CHAPTER 11

You CAN Have It All, But You Will Have to Work for It

If something is important enough, you have to try, even if the most probable outcome is failure.

—Elon Musk

Founder of PayPal, Tesla, and SpaceX

The question is not whether you can build a career around your passion or your major: The question is how you can best do it!

—Tom Kucharvy

I began this book by asking a straightforward question: What do you want your life to be like when you’re 25? 35? 55?

A vision of your future is a great place to begin your quest to achieve it. Imagining something, however, does not make it a reality. The bad news is that whatever your vision for your future career, it will take far more work to achieve it than was the case a generation ago. The good news is that those with the right preparation and the right skills will have far more options for not only building the career of their dreams, but also for managing that career around the lifestyle of their dreams.

That’s where this book’s 20-step plan fits in. But before summarizing the plan, how did we get here? Why, five years after the formal end of the 2007 recession, is growth still so anemic and jobs—much less good jobs—so hard to find? Most importantly, what will the job market look like when you are ready to graduate and what must you do now to give you the best chance of not just getting the job of your dreams, but of building the career of your dreams?

Planning a Career in the New Normal

Here we are, five years after the end of the so-called Great Recession. Economic growth rates remain far below those of previous post-recession recoveries and the United States still employs fewer workers than in 2007. Even those who have kept their jobs have not been spared pain. Real, after-inflation wages have fallen and then stagnated. Forget about 2007 wage rates. Today’s inflation-adjusted wages are below those of 1999!

Welcome to the New Normal, an era of reduced economic growth and expectations. An era in which growth rates will continue to fall well below those of the boom years of the late 20th century, in which companies will limit the hiring of full-time employees as a means of keeping fixed costs down, and in which median wages will see slow—if any—real growth.

The recession and slow recovery has been particularly tough on those young adults who have had the misfortune of graduating since it began. As of the end of 2013, 10.9 percent of that year’s graduates remained without jobs. Of those who did get jobs, 44 percent were “underemployed”—in jobs that did not require college degrees. And don’t even begin to think about the number who could not get jobs within their major.

The good news is that the job market has improved significantly since the recession ended. The bad news is that nobody expects rapid improvement. Getting jobs—especially, good career-track jobs—will remain tough for years to come.

This said, today’s job market, like the economy as a whole, is increasingly becoming a tale of two classes. High-skilled individuals in particular fields, such as healthcare and most STEM segments, will enjoy huge demand for their services and good, steadily growing salaries. Meanwhile, the traditionally huge base of mid-skill, mid-wage manufacturing, construction, and office jobs is being hollowed out by forces such as automation and offshoring. Many jobs are being eliminated and many others are being totally transformed. Most young adults entering the workforce will fall into one of two camps:

1. A large majority who will struggle to get any job that offers a reasonable salary, training, and long-term growth opportunities, much less a job that makes use of their education and skills or that allows them to pursue their passions; or

2. A small minority (perhaps 15 to 20 percent) who will receive multiple offers for challenging jobs within their field, generous salaries and benefits, and rapidly growing demand for their services.

The good news is that there have never been more opportunities for determined, high-skill individuals to chart and control their own career destinies, in virtually any field.

Since you have the good fortune of being born later than those who graduated between 2008 and 2012, you have a much better opportunity to prepare yourself to be among the big winners in this new market. You can position yourself to be among the winners in this new job market in three primary ways:

• The easiest and most straightforward approach is to gain a solid postsecondary education where you will major in, get good grades in, and land a pregraduation paid internship in one of the markets for which there is, and will continue to be great demand. These include a handful of high-skill trades (especially in advanced manufacturing or some construction fields); the vast majority of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields; and most segments of healthcare (and especially those dealing with aging baby boomers).

• A more challenging, but potentially more psychically rewarding approach is to build an extraordinary resume (with a record of consistent achievement and demonstrable accomplishments) around your passion. Depending on your field, however, this approach may require more than passion and achievement. It may also require that you hedge your bets by simultaneously preparing for a complementary safety career in a field for which there is proven demand.

