In previous posts I wrote about what kind of pacing might you want in your work life, and what kinds of problems you'd prefer solving. Today I'm writing about the why you might choose to do what you do - a crucial part when you're making decisions on pursuing a career or pivoting from one to another.
Funny enough, I struggled to find my own cause for years because it was actually right under my nose (!) when I was working in/near academia as manager. It wasn't until I worked in a very different domain until I started to notice what my own raison d'être was. I was working for a no-kill animal services agency which runs many initiatives, one of them being a cat sanctuary - a retirement home for hundreds of cats that are deemed "unadoptable" for various reasons and would have been euthanized in other jurisdictions (as a cat person, I'm head over heels for that). As much as I believe in no-kill animal care, that cause wasn't mine. I discovered my own cause only after coming back to academia and speaking to students (to me, they are bright minds who will do great things in the future) again: The way I can be most useful for society is to bring out the talent in other people and to connect said people so that they can collectively do great things out there. I went into servant leadership for that reason. It wasn't because I wanted to lead others - it was because I wanted to nurture (and then send out) leaders out into the wild so that they can make a positive impact on the world. And imagine if they did the same thing... the effect can be exponential. This notion pushes me to do better every day. Do you have a cause you live for? How did you discover it (or build/nurture it)? Was it intuitive or unexpected? Or - are you currently searching? Did your cause change over time?
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From what I've seen so far, when you go into a career it's usually about solving problems. So then if you know yourself in terms of what kinds of problems you like solving will help you figure out what kind of career you'd thrive in.
For example, I call myself a 'process optimizer'. The world is chaos, yet I still try to come up with ways to establish order (although rather Sisyphean). I thrive when there's processes where I can optimize through iteration:
Over the past several years, I learned that I may be a good firefighter (in the figurative sense) but it takes years off my life; can't do it for long. I can also build processes from scratch but it's not something I love doing because if the requirements are unclear, that will significantly reduce your success rate (<rant> people tend to misunderstand what "requirements" means. They jump to solutions which are not the requirements. </rant> It takes a LOT of patience and persistence to eke out those requirements, and I admit that I'm simply not patient enough). What problems do you like solving? I failed to write for the last few Saturdays because I had underestimated how much effort it takes to adjust to a new job (^__^;) Now that it has been over 1 month since I started, I can say that I have mostly adjusted.
One of the things I've been (re-)adjusting to is the speed in which things happen, and I am astounded by how different the pace of life is in an academic setting vs. a small not-for-profit-scaling-up setting. In academia (especially in large institutions), things happen very slowly - some things happen over the course of weeks, other things take years. When I used to work in academia (2 jobs ago, as someone who had been running and managing visual analytics workshops) I found this process painful, but there were some things about that slowness that I now appreciate being back in academia:
If you are a gamer, here's a question for you: what actions you like to do most in a video game? For example - if you were playing Mario, are you the kind of person who stomps on every enemy you can stomp on? (I do this all the time.) Or are you the kind of person who runs off every edge to see if there's a hidden secret? (My partner does this all the time.) Recently, I discovered something else I had been doing all the time in video games that I haven't thought about before (even after playing video games for decades): I pause and/or open the menu. I pause in City Skylines. I pause in Project Highrise. I pause in Stardew Valley. I pause in RimWorld. I pause in Two Point Hospital. What do I typically do when I pause? First, I breathe. Then, I plan. Where do I want my commercial zones in relation to my industrial and residential zones in my city? Where do I want to put my restaurants in a building so that I won't get complaints from other tenants? How do I want to arrange my farm plots and sprinklers so that my one scarecrow can protect all the crops? How do I arrange all the rooms so that my colonists don't get upset because they "ate without a table"? Which nurses should I put in the different treatment rooms to maximize the treatment success rate?
I don't like it when I can't pause when I'm in a multiplayer game. I really don't like timed battles. I especially panic in those situations when you need to escape from a castle that's going to burn down in 3 minutes or something and the timer is ticking and you open the menu to pause but you notice that THE TIMER IS STILL TICKING. It dawned on me that I've been "racing against the timer" for the past couple years (e.g. a surprise deadline in 3 hours on something I have not worked on or even seen before), and that was one of the reasons why I was not feeling well overall. Of course I can't pause real life like the way I can pause in a video game, but I noticed that following my wanting-to-pause-and-plan instinct to be healthy for me. Do you like pausing? Or do you prefer real-time? For the longest time, I was terrified of uncertainty. (Maybe I still am.) So I ran away from it. I didn't even want to look at it from the corner of my eye. I was so afraid of uncertainty and taking responsibility for my own choices that I willingly relinquished my power to choose; I planted myself on rails and just went wherever the rails took me. And when opportunities presented themselves, I took them all because what if I said no? Then what would I be doing instead? Consequentially, I took on whatever came my direction. My mind became really cluttered, and eventually I started to suffocate. I was overwhelmed to the point where it was damaging myself and my relationship with my loved ones - there was a time when I dreaded waking up in the morning. There were nights when I hoped I can fall asleep and never wake up. Earlier this year, I started exercising that choice "muscle" because it had atrophied so much over the years (and led to somewhat alarming consequences). I joined a choir. I became a board member. I gave notice to my current employer. That was when this phone conversation happened: "You're leaving?" "Yeah." "Where are you going?" "I don't know yet." That's right, I don't know yet. For the first time in my life, not knowing what I was going to do in the future (yes, uncertainty) felt FANTASTIC. I always had the impression that the what-am-I-gonna-do uncertainty was a void - a cold, dark, scary place. But when I had that phone call I realized that I didn't see the uncertainty as a void anymore. It looked more like this: It turns out that I now do know where I'm heading but I will treasure that feeling, that sense of mental space that I felt when I said I don't know yet.
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AuthorI'm Candice and I doodle with the intensity of the doomguy. Categories
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