Happily Ever Employed: A 10 Question Exercise for a Comprehensive Life Plan

         "What am I going to do with my life!?" Nothing like a career transition to launch us into existential crisis. Maybe it doesn’t have to be quite so dramatic. Those of us adept at problem solving can break a task down into parts, planning our next steps piece by piece and hopefully staying calm as we carry on.

         I started my process by thinking about the stories that excite me and what they have in common. I remembered being moved by people like Martin Luther King, Jr., Darryl Davis, Deeyah Khan, and other people fighting for civil rights against hate. In opposition of slavery, Henry David Thoreau spent the night in jail before writing "Civil Disobedience". My similarity is that when I'm moved to make a change in the world, I go at it. I'm a little rebellious. I'm a purpose-driven leader and an innovative problem solver.

         I also asked my family and friends how they saw me. When it comes to knowing who we are, we can only do so much to see ourselves objectively. I sought the opinion of others to learn what I was putting out there that maybe I wasn't seeing. Much to my delight, without any prompting, the two most common answers I received were leadership and problem solving!

         Now, I had a blueprint of me in hand. I liked the descriptions of business development manager, management consultant, and product manager, but reading job responsibilities and researching companies only tells us what’s available. Clearly knowing what we want is necessary to match ourselves to what’s available. But all I had were my goals, values and an inkling of what I wanted.

         To complete my job search planning, I wrote out and answered strategic questions to provide me the details of what I wanted and, perhaps more importantly, what I did NOT want.

The Exercise

         To prepare for your life’s transitions, consider all the information you collected on yourself so far, especially thinking about your values, goals, purpose, and story. Before doing the exercise, you should think hard about the stories and role models that excite you and have a strong - albeit broad - idea of what you want in life.

         Using that information, answer the 10 questions below. The questions are ordered so that answers to earlier questions help answer later questions. For example, if reaching your ideal goal means not traveling for work so you can spend more time with your family, you should answer the career positions question with roles without travel requirements.

         Feel free to expand on this list. You may want to add questions or split some up to emphasize aspects that are important to you. You could also combine some to answer important factors in tandem. The important thing is to get what you need out of the exercise to help you with the next step in your career.

         Expanding your answers along some parameters may also be helpful. For example, I distinguished the following in mine: lofty goals that are idealistic but get me excited; lower limits or what is acceptable, if for some reason, I can’t reach my ideal (i.e., What is enough to get me by in life?); and what do I NOT want, especially if I’ll be pressured to accept it (i.e., I reframed the question to its negative.).

         To plan for the dynamics of your career, you can add transition timepoints. Maybe you’re graduating in a couple years. What you want now will likely change when you transition. I started by answering each question for now and the immediate future. Since I’m making such a big transition, I added what I might need to modify within 1 year after getting hired. For example, I predicted I’ll want to move closer to where I work to reduce my commute. Finally, I went back to the top and answered the questions again for each of the following: in 5 years, 10 years, and 15+ years.

         As you give answers, you may want to consider how goals in each of them rank in importance and certainty. Perhaps having a flexible schedule and plenty of vacation time is more important to you than the position you occupy in the company. Ordering these priorities now may help you when deciding between multiple job offers. If you feel uncertain about any of your answers, you could research these areas further. Moreover, if you find that you don’t feel confident answering something that you also think is valuable, you might be even more motivated to study up before continuing.

         Not going into industry? Try to re-tool the questions that are industry-oriented to reflect the domain in which you’ll work. Government agencies and academic institutions are similar in that they’re also organizations.

The 10 Questions

1. What lifestyle do you want?

         How healthy physically and mentally do you want to be? Think about your physical fitness and how much you want to exercise. How do you want to exercise? How much sleep and free time do you want? What kind of foods do you want to eat? How will you care for yourself to maintain mental health?

         What do you want for relationships? Do you want intimate partners? Do you want a family? How much emotional or sexual intimacy do you want with your partners? What do you need to maintain emotional health and be romantic? What do you need to do to be sexually attractive? Do you want children? How will you care for children, if you have them? Will you include pets in your family? How would you care for pets, if you include them?

         What kind of social circle do you want? How many friends do you want? How close will they be? How will you maintain a balance of a family and a social life?

         What kind of lifestyle do you want? Consider your financial security, type of home, kinds of vacations, discretionary spending, hobbies, volunteering, and social clubs. Do you want to be a millionaire and live in a mansion? Or are you a minimalist that prefers studio apartments and backpacking?

         Where do you want to live geographically? What kind of climate do you prefer? How will your beliefs fit that area’s culture? How developed of an infrastructure do you want? How big or small do you want the population to be?

 2. What do you want to do at work?

         What do you want to do technically? What kind of problems do you want to solve? Think about the technical skills you want to use. Do you prefer philosophical endeavors, lab research, data mining, business strategizing, market analysis, financial decision-making, or something else?

         What type of problems do you want to solve? Do you prefer working with people, data, ideas, or physical objects? What is your preferred field and how does it fit in the spectrums of human vs. technological or basic vs. applied?

         What types of day-to-day tasks do you want to do? Do you prefer writing, planning, managing, benchwork, networking/building relationships, teaching, mentoring, answering emails, returning calls, doing paperwork/filling out forms, or something else?

 3. How do you want to do your work?

         How many hours do you want to work? Per day? Per week?

         Do you want to work in an office, from home, or remotely? What frequency of an option to work at home/not at the office do you want?

