12.

Start at the End

One of the courses I teach is critical thinking. But when I teach it, it's called “Critical Thinking and Action.” Being aware of something isn't enough. You must do something. It's not enough to say, “After many years of therapy, I've learned that my mother was neurotic. If she hadn't been neurotic, my life wouldn't be such a mess and I'd be able to do what I've always dreamed of doing.” Or, “I feel so badly for the poor, starving children in Africa.” You must do something about those problems.

If you don't do something, it doesn't mean anything. Intention, good will, or feeling badly about something doesn't accomplish a thing. It's not what you think or how you feel; it's what you do that matters. (In the same way, I believe that thinking of something or even talking about doing something isn't wrong. You can be angry at someone and think, “I could kill him”—and haven't we all felt that way about someone at some point in our lives?—but that's not the same thing as actually committing homicide.)

The first thing to look at is, what's your goal? What's the end point? That may seem like an odd place to start, but it puts everything into focus. If you know what you want, you can then determine the steps you need to take to get there. And if you want it badly enough—and given we're talking about your career, presumably you will want it badly enough—you will push through whatever barriers you need to in order to get there.

What do you want to do? What's your passion—that thing you love to do for hours on end that you can get lost in, that puts you “in the zone,” that makes you forget to eat or causes you to lose track of time? As Confucius said, “I am a person who forgets his food when engaged in vigorous pursuit of something.” Your passion is the well-spring of how you'll shape your career.

You may have tried to determine your passion before, only to end up frustrated (“I just can't figure out what I want to do!”). If you don't know exactly what your passion is, don't worry about it. Spending a lot of time trying to figure out exactly what it is you want to do, what you are meant to do, or what you are supposed to do is a waste of time. I know I differ from a lot of career coaches in this regard, people like Dick Bolles, author of What Color Is Your Parachute, and fans of the Myers-Briggs Personality Test and others like it. But the truth is, the new normal is that you'll have multiple careers—in fact, it's predicted that Millennials will have five or six of them! Because you will most likely have more than one career, the best way to find them is through the experience of working at things you enjoy or in which you think you may be interested. You will find your passion or passions eventually. Meanwhile, get to work and do something that interests you.