Author Greg McKeown starts by defining “the clarity paradox:”
Phase 1: When we really have clarity of purpose, it leads to success.
Phase 2: When we have success, it leads to more options and opportunities.
Phase 3: When we have increased options and opportunities, it leads to diffused efforts.
Phase 4: Diffused efforts undermine the very clarity that led to our success in the first place.
Then he suggests three ways to fight the clarity paradox … I’ve given an extremely condensed version:
1. Use more extreme criteria. Think of what happens to our closets when we use the broad criteria: “Is there a chance that I will wear this someday in the future?” The closet becomes cluttered with clothes we rarely wear. If we ask, “Do I absolutely love this?” then we will be able to eliminate the clutter and have space for something better. We can do the same with our career choices.
2. Ask “What is essential?” and eliminate the rest. Everything changes when we give ourselves permission to eliminate the nonessentials. At once, we have the key to unlock the next level of our lives.
3. Beware of the endowment effect. Also known as the divestiture aversion, the endowment effect refers to our tendency to value an item more once we own it. Tom Stafford describes a cure for this that we can apply to career clarity: Instead of asking, “How much do I value this item?” we should ask “If I did not own this item, how much would I pay to obtain it?” And the same goes for career opportunities. We shouldn’t ask, “How much do I value this opportunity?” but “If I did not have this opportunity, how much would I be willing to sacrifice in order to obtain it?”
I’ve been thinking in the new year about tasks and responsibilities on my to-do list that I should eliminate — but McKeown is challenging our decisions at a higher level. First you have to examine whether you’re doing the right job, for example, before you prioritize your activities.
This March when I moved to Philadelphia, I was broke—25 years of living in New York, the past five of it as the breadwinner for my family, can do that. Don’t focus on making new friends, I told myself: Make money.
Yet my first move was the opposite. I did want to find my tribe, so when I was asked to teach fiction writing at a local literary center—$240 (total) to teach a six-week course—I agreed.
My husband was appalled. How could I waste my time like that? I’d practically taken on a volunteer job, he said. I know, I sighed, but I really like the students, their work is so ambitious, and I want to help them.
Weirdly, saying yes (when I could have said no) paid off. Three months later, several former students have hired me to work with them on a one-on-one basis. Those who can afford to pay my $130/hour fee do; for those who can’t, I barter services (one student’s husband is a sculptor and teaches my girls art).
So often there’s an impulse to say no, when the immediate economic benefit isn’t apparent. I’ve revised my strategy to a more open-minded “say yes whenever possible.” You never know what unintended gains could be.
If you spent Sunday evening dreading the arrival of Monday morning, this post is for you.
If you spend eight hours a day at work, not even including time spent commuting or eating lunch, you probably spend more time at your job during the week then you do at home, with your spouse or with your kids. So if you hate it, that’s a miserable place to be.
Find out if your problems are unique by reaching out to coworkers and peers.
Reevaluate your expectations for yourself, and set achievable goals that you break into smaller goals to see your success along the way.
Pitch your boss a change in your arrangement, offering improved results in exchange for more autonomy.
Change your approach to your job so you can feel more success.
Harvard Business Review’s blog post Don’t Like Your Job? Change It (Without Quitting) interviews Gretchen Spreitzer, professor of management and organizations at my alma mater, University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, and suggests:
Do:
Make connections with people you like at work
Assess what you don’t enjoy about your job so that you can minimize the time you spend doing unwanted tasks
Keep your options open — you may not be able to leave your job now, but circumstances may change
Don’t:
Assume that the job is the problem — you may be prone to being dissatisfied
Think you’re stuck — there is usually more leeway to alter your job than you think
Complain incessantly about your job and bring others down
Make a list of all the things you like and dislike about your job to help get perspective.
Talk to your boss to see if you can adjust your role, reducing some of the tasks you dislike or doing more of those you enjoy.
Use your job to develop your skills, including taking advantage of education benefits.
If your boss is unappreciative of your hard work, look outside your job for positive feedback.
Document your productivity and success, either to help bosses understand your value to the organization or to help yourself feel better.
Exercise caution complaining too much at work.
