Unlocking Career Fulfillment

“What do you want to be when you grow up?” 

How many times do you recall being asked this question growing up? I believe this simple question is one of the causes of why over 50% of people hate their jobs today. 

I recently read “Open” by Andre Agassi, a world-renowned tennis player who won 8 grand slams and a gold medal. Andre was my favorite tennis player growing up, but the one thing I didn’t know about Andre was they absolutely despised the sport.

I couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that someone who had so much talent, hated what they did best.

It wasn’t until I came across the term of Identity Foreclosure in Adam Grant’s bestselling book, “Think Again,” did I really understand how the premature commitment an individual makes to their own identity impacts their future. Identity Foreclosure happens when we settle on a sense of self, without enough due diligence, and close our minds to our possible alternative selves.

This phenomenon is the unquestioning acceptance by individuals, usually adolescents, of a career, job, and goal that typically parents, teachers, and close friends have chosen for them. 

In the book “Open”, at a young age, Andre’s father determined that his son would be a star tennis player and he set a career path for his boy that would include sending him away to a tennis boarding school with countless hours of tennis training. This determination ultimately led to the foreclosure of his identity. 

It is so interesting to think that throughout our careers, we often foreclose on career identity as if we grow up and reach a finite point in our lives of who we are.

According to Dell Technologies and the Institute for the Future, up to 85% of jobs that will exist 10 years from now, haven’t even been invented yet. Companies like Uber, Slack, and TikTok didn’t exist over a decade ago. 

Freshman college students in 2017 were entering college when blockchain technology was just exploding globally. By their 2021 graduation, the pandemic alone created a massive shift in digital transformation and how work is done 

So, the question is, how do you determine if you’ve foreclosed on your identity prematurely, and how can you unlock career fulfillment? 

We first should reframe the question from “what do you want to be when you grow up?”, to “what kind of an impact you want to make or what mark do you want to leave on the world?”

Adam Grant suggests we all should conduct routine career checkups to determine if we’re happy in our life and career. 

There are three questions we can ask ourselves to determine this:

1. Does your work make you feel alive?
2. Are you creating value for yourself and others?
3. Are you doing things that matter to you?

For Andre Agassi, these three questions led him to creating the Andre Agassi Foundation for Education in 1994. He believes that parents, advocates, educators, and legislators have a responsibility to help children fulfill their potential and achieve their dreams.

Late in his tennis career, Andre invested every dollar of his winnings to the foundation and shifted his identity from tennis player to philanthropist.

He has devoted his life to this work.