Is Your Career Soul Mate Out There?
Maybe. But You'll Have to Make Your Own Situationship.
Humans are notoriously bad at predicting their own happiness. But is there such a thing as finding your One True Love in a job? Is there a way to find The One when it comes to your occupation?
Let’s start with a story about sensuous oils
Remember back when essential oils got so big? One night at a gathering, Sally (her real name) told everybody she’d been swept up in the lovely aromas and promised benefits of essential oils. She told everybody that she was considering leaving her childcare career to open a shop.
Just about everybody was happy for her, except a guy named Kevin who chimed in that leaving her career to start a shop sounded like a terrible idea. What? Everybody else in the room was thinking, Just let Sally dream! If this is what she wants she should go for it! Right?
But Kevin had feelings on the subject. Actually, he had more than feelings; he had substantive questions from his own experience running a company. He started peppering her with queries:
Are you ok with working nights and weekends? (Sally has 2 young children)
How do you feel about doing inventory?
Do you enjoy managing people between the ages 15 and 25?
What is your plan for when essential oils falls out of popularity?
You can probably see where this is going. But Kevin knew Sally well enough to say that starting another business wouldn’t fit Sally and her family, and Sally decided not to leave her childcare company. (The friends still jokingly call Kevin “The Dream Killer.”)
We’re bad at predicting what will make us happy.
In his book Stumbling on Happiness, Harvard psychologist and researcher, Dr. Dan Gilbert, makes the case that we are often wrong about what will make us happy. We fancy that leaving our current job situation will bring us joy. We imagine that getting a promotion will fulfill us. We wish we could leave the boss and launch our own company. But Gilbert’s decades of research suggests our happiness schemes are very often wrong.
Why are we so bad at predicting what will make for future happiness? Gilbert suggests two failings we fall into:
We ignore the details. Much like Sally in the story above, we often notice one or two major pieces of our future story and completely ignore the others. When it comes to the details, as Sherlock Holmes might say, we see, but we do not observe.
We don’t know our future selves. Gilbert’s research finds people change more in 10 years than they think they will, at any age. People ages 18 and 28 reported a lot of change. But so did those between ages 58 and 68.
Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they're finished. The person you are right now is as transient, as fleeting and as temporary as all the people you've ever been. The one constant in our life is change. - Dr. Dan Gilbert
So, what do we make of the research that, when we’re considering romancing a new line of work, we tend to be detail-blind and prediction-poor?
Trash the Crystal Ball. Predicting the future just doesn’t work. Excruciating as it is, especially when you’re making major life decisions, we can’t clearly make out what’s coming next. Like Patty Griffin says, “I don't know nothing except change will come.”
Pursue Surrogate Stories. Gilbert suggests finding people who are already doing the things you want to do and asking them for their honest experience. This will give you a better understanding of the unknown you’re thinking of walking into. Other people’s stories, the research suggests, offer good indicators of how the situation will feel for you, too.
Accept Uncertainty. It’s all too human, as communication theorist Chuck Berger would say, to try to eliminate uncertainty. But not knowing can be livable, too. Is that 9 AM going to suck? Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe your boss will be in a good mood and someone will bring bagels. Don’t lose possible zen trying to get impossible certainty.
Embrace Impermanence. We’re all going to make choices that don’t work out the way we thought. But you’ll have other choices come along. Besides, even getting to make a choice is a kind of privilege not everybody on the planet gets to make. (Seth Godin has a good story about how his own privilege kept him from recognizing this.)
Look, don’t let me deter you from a lateral move from company to company. You might just find a new work culture that’s better for you. But all the same, you should get used to the changeableness of choices and their consequences.
So, what’s the mode switch for this week?
Try changing how you talk about jobs. Sometimes, you have to experiment with a few metaphors before you find one that works, but here’s the crazy thing about language. New language gives you new names, and new names help you see new things. We tend to use romantic metaphors to talk about work. (The Mode/Switch has discussed people’s love affair with work in this issue and this one, too). But that language disables us from seeing other aspects of our jobs besides passion and commitment and fulfillment. (Which are in sometimes short supply in the gig economy.) Why not try instead the language of pilgrimage or maroonment or craft or friendship, using sentences like:
This job’s a quest. Not sure where it’s taking me, but I’m gonna see it through.
I wonder who else is working on this island? Better start poking around.
Nobody does this with the skill I do. Pretty proud of that, actually.
My job’s being an absolute jerk to me right now, but I’m trying to befriend it.
Each of those words evokes a challenging story with invigorating realities. Each word also offers a fresh vision for the career you have as well as the one you’re still crafting. And as they say in The Good Place, “If soul mates do exist, they’re not found. They’re made.”
Thanks for reading! So great to have so many of you joining the Mode/Switch this week! I’m deeply grateful to collaborating writer, Andrea Munday, for getting me started on this piece during a week when I was drowning in research and book-writing. - craig