Beware of self sabotage, like poor performance or talking back.
Beware of idealizing other jobs — just because you’re unhappy in your current job doesn’t mean the next one will be perfect.
Finally, back to Brazen Careerist for one more tip: make a friend at work. Take a look at your calendar for the week and invite someone to lunch, coffee or happy hour. Just don’t spend the whole time complaining about work.
Here’s some advice for those of you who don’t like your job: Maybe your job is not your problem. Maybe it’s that you are not trying hard enough to make friends at work. People with one friend at work are much more likely to find their work interesting. And people with three friends at work are virtually guaranteed to be very satisfied with their life.
Rath says a friend who can change your work environment is “someone you spend a lot of time in a relationship with. And you are probably making a difference in that person’s life, too. If the person were gone, work would be less fun.”
Author Richard Russo hasn’t lived in his hometown for decades, hasn’t even gone back to visit.
Yet Russo remains intimately tied to Gloversville, N.Y. , setting most of his books in a fading factory town like the one where he grew up, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Empire Falls.”
“In some fairly fundamental way, I never left,” Russo said.
I asked Russo for a Newvine Growing interview not just because he’s my favorite author and I’ve read every one of his books, but because as I’ve wrestled with where we should call home, I was intrigued by his connection to his hometown. I was also curious how his creative process has changed since he went from a college professor who moonlighted as a writer to a full-time writer who’s “won a prize.” (He would never actually say the word “Pulitzer.”)
Seeking a better life drew Russo’s maternal and paternal grandparents to Gloversville, an upstate New York town where leather was tanned and turned into nearly all the leather gloves sold in the U.S. But as glove factory jobs disappeared, “It was commonly accepted of my generation that we were going to have to leave.”
Russo’s mother not only urgently wanted him to leave, but wanted to go herself. She even hatched a plan to follow her only son when he enrolled at University of Arizona — only to return to Gloversville, as she always did.
“There were always two Gloversvilles for her,” Russo said. When she was there, it was claustrophobic, with no hope and no opportunity, but it was also her safety net, and when she left, she yearned for it as though she’d been unfairly expelled.
“She was never able to resolve that paradox,” he said. “She passed that on to me.”
“I love that town and everyone in it like she loved it when I’m not there.”
Gloversville, N.Y. is northwest of Albany, a small town formerly home to the tanneries and factories that made most of the leather gloves sold in the U.S. Note “Mohawk Trail State Forest” east of Albany. Russo’s first novel was set in a town called Mohawk.
Russo described feeling that tension each summer, when he’d return from college and work road construction with his dad. He told NPR about it in 2007:
“At the beginning of the summer I would think, ‘God, I don’t know if I can get into those rhythms of life again,” Russo says. “But by the end of August, I would be so thoroughly subsumed into that other life — a very hard life that my father lived. But then at the end of the day, sitting at a bar and watching those long-neck bottles of beer line up sweating in front of you, and I would think to myself, ‘Do I really want to go back to the university?’
“And as a result of doing that every summer, I think I bifurcated in some way. I’ve always thought that there was some other version of me sitting on a bar stool.”
Russo said he liked the construction guys, who he described as good-natured drunks, bar brawlers filled with rage about how hard they worked for so little.
“Your life where you end up seems inevitable, but I do have that sense of, ‘There but for the grace of God,’” he said.
Russo’s 2007 novel “Bridge of Sighs” focuses on high school friends who are now adults — one of the men an artist living in Venice, another still in his hometown, married to his high school sweetheart.
“I feel almost perfectly placed equidistantly between these two characters,” Russo said.
“Interventions” is a collection of four short stories, each with an illustration by Russo’s daughter, Kate. The story “High and Dry” tells the story of Russo’s family in Gloversville, which he says this fall’s “Elsewhere” will explore in greater depth.
“I’m calling it a memoir because I don’t know what else to call it,” he said, adding that he’d recently talked to his author friend Andre Dubus about writing memoirs, and that they’d discussed the goal not being sharing something you know but trying to figure something out.
