The Lost Spark: Romanticizing Finding a Career
You’re looking for true love.
Who isn’t?
Or maybe you’ve found it already.
The perfect match. Your soulmate. The one.
Lucky you.
But this isn’t about true love, soulmates, or magical sparks that erupt overhead the first time you kiss the one.
No, this is about a different kind of romantic relationship, but just as important. It’s about finding a career you love waking up for.
For most of us, a typical career will take up somewhere between 20% and 60% of your meaningful adult time.1
Romanticizing Passion
When it comes to romantic relationships, psychologist Renae Franiuk found that people have either a soulmate mindset, the belief that relationship satisfaction comes from finding the right person; or a work-it-out mindset, the belief that relationship success derives from putting in effort.
Logan Ury. How to Not Die Alone
Most of us have been conditioned to believe that soulmates exist—and if you’re not a true believer, you certainly wouldn’t mind meeting your partner while walking down the street and accidentally colliding with someone, spilling coffee on your shirt then looking up to find yourself staring into the eyes of Mr. or Ms. Right as the anger washes from your face.
What if the same is true for finding your passion in life: your perfect career?
Mindset Matters
Your thoughts and beliefs affect your attitudes and expectations, which in turn shape the context for your experience.
If you are in the work-it-out camp, chances are you’ve found a career that is good enough and you 1) Enjoy it just enough to do it, but it’s not your passion, 2) Hate every day of it, but do it because it pays the bills and you’re too afraid to try something else, or 3) Worked at it to make it your passion.
Either way, good for you.
But maybe your soul is calling for something more. Maybe it’s yearning for a career change because you know fulfillment is out there somewhere, waiting for you.
What if a soulmate career does exist?
Perhaps there is some magical spark you feel when you suddenly start doing what was always meant for you. That you’ll “just know.”
Maybe for Some, But Probably Not for You
The suckiest part about our search for our soulmate career is that, for some, it is a magical spark.
These people announce to the world, in no uncertain terms, that they are going to build the world’s largest company that designs stylish leggings for pets. And gosh darn it, they actually do it.
Maybe it happened in childhood when they answered the ridiculous question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” And then followed the path. Or maybe they had an epiphany in University besides the realization that doing keg stands every night is probably bad for their brain. Perhaps it was somewhere deep in the back of their cloudy, pubescent brain waiting for them to grow up.
Some people “just know.”
For the rest of us non-legging-making folks, we are left to feel like we missed something along the way. Hey, did any of you guys see that letter I was waiting for to see what I should be doing every Monday to Friday, for the majority of my adult life? No? Ahhh, okay, just thought I’d ask.
And if you believe that a soulmate career exists, then you’ll expect to find it hidden just inside that next book you read, course you take, or TikTok video you watch. But, you’ll be left standing there more lost and confused than before because that’s not where you’ll find it.
You’ve been led to believe that finding your passion hits you one day like a bolt of lightning—that it is something you “find” inside yourself.
Unfortunately, life is a cruel lover, and finding a career you love is trickier than it appears.
Miswanting Your Career
You’re talented. You have valuable work experience. You’re career cultured.
But you’re still not feeling fulfilled.
Why?
Because all of the information and advice (including some of mine) will tell you to self-reflect—to dig deep into your subconscious and uncover your deepest yearnings to reveal your ultimate passion in life.
Yeah, right. Thanks.
The reality is, you don’t even know what you want. You think you do, but research has shown that we consistently Miswant. We think we know what we want, we get it, and then we don’t really like it.2
Where Does Career Miswanting Come From?
Most of your beliefs about careers were instilled in you by your parents, your High School guidance counselor, Earl, or society. Yeah, that shit is outdated.
Other voices will never stop fiercely trying to live your life for you—you owe it to that little insecure character in the very center of your consciousness to get this right.
Tim Urban
But, let’s say you are one of the lucky few who do manage to pull out their dusty passion that was hidden deep in the basement of their subconscious mind, and at 37 years old, you discover that your true lifelong dream is to be a nutritionist, not a desk-laden lawyer. Then what?
There you are, ready to start your new career. You’ve thought about it and think you want it, but how do you really know that it’s right for you?
The truth is, you don’t. Maybe it is what you truly want. Or maybe, it came from parents, friends, or your weird Uncle Winston who was always telling you, “You should be a nutritionist. You’d be good at it.”
Your options are limited because, well, you’ve never been a nutritionist before. You can invest the next few years of your free time studying to become a nutritionist, start your own business, or work for someone else because that’s how you thrive.
This is where The Panic Monster3 comes out because it’s not easy to do any of those things, especially if you only think being a nutritionist is the right career for you.
The Career-Causing Identity Crisis
Conventional wisdom has many of us believing that the career we choose in life is the one we will have for the rest of our lives. For those people still trying to figure out who they are and who they want to be decades from now—which is most sane people—they are left with an identity crisis. Everywhere they turn, the stakes are so high to make the right career choice that they become paralyzed by choice. And with limited options to test their passions in reality, they lose their courage to make a career change. Even if they know deep down that their soul is waiting.
