three years before they consider having children. A reasonable expectation is to meet someone, date for a couple of years, and get engaged with almost a year’s time to pull off a wedding. So you need to meet the person at age twenty-four.

So this means that it may make sense for men to work full-speed ahead on their career in their early twenties, but women cannot afford that. Women need to make time in their lives to search for a mate in the same systematic, focused way that women have been searching for careers in their early twenties. And don’t tell yourself you’re waiting until you know yourself better. Getting to know yourself is a lifelong process, and after age twenty-five, waiting to get married won’t decrease your chance of divorce.

The good news here is that a large body of research shows that you will gain more happiness by being married than by having a good job. Yes, you should not have to choose between a good job and marriage. But this column is not about what is fair or what is just. It is about what is real.

You have a biological clock that does not pay attention to issues of social justice. You cannot control your biological clock and you cannot control the workplace. But you can control where you spend your time and energy, and you should look hard for a husband early on. Line up the marriage first, then the career.

 

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Danica Patrick’s unique selling proposition

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Okay, so Danica Patrick still has not won a race, and now that the Indy 500 is over, a new round of complaining has started. There is truth the complaining. Patrick does have very good equipment in a sport where equipment matters a lot. And she does have more sponsors in a sport where other competitors have had to win a lot of races to get sponsors.

But instead of pointing out all the factors that make Patrick an anomaly, look at how she is like you: She is looking to do something she loves, and she is figuring out a way to make it work. She sees an opening — selling herself to the media as the only woman driver — and she takes it. This is not unfair. In fact, Jamie Birch reminds us that having a unique selling proposition is integral to good business and we all need one.

So as you’re doing your job, keep an eye open for what will make you pull ahead of the crowd, and don’t be discouraged in a field of fast drivers. You don’t need to win a race to have the best selling proposition.

You do, however, need to have a good understanding of what you offer. Be realistic of why someone is coming back to you. Patrick wishes people loved her because she wins races, but they love her because she’s the first woman. Don’t be so picky about why people love you — just leverage that affection to do the work you want to do.

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Job snobbery is misguided

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You do not need to have an intellectually challenging job in order to be happy in your job. You need to feel like you are meeting a core need by being at your job.

I interviewed Sonja Lyubomirsky, assistant professor of psychology at University of California at Riverside, who studies what makes people happy. She stressed to me that research shows that a wide range of jobs make people happy.

For example, in one study, a janitor was happy in his work because he knew he was helping people by keeping his building clean. He had a core need to help. “People have important goals that come from inside themselves – for example, personal growth, community, or relationships,” says Lyubomirsky. “Jobs that allow you to meet intrinsic goals will lead to more happiness.”

When I was playing professional beach volleyball, I trained at the beach and the gym for eight hours a day. In the evenings, my job was to shelve books at a bookstore. It was pretty mindless, but what I needed during that time was contact with other people, and a chance to slow down. So I loved the job because it filled those needs.

Newsweek’s My Turn is by Kathy Kallenbach Clark, a woman who is at home with her kids all day, and although she has a master’s degree, she chooses to deliver pizzas at night. I love this essay because it challenges our snobby views of what kinds of jobs we should look for. (Though I have to add that the headline is sophomoric and irrelevant and borders on insulting the writer.)

I can totally understand why Clark wants to deliver pizzas after spending a day with kids. I spend a good portion of my days with my young sons, and there is no time to think. Kids require constant, low-level brain power and there is no chance to do any deep thinking. A pizza job is glorious thinking time to a mom who has very little otherwise.

When you are trying to figure out what kind of job to look for, think about what need you are really looking to fill. Be honest with yourself. Put your job snob away, and address your core needs.

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The science behind the idea “Do what you love”

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

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

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

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Top ten jobs to have

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Salary.com and Money magazine just released a list of the top fifty jobs.

Here’s how they did the rankings:

Things that are bad are less than $50,000 average salary, dangerous, and small field with little room for advancement.

Things that are good are a growing field, low stress, flexibility in hours and working environment, creativity, and easy advancement.