• Start your own business. Although this can be challenging for anyone, much less someone just out of school and without resources or a proven track record, it has seldom been easier or less costly to launch one’s own businesses. Technologies including personal computers, cloud-based business services, and 3D printers have slashed the cost of starting a new business—provided new opportunities to create and launch totally new concepts (such as a new social media tool or small-volume, custom manufacturing) on the cheap and for even one-person companies to sell into a global market.

Identifying and Preparing for the Career That’s Right for You

No matter which route you choose, each has a relatively similar basic recipe for success that is embodied in Chapter 4’s 20-step program. It begins by:

• Identifying your passions and your primary interests (Step 1);

• Identifying and objectively evaluating your skills and your limitations (Step 2);

• Determining ways you can apply different combinations of your skills to your passions (Step 3); and

• Prioritizing and developing deep understanding, skills, and recognition around a few of the passion/interest/skill combinations in which you have the greatest interest (Step 4).

Armed with this knowledge about yourself, you’re ready to take your first cut at your lifetime effort of defining and continually honing and adapting your personal brand (Step 5), evaluating and validating potential career opportunities around your passion/interest/skills combinations and brand (Step 6), developing a network of advisors (Step 7) to help you identify career opportunities that may fit these combinations, and determining which offer the best and most flexible career options (Step 8).

You must then narrow these options down to a few complementary fields that can form the basis for the dream career, and just in case you can’t get your dream job or it doesn’t turn out to be as dreamy as you had anticipated, a safety career (Step 9).

Once you have identified primary and secondary career goals that best align with your passions, your skills, and market trends and realities, you’re ready for the next steps of identifying the skills you must develop to prepare you not just to get your first job, but those you will need to succeed through your entire 40+-year career, regardless of the fields into which your ever changing passions, interests and skills (not to speak of market realities and serendipity) may take you (Step 10), and creating an education plan that will help you develop these skills (Step 11).

The New Skills Imperative

Many of the skills you will require will depend on the specific career options you have chosen. You must develop the domain knowledge—the key precepts, frameworks, methodologies, and knowledge that is required in your specific fields, along with demonstrable experience in working in these areas, documented accomplishments and references. That, of course, is a given.

More importantly, regardless of the specific career you target, you will need a number of foundational skills, differentiating value-added skills, and especially the personality traits that are required to succeed in virtually all high-skill jobs, as well as to manage your career (not to speak of your entire life) in an era of complexity and continual change. Among the more important of these foundational skills are communication and collaboration, information, media and information technology, statistics, entrepreneurship, and social and cross-cultural skills.

Although these skills will be important in all jobs, they are merely the ante: the stakes that are required just to get a seat at the table. A different set of higher level of skills will separate the real winners from the also-rans in the race to make it to the top level of virtually any high-skill profession. These include critical thinking, complex problem solving, creativity, innovation, and “complex communication” skills.

These high-level skills are necessary in propelling you to the top of your profession. Even they, however, aren’t sufficient. You also need the personality traits that will give you the drive required to become the best, the grit required to keep going in the face of continual setbacks, the discretion to recognize the need to change course, and the flexibility to make these changes. These traits or attributes can be summarized as initiative and self-direction, flexibility and adaptability, self-restraint, and, since you will have to anticipate and adapt to continual change, an insatiable curiosity and passion for learning.

There are many established vehicles for learning foundational skills such as IT, statistics, and communication. Unfortunately, this is not the case for higher order skills such as complex problem solving and creativity, much less personality traits including initiative, adaptability, and self-restraint. Even most colleges falter in these areas. A growing number of studies even suggest that most college graduates experience little or no increase in critical thinking and complex problem solving skills from the time they began their freshman years!

