How did I end up in this Career?

Is my current career worth chasing? As I observe my colleagues and peers, It is wise to be appropriately pessimistic here. Unhappiness and indifference are the new normal everywhere I look. Nevertheless, I have encountered some professionals in this area that are of such primal, grinding mismatch, such deep-seated incompatibility, that one has to conclude that something else is at play beyond the normal disappointments and tensions of every long-term career: some people and their career simply shouldn’t be together.

How do these anomalies happen? With appalling ease and regularity. Getting into the wrong career is the single easiest and also costliest mistake any of us can make (and one which places an enormous burden on the society and the next generation). It is extraordinary and almost criminal that the issue of choosing a career intelligently is not more systematically addressed at a national and personal level, as road safety or smoking are.

It’s all the sadder because, in truth, the reasons why people make the wrong choices are easy to lay out and unsurprising in their structure. They tend to fall into some of the following basic categories.

1.    We haven’t figured ourselves out

When first selecting a career path, say information management, the requirements we come up with are coloured by a beautiful non-specific sentimental vagueness: we’ll say we want to find a job that pays well, fits well and that is fun.

It isn’t that such desires are wrong, they are just not remotely precise enough in their understanding of what information management is about, and in particular what is required to stand a chance of being successful.

The problem is that knowledge of our weaknesses is not at all easy to come by. It can take years and situations we have had no experience of. Before actively working in a career, we’re rarely involved in dynamics that properly hold up a mirror to our limitations. Whenever more difficult situations threaten to reveal the ‘difficult’ side of our natures, we tend to blame the employment – and look for a way to quit.

With such a poor level of understanding of our characters, no wonder we aren’t in any position to know whether or not we shall be successful.

2.    We don’t understand other professionals

This problem is compounded because others are stuck at the same low level of self-knowledge as we are. However well-meaning they might be, they too are in no position to grasp, let alone inform us, of what is wrong.

Naturally, we make a stab at trying to know them. We go to workshops, attend conferences, visit their families, perhaps the place they first went to school. We follow them on Facebook, twitter etc. and we meet their friends. All this contributes to a sense we’ve done our homework. But it’s like a novice pilot assuming they can fly after sending a paper plane successfully around the room.

It is the wiser professionals that go deeper to understand the value of humanity and the information that requires being managed. We need to know the intimate motivations of the psyche of information managers. We need to know their attitudes to, or stance on, authority, history, technology, leadership, values, money, competition, and a hundred things besides. This knowledge won’t be available via a standard chat.

3.    We aren’t used to being happy

We believe we that there is some happiness in seeking a career, but it’s not quite as simple. What at times it seems we seek is familiarity – which may well complicate any plans we might have for happiness.

We recreate in our career environments some of the feelings we knew in childhood. It was as children that we first came to know and understand what working meant. But unfortunately, the lessons we picked up may not have been straightforward. The work we knew as children may have come entwined with other, less pleasant dynamics: being controlled, feeling humiliated, being abandoned, never communicating, in short: suffering.

As adults, we may then reject certain career options, not because they are wrong, but precisely because they are too well-balanced and structured, and this rightness feels unfamiliar and alien, almost oppressive. We head instead to options that our unconscious is drawn to, not because they will please us, but because they will frustrate us in familiar ways.

We choose the wrong career because the right ones feel wrong – undeserved; because we have no experience of success, because we don’t ultimately associate working with feeling satisfied and happy.

4.    Being jobless is not cool

One is never in a good frame of mind to choose a career rationally when remaining jobless is unbearable. We have to be utterly at peace with the prospect of some months of searching to have any chance of landing our dream career. Or we’ll love no longer being jobless rather more than we love the career that spared us being so.

5.    Instinct has too much prestige

Back in the olden days, choosing a career was a rational business; all to do with matching your skills with the business. It appeared cold, ruthless and disconnected from the happiness of the protagonists. We are still traumatised by this.