People who are multi-faceted, curious, mid-career people, feel too old to commit decades to a new path that they only think they will like.
Tim Urban’s Career Question
Tim Urban has an amazing article about How to Pick a Career (That Actually Fits You). In it, he offers up a guiding question you could use when deciding whether or not a career path is right for you:
With enough time, could you get good enough at this game to potentially reach whatever your definition of success is in that career?
The problem with the question is 1) You can get good at pretty much anything with enough time, effort, and determination, and 2) It still involves you thinking about which career is right for you and not actually Trying It On.
That leaves people to their imaginations to concoct a solution to a very complex problem—which career is right for them—all in their mind.
Unless you are a 20-year-old motivated college student, get extremely lucky and land beginner roles with no experience, or do your own thing, you are left guessing. If you are transitioning careers later in life, and not exactly sure what it is you’d like to pursue, because yeah, it’s been two decades since your first career, and you’re ready to move on, you’re left asking one question:
How do I find my passion?
The Science Laboratory…for Careers
With new jobs that didn’t even exist six months ago popping up all over the place, it’s impossible to think your way to the perfect career.
The world is changing too quickly for conventional wisdom to keep up. What it means to be an entrepreneur, a writer, a politician, and even a doctor or lawyer, isn’t the same as it was just a decade ago.
Today’s career landscape is a giant, impossibly complex, ever-changing science lab. Today’s people are impossibly complex, ever-changing scientists. If we are scientists who learn by conducting a long series of various science experiments and society is a science lab, things should work in unison.
But, unfortunately, today’s scientists don’t have access to the lab.
Instead of coming up with a solution, we are telling people to work it out, create their passion, or “Stick with it and passion will eventually come.”
People have argued that passion emerges over time, as you improve. I call bullshit.
With countless career options in the world, logically, and statistically, you should be able to spend 20-60% of your waking life doing what you actually enjoy doing.
So not only do you not know what you want, but also there are countless career paths you could take to realize your passion. But, with no way of knowing if you’ll like it besides imagining in your mind if your current passions will align with a Happily Ever After at Work, you feel hopeless.
Try It On Principle: The Date A Company Solution
The only way to know for sure is to try.
You’ve heard it. I’ve heard it. It’s great advice.
If a friend were toiling over what kind of person she wants to marry but never went out with anyone, you’d tell her, “You can’t figure this out on your couch—you’ve gotta start going on dates, and that’ll teach you what you want in a partner.” If that friend then went on a solid first date and returned home to toil for hours about whether or not this new person was The One, you’d again have to correct her. You’d say, “There’s no way you can know that from just one date! You have to get some experience dating this person to learn what you need to learn to make that decision.” We can all agree that this hypothetical friend is pretty nuts and is lacking a fundamental understanding of how you find a happy relationship.
Tim Urban
Yet, when it comes to careers, there is zero opportunity to sleep around a little and test out different careers.
The Try It On Principle lets us try on certain careers the same way we do when dating to see what fits and what doesn’t, what’s cozy and what’s not, or which ones are just flat-out a bad fit and we were only attracted to the superfluous.
Dating your career in your 30’s, 40’s, or even 50’s isn’t possible. But it should be—finding your career should be treated like dating because, yes, it’s that important.
People get divorced all the time. But, to leave your current career and start dating jobs again is more difficult than ever.
The current hiring and interviewing process is a relic of the past and needs a facelift.
Like scientists, people need enough hands-on experience to figure out if their passion hypotheses are accurate or not.
What Does AI Have to Say About It?
Absolutely, the “Date a Company” app could be a major disruptor in the hiring and recruitment industry!
ChatGPT
If AI says it’s a good idea then it must be good, right?
I think so.
So, here’s a call for a new, innovative way to find your passion—your soulmate career. It’s a call for businesses to open their doors to the science lab so today’s scientists can come in and test their best guesses to see if their passions really do fit with what they expected the career to be. It’s a vision of a Career Laboratory where we don’t have to “imagine,” “estimate,” or “think about” how much we might like a career. Instead, we can go Try It On.
(And yes, businesses would benefit as well. But that’s for a different post.)
Live to Not Regret
One of the top regrets of people at the end of their lives is, “I wish I had quit earlier.”4 A common response given by elderly people when asked what advice they have for the younger generation is, “Don’t stay in a job you dislike.“5
Getting your career right—so it aligns with your passions and you actually enjoy what you are doing—is worth getting right.
- https://waitbutwhy.com/2018/04/picking-career.html ↩︎
- https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2000-07085-007 ↩︎
- https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/10/why-procrastinators-procrastinate.html ↩︎
- https://bakadesuyo.com/2012/12/top-career-regrets/ ↩︎
- https://bakadesuyo.com/2013/04/most-important-life-lesson/ ↩︎
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