In other words, if you want to learn the skills that will be truly required for success in this new era, you have to take responsibility for your own learning and develop your own education plan (Step 12).

The Educational Dilemma

Some form of postsecondary education is critical in this new era. But just what type of education? College has certainly been the traditional route to a high-value job and continues to be the most favored route. In fact, a record 33.5 percent of Americans aged 25 to 29 now have at least a bachelor’s degree and another five percent have an associate’s degree. Although there are certainly exceptions (think Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Ellen DeGeneres, Ted Turner), study after study shows that a college degree is one of the most effective—and cost-efficient—ways of getting a good job that pays a good wage. Those with college degrees, and especially graduate degrees, consistently earn more, are less likely to experience unemployment, will live in safer neighborhoods, and have children that are likely to out-earn those that do not graduate.

But how many families can even afford to send their children to colleges, with some costing more than $50,000 per year (for tuition, fees, room, and board). Besides, if a college education is so great, why are 10.9 percent of recent college graduates unemployed and 44 percent underemployed (in occupations that do not require a college degree)?

Sure, a college degree can be a bargain for one who graduates into an $80,000 per year engineering job or a $100,000 per year financial analyst position. But how about the average college graduate? How much better off is a barista with a college degree and $29,000 in college debt (the average for those who take out loans), or a humanities PhD with $150,000 in debt, than is someone who got the same job straight out of high school? Given the high cost of college, and the limited career and earning prospects for many graduates, it makes little sense to even begin college unless you know exactly what you plan to gain from your education, or if you aren’t ready to take full advantage of the opportunity.

Some jobs absolutely require a bachelor’s, or even a master’s, professional, or doctorate degree. Many high-skill jobs, however, do not. And while many employers have come to favor or even require a college degree for jobs that do not really require that level of education, a growing number—including some of the premier employers in technology and finance industries—have come to recognize that college is not the only, or necessarily the best, means of developing the skills that are required for many of even the highest skill jobs.

So, while virtually all challenging, secure, and well-paying high-skill jobs require more than a high school education, there are a growing number of increasingly viable means of developing these skills. For example, community college associate degree, apprenticeship, and certification programs can prepare you for entry into high-demand trades that may well start at $30,000 to $50,000 per year and ultimately allow you to earn well into the six figures.

There are also a growing number of less formal education alternatives. These include self-directed career readiness and learning programs, informal office apprenticeships, boot camps, Massive Open Online Courses, or even self-directed independent learning and experience. Nor are such programs necessarily alternatives to a four-year college. They can be complements. Gap Year programs are generally intended to prepare participants to get more out of college, and community colleges can be great steppingstones into a four-year college program. Boot camps and MOOCs, meanwhile, are typically better suited as complements to, rather than substitutes for, college. Not only can they provide the hands-on skills that you do not often get in college, they may also allow you to get the type of certification that will demonstrate that a nongraduate can fill a specific job opening or that a college graduate with even the most obscure of majors (ancient African tribal arts?) can provide immediate value to a company in addition to offering long-term growth potential (Step 13).

In the end, almost everybody will need some form of postsecondary education to even get a shot at a good job. The type of education, however, depends on a combination of your own learning style, your objectives, the published and informal requirements of the specific job, your financial situation and your family, and other obligations. But whatever type of education you choose, it is up to you to ensure that you develop the life skills you will require for long-term career success, in addition to the practical skills you require for a specific job (Step 14). After all, as Harvard education expert Tony Wagner says, the world no longer cares how much you know; the world cares about what you can do with what you know.” “To succeed in the 21st-century economy, students must learn to analyze and solve problems, collaborate, persevere, take calculated risks, and learn from failure.”

Finding and Succeeding in Your Dream Job

Once you’ve decided what you want to do, and you have gotten the education, developed the skills, and earned the required certifications, you will be prepared to land your first job and begin making your mark on the world. But much has changed between the time you originally mapped out your career plans and the time you have completed your education. Before you begin your search you have to update your career and initial job expectations in light of market changes (Step 15), update your brand, and reengage and dramatically expand your career planning network. You must, for example, determine which specific positions will best utilize your skills and engage your passions, as well as what size and style company is best suited to you and your goals.