         How far do you want to commute and how? How many hours will you have to travel from home to your work location and back? Will you commute by car, foot, train, bike, or something else?

         How much will you travel for work? How much time will you spend away from home? How much notice do you want to be given? Will you be okay only being notified a day in advance? Or will you want a week, month, or more?

         How flexible do you want the work schedule to be? Will you come and go as you please? Will your schedule be set by your boss? Or will you find some middle ground?

         How much vacation time do you want? When do you want to be able to take it? Do you want it all at once or can it be broken up? How much advance notice are you willing to give? Will your vacation time accumulate annually or expire?

         How much sick time do you want? Will you still be paid? Are you okay with being required to provide an excuse or doctor’s note?

 4. How much in salary do you want?

         While money may not be that important to you, it affects other aspects of lifestyle and long-term plans like when or if you can retire. Although we like to say money doesn’t buy happiness, recent studies have shown that salary impacts our happiness significantly as it increases up to about $70,000 annually. Nonetheless, if you’re doing what you love, you may find that happiness is optimized at rates lower than this average.

 5. What type of position do you want?

         In what department? What level (entry, middle, c-level)?

 6. What do you want for benefits?

         What health-related benefits do you want? Think about health and dental insurance. Some places have employee assistance plans that include 24/7 counseling services, nurse practitioner advisors, personal assistants, and more. If you want an employee assistance plan, what do you want it to include?

         What starting benefits do you want? Do you want relocation assistance or temporary transitional housing? Do you want a starting bonus? How much?

         What contingent compensation benefits do you want? Many companies offer stock options, stock grants, management bonuses, profit sharing, 401k, and more.

 7. What do you want the company’s strategy to be?

         What is their vision, mission, and goals? What problems do they solve? What need do they serve? Remember to consider how it will it change in the 5, 10, and 15+ year increments.

 8. What kind of culture do you want at the company where you work?

         What stories are told? What statements have top leaders made? How engaged are the employees? Examples of values companies typically prioritize include caring/trustworthiness/cooperation, purpose/altruism/idealism, learning/innovation/risk-taking, enjoyment/playfulness, results/rationality, authority/competitiveness, safety/risk-caution, order/social-norm-centric. It’s not that companies value one or more of these and not the others. Typically, companies highly value all of these, however, they will prioritize some over others.

         How do you want people in the company to communicate? Do you prefer to communicate by phone, email, text, or in-person?

         How do you want the company’s employees to dress? Do you prefer casual or formal attire?

         What, if any, subcultures exist?

         How do you want the company to engage its employees? What do you want the company to reward/punish? Think about the key performance indicators the company monitors. Are they incentivizing innovation and leadership? Or do they rely more on threats of restructuring and lay-offs?

         What do you want to be most important to the company? Besides general values, companies typically prioritize the following: customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction, product development, publications, the numbers, and more.

         How well do you want to fit in? How will what you value match what they value?

 9. What do you want in terms of other company details?

         Company strategy, structure, and culture break down into immense details. It’s up to you how fine-tuned you want to be in knowing what you want.

         What kind of company do you want to be working for/with? Do you prefer a for-profit or non-profit? Examples of types of companies include consumer discretionary, consumer staples, energy and utilities, financial and professional services, healthcare, industrials, and IT/telecom. In addition to their fields and strategies differing, each one is typified by variances in culture.

         How well is the company’s strategy aligned with its culture?

         Do you want to stay at the same company or will you move from one to another? Do you want to start your own company?

         How big do you want the company to be? How many employees? How much annual revenue/profit?

         How do you want the company to be with respect to mergers/acquisitions? Did it just merge with another company? How is that going? Are the cultures clashing?

         On a related note, is it in the middle of a hostile takeover by an investor or at risk for one? How will that impact strategy and culture?

         How do you want the company to help employees advance? Consider how it does its onboarding, on-site training, and continuing education credits. Will you have ample opportunities to grow? Present your work? Network? Collaborate?

         How well do you want the company to retain employees and how? Are people leaving after a year or staying until retirement? Something in between? What factors are influencing retention/attrition? What percentage of the employees are single, married, or divorced?

         What department do you want to dominate the company? Would you prefer the company be dominated by the R&D or marketing department?

10. What do you want the company to say about why the position they’re hiring you for is open?

         This question could summarize much of the company’s strategy and culture when you’re being hired. Was the person previously in this position fired because they couldn’t meet the high demands? Or was the person promoted because the company and its employees are growing?

         Martin Luther King, Jr. is one of my heroes because while shifting our culture toward something he believed in, he showed he knew how to motivate people through imagery. Research shows that having a strong vision of how to solve a problem increases your motivation to work towards your goals. Doing this exercise can provide powerfully motivating details to help you envision your future.

         After doing the exercise, I learned I don’t have much restricting me from spending all my waking hours doing something I love—if I’m being compensated adequately. I know what I love doing because I took the time to figure out who I am deep down and applied that knowledge to answering the questions in this exercise.

         I decided to target business development manager positions of mid-size biotech companies with neuroscience therapeutic areas. As I seek employment, my efforts will be more efficient. My applications will be more competitive because I can effectively communicate what I want. I’ll also know what my non-negotiables are and which offers to turn down. Most importantly, when I do land a job I love, it won’t be work because as the adage goes, “When you do what you love, you never work a day in your life.”