Honesty, Rick, I’m really glad I was writing fiction a lot of years before I started to turn the camera onto myself. It makes me think of Louis Pasteur injecting his whole body with germs. He had enough faith that he would actually survive and in fact, perhaps, triumph with the right attitude, which I think is truth seeking.
Resources and challenges
Russo was a fiction instructor at the Southern Illinois University at Carbondale and a professor of creative writing at Colby College in Waterville, Md. Russo wrote his first book, “Mohawk,” while teaching full time, but his novel wasn’t set in a quaint college town — it’s in a city much like Gloversville where the tanneries are closing.
He described the old book-of-the-month series “The Story of Civilization” as having the central premise that civilizations flourish when they have resources and challenges.
“I have thought that same thing holds for artists,” Russo said. When he taught at Colby, he saw kids who’d had every advantage and who carried a broad sense of entitlement. It made him appreciate his own background.
“It opened my imagination to almost anything I would want to write about,” Russo said of Gloversville.
Struggling towns play such an important role in Russo’s writing that in 1995, he gave a lecture to Warren Wilson MFA students called Place in Fiction. My friend, Mary Jean, shared a cassette of the lecture while she was a Warren Wilson student — and since 1995 predated YouTube and cheap digital cameras, I can’t share a video clip here. But it struck me as a writer that Russo thought of these towns as a character unto themselves, not just the backdrop where people happened to do things.
So much harder to please
Russo won the Pulitzer in 2002 for “Empire Falls,” which he said added pressure to his work. While he jokes, “I come from a long line of bullshitters,” he wanted to produce stories worthy of that award.
“As I get older, I am so much harder to please,” Russo said. He used to suffer through a “grotesque first draft,” patient with revising and improving it later, but now he works much slower, finessing each word and sentence as he goes.
“I’d love to be able to go back to those halcyon days of letting go,” Russo said.
Russo retired from teaching after he discovered screenwriting — his novel Nobody’s Fool became a movie starring Paul Newman, and was nominated for two Academy Awards: Best Actor in a Leading Role (Newman) and Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium.
“I miss the students but not the classroom,” Russo said. “Screen writing offered me something I didn’t know.”
It also kept Russo from becoming a hermit, something Russo’s wife feared might happen if he left teaching to write full time. He began working with the screenwriter and director Robert Benton, which Russo compared to going back to graduate school. He relished the collaboration and the challenge.
He also collaborated with his artist daughter, Kate, on what some have described as an anti e-book, but what Russo calls a celebration of printed books. “Interventions” is printed in the U.S. on paper from sustainably harvested forests, featuring full-color illustrations of each story.
Throughout this year, several bloggers will engage in a conversation here and on their blogs — asking questions of each other and responding. Others are absolutely welcome to join the conversation, as well. Learn more about the ladies of Blogversation 2012.
I did not grow up in a musical family. My parents didn’t sing or play an instrument, and didn’t worry that I should to build out my college application or be a well-rounded cultured child. It just wasn’t on their radar.
But I was fascinated by music pretty much as far back as I can remember. My mom was friends with a couple whose band played at a bowling alley in Saginaw, Mich. where my mom was a bartender. There’s a photo of me at I think 4 years old grinning like crazy when they sang me Happy Birthday. I didn’t care if it was Madison Square Garden or Timber Town bowling alley, these people made music and I was in awe.
One of my mom’s friends played piano and I watched in fascination. My first elementary school crush was a boy who played piano.
Yet I never learned to play an instrument. When we had the option to sign up for band in middle school, I thought you had to already know how to play. If I’d known the good taxpayers of Saginaw would pay for me to learn to play music, I’d have done it in an instant. Instead, I took choir. And hated it. I was a terrible singer, and a shy singer because of it, and spent the year jealously listening to the girls with the lovely soprano voices. Maybe someone could have told me it was OK I was an alto?
My college boyfriend bought me perhaps the most appropriate gift anyone’s ever given me: a small Yamaha keyboard. He wanted to encourage me to finally learn to play.
