Career Advice

When I was in school, everyone wanted to be a movie star, a singer or an engineer. Granted, I grew up in Hobart, Tasmania, and we didn’t have much access to the multitude of fascinating careers available. Becoming a lawyer was a respectable, appropriately ambitious vocation for a young man such as myself, and the aspirational caste of careers was similarly banal. For a year or so I entertained becoming a film director, a fantasy that brought me much joy before I shot it down myself at the end of high school by commencing a law degree. I talked myself out of it when I realised it was a long shot.

Years later I found out how remarkably common this is. Well educated societies tend to produce a bunch of well-educated youngsters who, for the first time in history, now have options available for their careers rather than simply doing what was prescribed. I must have sensed this after I dropped out of law school as rapidly as I dropped my directorial dreams. When I used to work as a University recruiter, I was routinely floored by the number of bright young students who felt pressure to ‘use up’ their well-furnished ATAR scores rather than, you know, do something they loved.

Ambiguous

Adults know where this misdirected energy stems from; them. Kids receive very confusing messages from their parents - you should absolutely follow your passion, but make sure you make full use of your talents and potential (the phrase ‘talent and potential’ devoid of definition or substance - just a vague aspiration the parent assigns to their kid). Be yourself, but not so much yourself that the rest of society hates you. I get it, we all need to ingratiate ourselves with other adults, but I think it has contributed to a pervasive corporate ennui stalking the modern workforce. It’s as though everyone is trying to remember a daydream it’s far too late to wake up from.

I met one kid at University who was studying to be a user experience designer. Smart, driven, all of that, I asked him what he loved doing. “Oh I want to be a chef,” he answered without hesitation. Why didn’t he just do that? He shook his head, “the money would be unacceptable.” Unacceptable. The word dripped with inherited affect. It obviously came from someone else’s mouth via a crushed dream or two, probably his dad. He had no idea what it meant to earn a lot of money, other than how it would make others see him (probably his parents), but that’s what he was going to pursue. I follow him on LinkedIn. He seems to be doing very well.

Besides, it’s not like “following your passion” is the best advice either. How do you even know what your passion is? I always liked writing, but it wasn’t a passion until I started forcing myself to do it everyday. It took a lot of hard work to develop my passion. Passion doesn’t hit you like a bolt of lightning. It’s a result of understanding part of the world, and then deciding you care enough to contribute or change it. Passion isn’t some masturbatory dream, like being a chef or an actor, but a result of understanding and action which comes from active engagement with the world.

No, finding your passion is just as bad as telling someone to fulfill whatever the fuck potential is. You’re not supposed to know who you’re supposed to be when you’re young - how could you? - only where you’d like to start.

Do You Actually Want To Be Famous?

Apparently kids these days want to be a YouTuber. This isn’t just material from boomer gossip circles. I was frequently told this by the more precocious types at the schools I used to visit, and could also include being an influencer or entrepreneur. The specifics - such as what exactly they wanted to influence - are beside the point. What these vocations share with the aspirants of my school years is an ambition for fame.

As a goal, ‘fame’ is a bit like wanting ‘success’ or ‘money’. It’s ill-defined - awful people become famous all the time - but it does seem to guarantee what all status-hungry human beings desire; love, adulation, social capital, approval. Goodness knows this was all I wanted growing up, so it was especially painful when I went into my first law lecture and nearly had an aneurysm brought on by the dryness of the subject. One law lecturer explicitly told us these lectures were supposed to be shitty and hard, just to weed out the softies. I meekly dropped out, and remain a softy to this day.

The realities of fame and money promise nothing like love and approval. They promise far sharper lessons - the necessity of suffering and monotony, the endless sacrifice of principle and dignity, the bloody reality of human politics. You have to work for entities that aren’t even conscious of you, but are only too happy to chew up your output and report it back to shareholders for its personal growth; you have to bite your tongue and play games you maybe rather wouldn’t, in order to please powerful people who themselves are playing games they maybe rather wouldn’t. You end up like Justin Bieber, all endless abundance with a withered-up soul and nowhere to go.

This is not to disparage the realities of work and success. To achieve anything in life you cannot ignore the game presented to you - you have to play it in order to win. The problem is that you will never be prepared for this. It is a painful and confusing thing to enter a career, because a career challenges that squishiest part of our selves - our sense of authenticity, of a central and eternal self. Almost immediately an internal battles ensues; between the aspirant self searching for love and belonging, and the demands of the world we enter.

Three Bits of Advice

Career stress comes from a) poorly defined success metrics and b) alienation between what you want and who you are. Unfortunately, much of modern career advice tends to boil down to a game of matching your skills with vocations. The older I get, the more I think of careers as a downstream consequence of who you’re growing into. Some assorted, warm advice from a fellow muddler, relevant at any age and level of ambition:

1. Constantly - and I mean here as much as possible, daily even - daydream about the sorts of things you wanted to do as a child. Do this not to absolve your responsibilities, but to take responsibility for your dreams and desires and start to wonder how you can make them real. There is nothing more hopeless than an adult who has abrogated what they want and find countless corrosive outlets to feed their starving souls. Childhood isn’t just a rich source for psychologists; it provides rich clues about who you are without the filtering effects of adults and world. Yours truly used to make word searches and force his parents to solve them, spend hours and hours reading, and wrote short stories in his spare time for fun. Writing is what I was meant to do, and it took me far too long to remember this.

2. Be willing to change everything, at any time. Far too many people resist this through spiritual resignation, or drift through their careers like seaweed on the tide. Again, this is not the same as abrogating responsibility, but simply recognising that constant change is the only truth in life and you must use this fact to your advantage. Accept that to do something new, you must become a different person, which also means waving goodbye to your old self; accept you cannot live a dream without swallowing its many pitfalls and inevitable darkness; accept that discomfort, anxiety and fear are leading indicators of internal signals you need to listen to, possibly conquer. Make entropy your constant ally and live, as David Deida cringily put it, with your lips pressed up against your fear.

3. Have your dreams, but work in the present. We risk suffocating our desires by fixating too much upon them; they calcify and feel like betrayal when the universe doesn’t deliver them to us. Embitterment is the death of dreams. I felt I had betrayed myself for much of my twenties, even as I was working in vocations that paid very well, because I was still fixated on a dream of being a writer, all the while not writing and wondering why I felt I wasn’t going anywhere. The antidote? Keep your goals as a distant hope, and focus on actions you can perform in the present. With the right action, even the faintest intent will ensure the future takes care of itself.

A final word from this muddler; I say all of this as my own career is in a moment of flux, so you can be assured it is said with affection and sincerity. Someone once wrote that you write best what you are currently learning, and there may be no harder skill in the modern workplace than navigating the tensions of sudden, often violent change accompanying us on our journey.

With love and fondest regards for your adventures,

Hoysted