Career Advice for the Lost and Hungry

“So what’s up man?”

You can see his eyes roll into the back of his head as he goes into his elevator pitch.  He’s done this before.  Good for him.

He tells me the story he made up.  The one he thinks I’ll like about why he wants to do consulting.

I’m sitting at Chipotle with this kid because my buddy put me in touch.  I am supposed to give him career advice, which is a joke because I have avoided a career like the plague.  But I go because I used to do consulting and my friend asked me to.

The kid ends with,

“I was interviewing in consulting and I realized, ‘This is pretty fun!’”

Hold the phone.  Consulting is fun?  You have to be kidding me.

Drinking beer is fun.  Having sex is fun.  Mindless vandalism is fun.

Consulting is no fun at all.  For anyone.  Ever.

So why don’t we cut out the BS?

What do YOU think is fun?  What ACTUALLY gets you high?

What if you let all the garbage about what you were supposed to be doing fade away?  What would you do if money were no object?

You WOULD NOT be a consultant.  NO ONE would be a consultant.

Yet droves of kids line up every day to tell the same story to some third year (in this case, me) who told the same story 3 years ago, and knows in his heart of hearts it is a load of shit, who can’t help but feel simultaneously skeezed out by the inauthenticity of the story and ashamed to know that he told the same one.

Why do we do this?  Why do we lower the bar on what we expect from our jobs–from the thing we spend half of our waking hours doing–to the point where we say consulting is fun?  Why do we have these interviews where kids act like ALL that they really want to do is work 100 hour weeks in finance, like there is some possible motive other than money or status?

What’s with all the stepping stones, the 15 year plans?  You know, the one that goes:

entry-level grind > MBA > Senior level grind > diagonal industry switch > VP role and golf on the weekends

Throw in a marriage, a mortgage, and kids and you have a damn accurate summary of some people’s entire lives.  Is that not horrifying?

We slave for 30 years to arrive somewhere that would have bored our bright-eyed, ambitious 20 year-old selves to death.

Why don’t we just tell the world what we WANT and go do that thing?

I know something about you.  You found this blog.  You are in the target demographic for this post.  You’re not living in abject poverty in sub-saharan Africa.  No dictators are controlling your decisions.  Your barriers are financial and psychological.

I started Charisma on Command with 100K in debt.  I’m moving I moved to Brazil with about as much debt, very little in the bank, and no definite plans to make money.  How do I have the guts to do that?

Because even if I fail, that’s not so bad.

The worst that could happen is that I lose a bunch of money and wind up working for a company I don’t love.  That’s my worst case scenario.  Which coincides with most people’s best case scenarios.  I’ve got so little to lose and everything to gain.  So do you.

We’ve got couches to crash on, families who won’t let us starve to death.  The only risk is money and ego.  We can take a shot at the dream with zero long-term, negative consequences.

Plus we’ve got the internet.  We can learn ANYTHING.  Why settle on the industry we wound up in at 22!?

So my advice to him was this:

Forget the stepping stones.  Take a shot at the dream.  Whatever it is.

Track down the dude you want to be.  Email him, call him.  Work for free.  Forget about money and just bust your ass to do what you want to be doing.  Surround yourself with the people you’d like to become.  Do the things you’d like to be doing.  Get good and you’ll get paid.  Basically, go live your ideal career – without permission.

We’ve got so little to lose and so much to gain.

The lifelong stepping stone

I get back home and I sit down to write this.  Thinking about this kid and myself and how we’re all just posturing for one another, how we’ve all deluded ourselves into chasing things we don’t really even want.

And I realized, I’m still missing the point.  Because the ideal “career” is still just a stepping stone.  It’s just the means to an end.

All anyone REALLY wants is happiness, growth, contribution, love, and a decent standard of living.

And I missed the point with this kid.  I’m sorry for that.  But here is for you:

“For its own sake, what do you want out of life?”

If this is a hard question to answer, you’re like most people.  Stepping stones are everywhere.  Everybody is pursuing a means to a means to a means to a means.  The career, the perfect body, the stacked bank account.  It’s all just to get them a step closer to the next interim goal.  What they REALLY want is nowhere in sight.

What they want is love.  What they want is growth.  But those things are hard.  So they work hard and hope that once they are successful they will have the love and growth they crave.

They won’t.  They will have exactly what they worked at.  A career, or a beach body, a 401K, maybe even a sense of accomplishment at having achieved those intermediate goals.  But true love and connection?  Maybe, but only by accident.  Or the satisfaction of knowing that they went after it, that they stretched themselves in ways that terrified them?  No fucking way.

And no matter how successful, no matter what how many stepping stones they conquer, the fear will still be there.  Lurking just under the surface, morphing into distress anytime they challenge themselves to admit their true passions.

Forget the stepping stones.  Face the fear.  Corner it, stare it down, and ask yourself

“What would I do if there was no chance of failure and I had complete certainty that I’d be totally accepted, no matter how strange?  Who would I date?  How would I spend my time if money were no object?  What would I contribute?”

I’m telling your from experience, 90% of the time it’s not the world that is holding you back.  You’re not reading this from a death camp.  The reason you can’t do the things you love RIGHT NOW is because you think you need money first, 3 years work experience first, the approval of your friends first.  All stepping stones.

Skip the stepping stones.  If you live your life for it’s own sake, you’ve already won.

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