Here’s a funny video of me torturing “When the Saints Go Marching In” a year ago:
Lauren, one of the Blogversation members, wrote a post this fall, You’re Not Too Old to Switch Careers. Or Play The Harp. that hit me hard. When practice is going badly, I lament not having taken middle school band, or grouse that my parents really should have gotten me piano lessons, or anything else to make my progress farther along than it is. Lauren wrote:
We didn’t start an instrument, our careers, a language at some magical age, 10? 17? 20? and our brain went into lockdown and whatever talents we managed to eck out by sheer luck and childhood fancy, are the ones that we are destined with forever. If we haven’t learned music, mastered a language, become a writer, we never will.
Thus the people who sigh, “I wish had learned the piano when I was young. It would be such a great talent to have.”
And the others that pine, “If only they had offered Spanish in school when I was ten. I would be bilingual.”
And me who shouts, “Shut up and starting practicing!” Because piano playing and language speaking might be easier at younger ages, but they can come greatly at any age if you decide to sit down, practice, and persist.
A recent NPR story said something similar — a psychologist who learned guitar to study musical learning wrote a book called “Guitar Zero: The New Musician and the Science of Learning.” NPR’s interview with Gary Marcus says:
“… although it’s definitely easier to learn some things when you’re a kid, it’s not the case that you just absolutely lose the ability later in life. There’s more of a gradual decline, but it is still possible.”
…
he maintains there is hope for nonmusical adults who would like to pick up an instrument — as long as they’re willing to swallow their pride and practice hard.
“A lot of people just do what they’re good at. They don’t focus on what they’re bad at,” Marcus says. “In my case, I really had to focus on the rhythm. If I had just done what I was good at, I would still sound terrible. Now I don’t quite sound terrible, and that’s because I focused so much on that. So don’t expect overnight success; try to enjoy each incremental bit of progress that you make.”
I still sometimes struggle to read sheet music, I don’t remember what notes are in which chords and my timing needs work. But I persist, because that 4-year-old me wanted it so desperately and I’m not willing to give up yet.
What’s one thing you’re really passionate about even though you’re not very good at it?
I like contrarian advice — not that I always agree with the devil’s advocate view, but I think it’s useful to challenge conventional wisdom and reconsider whether you still believe it’s true.
It’s with that appreciation for against-the-grain opinions that I was attracted to a Penelope Trunk post headlined Bad Career Advice: Do what you love.
Trunk writes:
Often, the thing we should do for our career is something we would only do if we were getting a reward. If you tell yourself that your job has to be something you’d do even if you didn’t get paid, you’ll be looking for a long time. Maybe forever. So why set that standard? The reward for doing a job is contributing to something larger than you are, participating in society, and being valued in the form of money.
The pressure we feel to find a perfect career is insane. And, given that people are trying to find it before they are thirty, in order to avoid both a quarterlife crisis and a biological-clock crisis, the pressure is enough to push people over the edge. Which is why one of the highest risk times for depression in life is in one’s early twenties when people realize how totally impossible it is to simply “do what you love.”
I recently blogged about a new documentary on Joseph Campbell, who advocated that we follow our bliss. And I believe it’s so important to making life meaningful that we find the things that bring us joy and make them a priority in our lives.
But I think Trunk’s argument is worth contemplating — maybe we drive ourselves crazy by trying to make a living at the thing we love, when it could be enough to do that thing for free.
I love to cook. However, I know enough people in the restaurant business to know doing it professionally is a high-stress gig that would likely turn me off to cooking. So I love doing it just for fun, and that’s enough.
Meanwhile, I get paid to put together marketing plans, design surveys and set pricing plans, among other things. Would I do any of those if I wasn’t getting paid? No, but that doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy them. I’m happy with my career path.
Trunk further writes:
if you are overwhelmed with the task of “doing what you love” you should recognize that you are totally normal, and maybe you should just forget it. Just do something that caters to your strengths. Do anything.
What do you think — about doing what you love, or about water, sleep, wine or monogamy?
I first started blogging in 2006 with a limited goal: We were going to spend a month subletting a New York City apartment, giving us a chance to test drive being New Yorkers. I wanted to share our experiences with friends without clogging up their email inboxes with numerous photo attachments, allowing those who were interested to read and those who weren’t to skip it.
Then about three years ago, I got bored with a me-centric blog. We’d been in New York full time a few years and the theme of what we were doing in NYC had run its course.