Here are the top ten:

1. Software engineer

2. College professor

3. Financial advisor

4. Human resource advisor

5. Physician assistant

6. Market research analyst

7. Computer/IT analyst

8. Real estate appraiser

9. Pharmacist

10. Psychologist

I dove for this list as soon as I saw it, but the rankings are not as useful as you might imagine. However it made me happy to see that psychologist is up there at the top — it’s hard enough to go to a therapist, so I at least want to know that while I’m talking she is enjoying herself.

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A job does not give life meaning

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People would be a lot happier with the job they had if they were happier with themselves outside of their job. We have seen steady decline in job satisfaction, no matter if the employment rate is very high or very low, and even when most people have control over their time and their workload, they still report that they are unhappy in their jobs, according to the Harvard Business Review.

People do not like work because they don’t like their personal life. And the key to being happy at work is not so much finding the perfect career as it is finding yourself. The more self-knowledge you have the happier you will be. So stop looking at your job to solve your problems and instead look inside yourself. Make friends with yourself and with other people, and your job, whatever it is, might start looking better because you’re not asking so much from it.

If you are looking to your job for the meaning of life, forget it. Even people who feed starving children with the Peace Corps have crisis of meaning. (For example, What is the point of feeding one child when six will die?) The meaning of life is elusive and you must put in a lot of time and energy to find meaning in your life.

The job hunt is separate. The job is something you have to do to support yourself. Since you’re going to be doing it for a good portion of your life, you should look for some basics: People who respect you and your personal life. A company that is honest. A job that uses your skills and experience. A job that challenges your abilities without overwhelming you.

Work does not need to give your life a grand purpose in order to be a good experience. The most pleasurable work provides a perfect balance between too much and too little — in terms of both amount and difficulty, according to Diane Fassel, the chief executive of workplace survey firm Newmeasures and author of the book Working Ourselves to Death.

A career is like a mate. The relationship is limited by what you bring to the table. If you are not happy with yourself, you won’t be happy with the match-up. Here’s an analogy a friend once told me: You have to have the cake, and then the relationship is the icing. It doesn’t matter how good the icing is if there’s no cake to put it on. Who eats icing by itself? Gross.

The part about you is the most important. What do you do when you’re alone? How do you feel about yourself? What are your core values and do you lead your life according to them each day? Do you numb yourself with food or TV or alcohol? It’s very hard to be honest about this stuff. Yet amazingly, people spend lots of time on locating a job and a mate and very little time locating themselves.

“Employees should not demand that companies imbue their lives with meaning,” writes E.L. Kersten in the Harvard Business Review. “Employers and employees have something the other needs. One of the keys to a mutually beneficial relationship is a realistic understanding of what that something is.” A job is not a life.

In fact, online dating is not a bad model for evaluating a job. For one thing, you should never write that you want a mate to make you feel fulfilled — that’s asking much too much from a single person. Yet we complain all the time that our jobs are not fulfilling.

Dating services ask that you be as specific as possible in your desires. So try that for a job. Here’s what I would ask for in a job, and it’s the same thing I looked for in a spouse:

Fair

Fun

Mind-expanding

Interesting

Consistent with my values

Leaves space for the other parts of my life

And here’s another thing about those lists: You are probably going to have to be your list to get your list. That’s why interesting people are at interesting companies. So be who you want to be instead of looking for a mate or a company to make you who you wish you were.

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If you’re stuck, take an adventure

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If you're out of work, or your job is so annoying that you wish you were out of work, then it's time to take an adventure. Some might say that an adventures is an expensive, childish way to avoid reality. This is partly true. But who cares?

The reality of adulthood is hard. There are no teachers stroking your ego with A's, there are no parents making sure you're doing fun and challenging activities every afternoon. So it is no surprise that putting off adulthood looks appealing. In fact, taking an adventure to see how other people do their lives is a good first step into adulthood because there is no better way to choose your life than to see how other people live.

There are some great things you can accomplish while you're adventuring:

You can use an adventure as a way out of a bad job. It's very hard to quit a job when you have nothing else lined up. But it's very hard to line up a new job while you're working at your current job. So a good way to ease yourself out of your job is to go on an adventure. You can tell yourself that you must quit now — now is the time for adventure.

You can sort out personal problems. A lot of career issues are actually personal issues. Do I want to be a doctor or do I want to please my parents? Do I want to settle down or do I feel pressure from my boyfriend? These are issues that dictate your career choices, but cannot be solved by changing jobs or rewriting your resume. Putting yourself in a new situation, away from the outside influencers you are used to — is will help you get a more clear perspective.