What replaced the career of reason was the career of instinct, the emotional career. It dictated that how one felt about a profession should be the only guide to career. If one felt cool, that was enough. No more questions asked. Feeling was triumphant. Employers could only applaud the feeling’s arrival, respecting it as one might the visitation of a divine spirit. Parents might be aghast, but they had to suppose that only the kid could ever know. We have for three hundred years been in collective reaction against thousands of years of very unhelpful interference based on prejudice, snobbery and lack of imagination.

So pedantic and cautious was the old career that one of the features of the career of feeling is its belief that one shouldn’t think too much about why one is choosing a profession. To analyse the decision feels un-cool. To write out charts of pros and cons seems absurd and cold. The most emotive thing one can do is just to choose quickly and suddenly, perhaps after only a few weeks, in a rush of enthusiasm – without any chance to do the horrible ‘reasoning’ that guaranteed misery to people for thousands of years previously.

6.    We don’t go to Career Schools

The time has come for a third kind of career. The career of emotions. One where one doesn’t choose a job for money or for ‘the feeling’ alone, but only when ‘the feeling’ has been properly submitted to examination and brought under the aegis of a mature awareness of one’s own and the other’s psychology.

Presently, we choose careers without any information. We almost never read books specifically on the area, we never spend more than a short time in the field, we don’t rigorously interrogate other professional or speak with any sincerity to those that exited. We go into it without any insightful reasons as to what is required to succeed in the career.

In the age of the marriage of reason, one might have considered the following criteria when marrying:

7.    We want to freeze happiness

We have a desperate and fateful urge to try to make great things permanent. We want to own the car we like; we want to live in the country we enjoyed as a tourist. And we want to work in the same place that we enjoyed as a visitor.

We imagine that a career is a guarantor of the happiness we’re enjoying while working. It will make permanent what might otherwise be fleeting. It will help us to bottle our joy – the joy we felt when the thought of joining the firm or profession. We joined to make this feeling permanent.

Unfortunately, there is no necessary causal connection between your career and this sort of feeling. The feeling was produced by your supervisor, a time of day, a lack of work, an excitement at an interview dinner, none of which success increases or guarantees.

Your career doesn’t freeze the moment at all. The peaks of life tend to be brief. Happiness doesn’t come in year-long blocks. With the Impressionists to guide us, we should be ready to appreciate isolated moments of everyday paradise whenever they come our way, without making the mistake of thinking them permanent.

8.    We believe we are special

The statistics are not encouraging. Everyone has before them plenty of examples of terrible jobs, career options etc. They’ve seen their friends go for it and come unstuck. They know perfectly well that – in general – career journeys face immense challenges. And yet we do not easily apply this insight to our case. Without specifically formulating it, we assume that this is a rule that applies to other people.

That’s because a raw statistical chance of seven in ten of failing in their careers seems wholly acceptable, given that – when one is on a career and working – one feels one has already beaten far more extraordinary odds. The fella feels like around one in a million.

We silently exclude ourselves from the generalisation. We’re not to be blamed for this. But we could benefit from being encouraged to see ourselves as exposed to the general fate.

9.    We want to stop thinking about looking for work again

Before we get hooked on a career path, we are likely to have had many years of turbulence in our search and work-life. We have tried to network in areas and with people who didn’t like us, we’ve joined and resigned from several jobs, we’ve gone out for endless conferences, in the hope of gaining valuable contacts, and known excitement and bitter disappointments.

No wonder if, at a certain point, we have enough of all that. Part of the reason we feel like this is it; is to interrupt the all-consuming grip that our nomadic career paths have taken. We are exhausted by the melodramas and thrills that go nowhere. We are restless for other challenges. We hope that this current career path can conclusively end life’s painful rule over our lives.

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It can’t and won’t: there is as much doubt, hope, fear, rejection and betrayal in career chasing as there is in other areas of life. It’s only from the outside that a career looks peaceful, uneventful and nicely boring. So get encouraged and know that you are not alone! Make do with what your hands have found. Aspire to give back to humanity wherever you are the gifts and skills that only you can bring! This is what will ultimately bring you joy when the day is long gone and night is here.