The Cheat Code to Finding Your Life's Task

The last Win Big Wednesday was all about the practice of "memento mori," how the daily remembrance of death can bring us an ultimate sense of purpose. Now, I want to help you focus in on that purpose as it relates to your work life. The work you were meant to do. Let's acknowledge a cold hard reality first, the average lifespan in the United States is 78 years old. If we go by the standard "prime working years" of 25-54, that's over a third of your life. So, how do we maximize that time?

Conventional wisdom is that it takes years of experimentation to find the right kind of career, if you find it at all. The best way to find something you like and are good at is by wearing a lot of different hats and going through a significant amount of failures and underwhelming positions first. But again we don't have that much time. Could there be a way to expedite the process? I say possibly yes, and I'm going to share it with you today. It may not work for you as it has for me, but it can't hurt for you to try. First, let me share a bit about how I've navigated my path so far.

Throughout my youth, there were a host of different career paths that I had in mind. At the time, they all seemed reasonable to me. First, I wanted to be a professional baseball player, then I flirted with the idea of being a SWAT team member (thanks M-rated video games), next up was being a journalist, and by the time I ended college, that idea in my head looked like being in sports marketing. That's a hell of a collection, and these were just some of the main ones. Suffice to say, none of these things came to fruition.

Although I could field a ground ball at an above average level in rec sports, it turns out that you need to be able to make contact at the plate more than 1 out of 10 times to make the high school team. It also happens that you need extensive physical toughness and mental fortitude along with policing/military/firearms training to be accepted into a SWAT team - none of which I had when thinking about college. Journalism seemed realistic initially, but whenever I wrote for the school newspaper, I didn't like chasing people down on deadline to ask questions that I often knew would get boring, cliche answers. There goes journalism. When it came to sports marketing, I had the skills, but my heart wasn't all the way in it - something essential when working irregular hours for low pay and facing a brutal climb to the executive level.

If your career journey from college to the present was anything like mine, it looks less like a highway and more like a crazy winding overpass. And I'm only 26. Now though, as a Program Manager who facilitates workshops and coaches formerly incarcerated individuals on developing business skills, I am in the kind of position that feels like it was designed for me. For the first time, I get out of bed with a constant hunger to work and see what the day has in store. There are challenging days, but it's never a drag. I imagine this goes back to a good combination of a skills, culture and passion fit.

It'd be accurate to say that I got to this place through lots of experimentation. There were many internships and jobs before this point. This is the most tried and true way for anyone to go about it. However, the more I think about it, it wasn't just experimentation. It was me coming full-circle back to the same role-playing that I did as a child.

When I was a kid, my parents would tell me that there were certain ways that I stood out from the crowd. In elementary school, when we'd sing the class song at assemblies, my voice would be one of the loudest. When we'd host talent shows, going up to the front of the room to present seemed unnaturally easy for me. At home, I'd love to play teacher for any interested audience (usually of one) and act out different scenarios. I gravitated towards activities that made me speak in public and work a room. This was a differentiator for me from other kids, who had their own specialties, but were either indifferent or shy in this area.

While I never had the ability for professional acting or singing or the interest in traditional teaching as a career path, I've leaned on similar skills as main features of my current job. Outside of the more administrative and planning work, I've spent hundreds of hours facilitating classes as part of the programming at the nonprofit I work at. It's easily one of my favorite parts of any role that I've ever had and I envision it as a major part of my long-term career. Because, aside from enjoying it, I think I'm pretty decent at it too. It's amazing to think about how my childhood foreshadowed what I'm doing now.

Consider what this might mean for your career. Do you feel unfulfilled in your current job or industry? Are you stuck in a place where your work is just something to desperately get through each week? If the answer is yes, you're not alone. There's often a lot of talk around finding your "calling" at work, but sadly, there's major disparity in who actually feels this between leaders/executives and managers/employees. According to a McKinsey & Company study, while two-thirds of non-executive employees said that work defines their purpose, only 15% are actually living that out their purpose on a daily basis. Additionally, Pew Research Center found that 48% of US workers either classify their work as "just a job to get them by" or "a steppingstone to a career."

It doesn't have to be this way. One of life's cheat codes is hiding in plain sight - think back on your childhood and ask your family what made you stand out. Find the behaviors that you were once drawn to and link that to soft or hard skills in a profession. A survey commissioned by The Genius of Play even found that 32% of US adults said that their childhood toys influenced their career path and 50% said the same about the activities they were a part of (sports, clubs, etc.). This may not be a cheat code that works every time with 100% success, but I bet it does a significant amount of the time.

To clarify, I don't believe pursuing a childhood "passion" is the best way to go. I'll unpack this more in a later newsletter, but I believe passion is not as valuable as skills. For me, as alluded to above, my passion was baseball. I loved it more than anything. But breaking into the kind of professional baseball that pays relatively well, requires 1%er level of talent along with tons of luck. That would never have worked for me. But later on I identified a skill that I was good at (public speaking), one that was unique to me, even if I didn't see acting/presenting/teaching as passions at the time. This key is that not everything that we like, we'll be good at, but often times the things we're good at are the things that we grow to like.

When we're young, the weight of the world has not yet struck us. We're not encumbered by other people's opinions of us. We're not worried about the practicality of what we want to make happen. Children just go and do things. Imagine if more of us still had traces of this within us. The race to a prosperous future may just be one jog of the memory away...