Meanwhile, I began to get the itch to explore bigger topics — specifically, wondering how I could make the most of my life to make it richer, more meaningful, happier. I’ve generally aimed for a big goal in the future, something to work toward, and having finished my MBA and gotten a media job in NYC, I’d accomplished my last missions, leaving me asking what was next.
Having this blog encouraged me to keep a lookout for articles and blog posts about happiness and living life well. It gave me a reason to reach out to people who inspire me, to interview them for their experiences and insights. And it was a good opportunity to write several times a week, something I’ve missed since moving out of a newsroom.
I blogged selfishly, looking for greater meaning in my life, but I also blogged about living life intentionally in the hope that my midlife crisis quest could provide inspiration to others.
Just last week I got an email from an old friend that I thought I’d lost touch with. Apparently I didn’t know what had become of her, but she was reading my blog while she went through a major transformation that included a career change and moving back to her hometown.
I cried big tears of joy as I read her email, which said in part:
“Thank you for the inspiration and hope that you gave me. Although you didn’t know it, as I simply read your blog day after day anonymously, you have played a major role in helping me turn my life around. … Hope this finds you well, and I hope that it adequately conveys what your blog and its message has done for me. You are having a genuine impact on people’s lives, Colleen. “
I could never have hoped to do something so beautiful, to inspire someone when they need it most — but I can’t think of a better reason in the world to blog.
I recall hearing a story years ago that one of the drivers of the technology revolution and dot-com boom was the hard economy of the 1980s — facing shaky job prospects, the best and brightest were more inclined to strike out on their own and innovate instead of serving corporate bosses.
I haven’t seen data proving the recession forced people to become entrepreneurs, then or now, but I can imagine some people deciding they might as well take a risky move if they can’t find a good job.
USA Today recently had an article headlined Employees bid goodbye to corporate America that included anecdotes of several people saying they felt inspired by layoffs and high unemployment to build their own future, rather than leave their future in someone else’s hands.
The article included this insight about how people see their careers:
Dr. Kevin Brennan, a New York City-based psychologist who concentrates on helping young professionals, said the pressures of choosing the right career and the right time to follow one’s passions are the centerpiece of his practice.
“This generation’s parents said we could do anything we want, just be ‘happy,’” says Brennan. “Thus, happiness is now our only benchmark, and it is often the hardest. The previous generation of workers may have also wanted to quit and pursue their passions, but there was an overwhelming expectation to stay put, so there was less anxiety about settling with the dead-end job. ‘Happiness’ was simply not their primary value, allowing them to settle and put off their passion-hunting until their responsibilities diminished, a.k.a. mid-life crisis.”
So maybe it’s not the recession that’s converting people to entrepreneurship, but this elusive pursuit of happiness?
Think about how many practical people you know in the greatest generation and the baby boomers, people who chose a job for the steady pay or benefits, compared to Gen X or Y or the millennials, who seem more inclined to talk about passion or satisfaction or happiness.
Though I haven’t seen data on that, either, and it’s yet another anecdotal observation.
Brennan encourages those who are confused about their careers to think not only outside the box, but outside themselves.
“When in doubt, help others out,” advises Brennan. “Ask 10 people who engage in activities that help the world if they love what they do, and nine will say ‘absolutely.’ If you are bright, capable and bewildered, then why not do something useful for others?”
Do you think more people are starting their own businesses because they feel corporate America can’t take care of them? Do you think people are choosing careers with happiness more in mind than finances? Have you done either of these things?
I love to write and I love many things that go with writing, like fountain pens. It shook me to flunk my business school writing test -- not once, but twice.
When I began my MBA at University of Michigan, I was intimidated by classes in topics brand new to me – finance, statistics, operations management – and nervous about a forced-curve grading system that would evaluate me against numerous classmates who worked in quantitative fields like engineering.
What I was not worried about was the writing proficiency requirement.
Ross Business School gave us the option to either take a communications class or pass a writing test. With a journalism degree under my belt, I figured I’d rather focus my 60 credits on building new skills than go for easy credits in a writing class.
