Career Experiments
I’m searching for my career passion. I’ve tried various surveys both professional and self-administered. I’ve read multiple books on the subject. I read multiple blog posts about finding ones’ passion.
Yet, I’ve come to realize that passion is like love. For me, with love, when I met might wife for the second time after a layoff, I just knew. She was it. Yet, it took me multiple experiments to figure it out. I had to date. I had to find out who and what characteristics I was compatible with. What did I like? Experimenting is a lot of trial an error. One might present a hypothesis, then control various variables to identify cause and effect.
Finding my career passion must not be from internal reflection, but more external reflection. I should look at my reactions to the actions I take. Daniel Pink discussed a similar topic recently, “the case against passion.” His take: What do you do?
Now, when I first read that question, What do you do? I mistakenly thought it meant what do you do for work, but that’s not it. What do you do for everything?
We all do stuff. We don’t just sit around and stare at a white wall day. Okay, maybe some of you do that, but you are stilling doing something. Its through this doing and evaluation of actions where we can identify our career passions.
I love technology. I love helping. I love people. I love talking and evangelizing ideas. Dreaming up the future.
Many times what we say we do and actually what we do are two different things. My March challenge to myself (should I choose to accept it) will be to be conscious of my actions. What do I actually do when I make time for myself? How do I spend that time? If I read, what do I read? If I watch tv, what type of shows am I watching? What is the show about? What content is there? If I’m out and about, what am I doing? How am I doing it? How do I feel while I’m doing it?
At one point, I wanted to be a blogger and a writer. Yet, I often don’t write just for fun. Yet, I realized that when I do write, I often perform better. I write often on paper and not on a computer. I’ll talk why I have not opened up this writing to the internet at a later date.
For now, I’m off to chronicle my actions.