Every Man is a Universe.

To set the stage for this piece - to help get you into an exploratory state of mind, I want to ask that you take a few minutes and watch this video. I love to begin talks and career workshops with this quick video. I've found it is a powerful, quick piece of media that helps lay the foundations for this discussion. It does a great visual job of showing what I mean when I say every man is a universe.

We readily accept how vast the universe is. That there are hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy. Beyond that, there are hundreds of billions of galaxies in the universe. And we know that we live on a very, very small planet in a seemingly infinite universe. To quote Carl Sagan, "Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark." We can easily find ourselves fascinated with the vastness of the universe around us (and rightfully so) and yet, at the same time, we are often painfully unaware of the depths of our own internal universe. I am convinced that just as expansive and vast as the universe is beyond us, our own makeup has created each of us equally complex and vast as beings. (See why the video helps?) Between our emotions, our spirit, our souls, desires, our motivations, our thoughts paired with our biology including our organs, cells, body, and brain - we are massively complex beings with countless operations all coexisting, all working together to run this biological machine that is "us". Just as we will likely never explore the entirety of our external universe, I don't know that one lifetime is enough to ever completely map out the intricacies of our own existence. This is made even more daunting of a task by the fact that we are a moving target - constantly learning, growing, and changing. So while the work of internal mapping may never be able to be completed, I still find wisdom from Socrates who said that "an unexamined life is not worth living."

You might wondering, "...wait. What does Socrates, the vastness of the universe, and my complexity as a biological being have to do with my career?" The answer: A lot. Maybe even everything.

One of the things I spend a lot of time doing is talking with people about their career. And many times, even for long established professionals, our conversations consist of elements of trying to figure out what's next. Yes, even established professionals, from time to time, find themselves at a crossroads in their career with multiple - often times competing - responsibilities and desires that need to be considered and navigated. (I wont' give any examples because I've learned everyone is truly unique in this conversation, especially the further along we get in life, the more our life becomes unlike anyone else's. There's just something about the passing time that molds each of us into something ever more unique. It differentiates each of us. And there is a point to where an individual is so different with respects to even their peers, that I've learned, even the best of advice can't be equally wise for both of them, because their situations are so different. Another interesting thing I've learned is that just because advice is good advice, it doesn't make it relevant or timely to your situation. Just because it's good advice, doesn't mean it's relevant for you or true for you in that given moment. It's not evergreen. Which is why deeply mapping yourself, knowing yourself, is so important. And also why it must be an ongoing process. It will help you to discern what good advice applies to you, and when it may be timely and relevant and when it is not. Only YOU can ever really know this. So you have to learn how to perform the internal work to be able to properly discern when the time comes.)

There's so much more that could be said about this, but for the sake of brevity, I'll begin to wrap it up because the process of self-discovery, while inexhaustible as the vastness of the universe, is really quite simple to begin. Write. And write a lot. Writing is the most powerful tool for gaining clarity. While reading and/or listening to books or lectures is at times more accessible in a hectic life, taking the time to write will yield results that simply reading and/or listening just can't. “Writing is thinking.?To write well is to think clearly. That's why it's so hard." - David McCullough

But the good news is, in order to start you don't have to write well. You're not writing for an audience. This is for you. Start a document on your laptop. Grab a notebook at Wal-Mart for a couple of bucks and keep it tucked away somewhere. Find out which medium is preferred for you, and just do it. (I do both. My house is littered with notebooks containing the notes from the voyages undertaken to explore my own internal universe. With more to come.)

If you don't know where to start, there is plenty of advice out there about how to get started writing. But as we've learned about advice, you'll need to filter through a lot of it to find the bit that's relevant to you. So the most broadly applicable advice I can give here is this: just get started. Just start writing. And whatever comes out - especially if this is a practice you don't have experience in - is perfect. You'll get better at being intentional with it and guiding your thoughts the more you engage in it. But don't be afraid to start. And realize that it's going to be bad. Like Hemmingway said about writing, "The first draft of anything is $h*t." (That was Hemmingway, not me.) So start writing. Shoot for a couple of times a week if you can, but at least once a week. And be honest. Don't try to guide it too hard. Just write.

Why write? It's the vehicle for external exploration and mapping. Because in order to make the best decisions with regards to your career and your life, you need to deeply understand yourself. Your motivations. Your fears. Your desires. Your weaknesses. Your strengths. Your faults. Your needs. Your family's needs. Everything. It's this knowledge that can help you navigate your career wisely through a lens other than salary. We all know money is important, but it's not the most important. There have even been studies performed on financial earnings and the correlation to happiness and mental well-being. Interestingly enough the studies showed that after your basic financial needs are met (around $70K in the US, but I would argue even lower in many places that are not major metros) the impact of your salary range doesn't affect your quality of life and mental well-being. What will continue to impact your well-being however, is your ability to navigate your own (at times competing) desires, needs, and drivers within your career and life decisions. Making decisions only about the salary is a short-sighted path that leads to misery in the long run. To help yourself mitigate unnecessary stresses and misery (and I mean unnecessary, as there is no such thing as a pain free existence in life. Loved ones die, for example. Things will always happen outside of our control.) learn to write. And the best way to learn is just get started.