Mentorlog #21 - Measuring career success

Evaluating your career is not complicated. Just treat?it as a stock ticker that measures your HAPPINESS.

Very?early?in my career, someone told me, your career is like a stock ticker. As long as your stock keeps going?up at your workplace, stay there. The moment it plateaus, eject and find a new platform.?

Sound advice then for a 20-something trying to make a mark.?

I simply focused on how to grow to my next level. How do I get my next promotion? Compensation was important too but lower in my list of priorities. I knew money?follows?growth.?

The ticker soon expanded to include the concept of liking what I do. I promptly moved from engineering?to take up a marketing/business role.?

With a family in tow, health and work-life equilibrium?kicked in as well.?

As these additional variables sought to balance the thrust to grow in the corporate ladder, it became evident to me that there was no preset formula to evaluate career success.?

It had to be about happiness.?

As life happened, my career stock ticker morphed to measure happiness and contentment. The happier I was, my ticker grew taller. When I was not contended with the state-of-affairs, I took proactive steps to address them. To my surprise, the "title" and "pay" that solely drove my ticker during my early career, also happened as a happy bi-product of my happiness framework.?

Let us put these together into a framework

• Prioritize Happiness: The points of friction with respect to your career decisions should always be resolved by optimizing for happiness. What makes you happy and why?
• Like what you do: Get paid for doing what you like
• Stay healthy: Sounds cliched. But be mindful of both your physical and mental health
• Focus on impact: Impact brings growth - both in responsibility and title. You will be compensated appropriately with growth. So, don't worry too much about pay, especially early in your career. What you need are opportunities that you can grasp.

So, what does your ticker tell you??

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