About halfway through my five years in the evening MBA program, I took the writing test. I received a few pages of background information and was instructed to write a memo.
When results came back, I was surprised to find I’d flunked. I knew Indian engineers who passed, and the business school seemed to be telling me these guys who do math for a living and who learned English as a second language were better writers than me. That bruised my pride, but laughed it off a little.
I swallowed my pride and went to talk to someone in the writing office about what they were looking for in successful tests.
Armed with that information, I took the test again. And I failed again.
While I was going to school at night, I was a writer at University of Michigan News Service during the day. So the same university that paid me a full-time salary and gave me a break on tuition because of my work as a writer didn’t feel I had strong enough writing skills to earn my MBA.
I went back to the writing office and asked if there was anything I could do to sway them. I had been earning a paycheck for writing since I was 17 so I had plenty of writing samples, including a few years’ worth from the Ann Arbor News, the daily newspaper in town. I suggested maybe I could get a letter from one of my university bosses saying they felt I was a competent writer.
No, they said, they don’t consider anything but the test itself in determining writing competency.
That is when I began to panic.
The test was only offered a few times a year, and I was already close enough to my scheduled graduation date that I risked not making it. The test wouldn’t be offered again before I was supposed to finish my degree and I couldn’t take a writing class before then.
What would I tell my family or friends if I had to take an extra semester to graduate because I’d been judged bad at the one thing I most identified myself with?
When I took the Dale Carnegie course, my teacher talked about being self referent – that is, to care less about what the external world says than about your own assessment of how you’re doing.
I had been editor of my high school newspaper, a reporter and editor on my college newspaper, a reporter and editor at daily, weekly and monthly publications – I had been a writer my entire adult life. To have someone evaluate my writing as inadequate tested my ability to be self referent. What if I wasn’t good at writing? What would that mean for my career path, my hobbies, my identity?
I talked to some writer friends. They conceded that maybe I’m wordier than I need to be – and I totally accept I’m not perfect as a writer.
But I am a writer, no matter what a test grader at my business school said.
I suppose the experience was like being an author or actor or musician who reads a harsh review and has to decide whether to care. Do you quit because someone doesn’t like your work? Or do you take a deep breath, remind yourself that taste is subjective, look to see if there’s anything in the criticism that you think is valid, then get back to work?
I went for the latter.
And the story has a happy ending.
As my final project for a negotiation class I was taking, I convinced the writing office to give me another shot at the test. I explained that I hadn’t waited until the last minute to take the test and I had figured surely I would pass it on my second try. I wasn’t asking for them to weigh my experience as proof of writing competency, only as a reason to let me take the test again before making me miss my graduation date.
They very generously gave me a break, and let me take a third writing test. I found out mere hours before commencement that I’d passed. I was scheduled to help read the names of graduating MBAs and thankfully, I was one of them.
Have you faced criticism at something you consider a central part of your identity or something you love doing? How did you handle it?
Question: You tell your readers to take inventory of the activities that make them the happiest. Why do you think people don’t spend time on these activities?
Ms. Dunleavey: That’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it? Why don’t we gravitate toward the choices that would make us happier, healthier, wealthier? In almost every case, the biggest hurdle people face is their desire for instant gratification. Shopping is a lot more fun than saving (for many people). Eating is more pleasurable than working out (again, not for everyone, but for an awful lot of us). But those instant pleasures die fast. You buy that sweater or eat that fried rice . . . and you’re still craving something more, something else, something . . .
But if you shift your focus toward more substantive sources of satisfaction—which almost always involve people and experiences, not stuff—you might be willing to make happier choices. If you REALLY want to travel to Shanghai or buy a new mountain bike, because that would enrich your whole quality of life—not just the current 10 minutes—you might forsake the dumb sweater to put money toward your own greater happiness. It takes a while to retrain your impulses, but you can do it.
I get real pleasure and true happiness spending money on:
Good, flavorful food from farmers market
Piano lessons
Beautiful and/or practical home furnishings
Travel to someplace relaxing or inspiring
Therefore, I try to limit my spending on other things to make sure there’s room in the budget for these.
What do you spend your money on that brings you real happiness? Or are you not spending on things that bring you real joy?