You can learn what you don't want. When I worked on a family chicken farm in rural France, one day, when we spent three hours looking for mushrooms in the forest, I said, “Why do we have to keep looking? It's taking so long and it's only mushrooms. Let's go home.” And the father said, “But how will we have wild mushrooms for salad?” I couldn't believe it. I wanted to have my mom buy some at the grocery store and send them via airmail. This is when I knew that although living close to the land looks appealing from the outside, but to me it felt monotonous and intellectually dissatisfying.

There are a few ways to get the money to travel. The most obvious is that you should alter your lifestyle And prolific travel blogger Ali Watters has a few suggestions: Don't get a car or a mortgage unless you absolutely need one Give up smoking or expensive trips to coffee shops — it wastes money each day. Stay away from material possessions. Before each purchase ask yourself what you'll do with it while you're traveling.

Ali also recommends that you go somewhere cheap; a month in Europe will cost you three times as much as a month in South East Asia.

If Ali's advice is too hard to swallow, you might try lining up a job that's an adventure. If you are under thirty years old you might be able to benefit from reciprocal work agreements with the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand.

Adventure is a good choice for a lot of people. It will give you perspective on a career that's stuck, and if you don't even have a career, there's little difference between a good entry level job and an adventure. Both are about learning, trying new things, and making sure you don't starve. So when you are looking at your job choices, put travel right up there on top with everything else. It's good for your resume and good for your life.

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Is grad school right for you?

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Whether you're thinking of a top-tier MBA or a PhD in anthropology, there is a right way and a wrong way to approach graduate school. You need to understand your dreams, and what is required to achieve them. Also, you need to understand the marketplace, and what it values.

If you dream of climbing ladders in the Fortune 500, get an MBA. The degree a VIP ticket to corporate life and a prerequisite for the top ranks. And if you have the luck of being in your 20s, don't wait, get the degree now, when it can get you a better starting job after you graduate. If you've already made headway in your career, you'll still need that MBA, but when you're older it's more like a career lubricant than a jump start: The degree has little impact on where you are now, but prevents you from getting stuck later.

Think twice before cashing in your chips for less respected school. The top five or ten business schools have a much, much higher value in the business world than all the other business schools. If you attend the third tier school, do it at night because the cost to your checkbook and your career growth while you're in school do not outweigh the benefits of the degree you'll earn.

For some people, though, graduate school is not so much a way to fulfill a dream as a way to put off finding one. Thomas Benton, a pseudonym for an assistant professor who writes a column for the Chronicle of Higher Education, blames much of the flight to graduate school on grade inflation and fragile egos: “Humanities majors are used praised from professors. Many recent grads return to school when they discover that not everyone thinks they are as great as their humanities teachers did. Humanities don't have the objective standards of business. Going back to grad school allows people to reestablish their ego. But it is short lived because they have to face the same market when they get out.”

So be honest with yourself. If you're going back to school because you're nostalgic for the days when you could get a good grade and a pat on the back. If you're looking for grad school to give you breathing room from the realities of adult life, you probably need a social worker more than you need another degree.

Besides, breathing time in grad school only delays future feelings of suffocation. For example, MFA programs do not make you more creative, they make you more qualified to teach. And the academic job market is a nightmare. One out of five people who enter English literature PhD programs will get a job in that field. The rest will find themselves back at square one, waiting tables, albeit with improved literary banter, and looking for a career.

Lost humanities students with an eye for cash and stability often enter law school because other professional schools require too much math or science. Yet the land of lost lawyers is full, too, which confirms that if you don't have a passion for what you are going to learn in graduate school, you shouldn't go.

If you still think you might be best off at grad school, then here's a checklist of things you should do before you apply:

1. Try other jobs first. The people who do best in graduate school are those who don't use it to escape their terrible job life. So find decent alternatives to going back to school, and if you still want to go back to school then you should.

2. Determine if an advanced degree is necessary. Talk to people who are where you want to be in five years to ten years. If those people got there without a degree, then you probably can, too.

3. Take the passion test. Are you reading about your proposed graduate topic now, before you are in school? If you're not passionate enough about the subject matter to read about it on your own, then you should find something to pursue that excites you more.

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