Since you will have thought so deeply about what you want to do, researched your options so thoroughly, designed your skills development and education programs so well, and built such as strong network, you will have dramatically improved your odds of finding your dream (or at least your safety) job. But before you jump at your first offer, remember: Your first career-track job will be one of your most important of, and the launch pad for your career.

You must, therefore, know exactly what you want to get out of that job and the potential for achieving your goals. Among the primary questions you want to answer before you accept an offer:

• Will I enjoy the job?

• What will I learn from it?

• What advancement opportunities will it provide?

• Will the company and the job improve my marketability?

• Will it allow me to expand, enhance, and especially deepen my network?

• Will it be consistent with my lifestyle goals?

• Is the company’s culture and image consistent with my needs and values?

• Are the salary and benefits competitive?

• Would I be better off going out on my own or starting my own company?

The considerations are numerous. They are, however, eminently manageable. The best part is, the better you plan and the more thoroughly you assess your options, the more likely you are to end up in a job in which you will be able to excel and adapt to your own needs (Steps 16 and 17), and develop the type of work and life skills, network and the relationships (Steps 18 and 19) you will need through your career. And the more passionate about and the more you learn from and thrive in your work, the more likely you are to proactively search out the learning opportunities that will help you anticipate and stay ahead of the forces that will continually reshape your industry, your company, and your occupation (Step 20).

That’s it: 20 “easy” steps to building, controlling, and thriving in a career you will love and that will enable the lifestyle you want for yourself and your family.

Twenty Principles for Building Your Dream Career

This book provides a 20-step process to help you identify, prepare for, and launch a career that is built around your passion and that will enable your chosen lifestyle. So it is probably fitting that it should end with another 20-item list—a list of 20 principles for guiding you along your entire career planning process.

As I’ve discussed throughout this book, there is nothing immutable about the process or the individual steps in my 20-step plan. Most steps must be repeated continually through your entire career and many merge into others. It is, however, at these intersections where the real lessons for planning and managing your career lie. Although these lessons, or guiding principles are discussed in detail in the book, I want to briefly highlight some of the most important. These include:

Dream, but Validate: I am a great believer in building a career around your passion and your interests. After all, it takes a lot of time, effort, and determination to build a meaningful high-skill, high-value career. It’s much easier to motivate yourself to devote this effort to something you love, than it is to something that is “just a job.” Identifying your passions and interests, however, is only the first step in building a career around them. You must also objectively determine how well suited your skills are to this passion, what job opportunities are likely to be available, what are the prospects of getting these jobs, and what you have to do (education, credentials, experience, etc.) to maximize your odds. You then have to put in the work not only to prepare yourself for your desired job but also to ensure that you are more qualified and prepared than are the thousands of others who are trying to get that same job. After all, nobody is going to hire you for your passion. They will only hire you for the value you can bring to them. Remember also that passions change. Even if you do get the job of your dreams, those who focus on preparing for a career around your passion without honing the broad skills required to succeed in multiple careers are mortgaging their futures.

Hedge your Dream Career with a Safety Career: Preparing for the career of your dreams is great. But there is something worse than not getting your dream job: it is not being able to get any job (or at least any meaningful job) at all. Unless your dream career has close to a 100 percent employment rate, and provides for lifetime employment, you need to also prepare for a safety career that takes into account your skills and interests in an area in which there are plenty of good jobs (nursing, accounting, sales, software development, etc.), and in a field for which you have a passion. Make your dream career your mission, but make your safety career your insurance policy or your parachute. It will multiply your prospects for getting a career-track job out of school and provide an alternative in case you don’t get your dream job, or discover that it is not quite as dreamy as you once thought, or that it won’t provide a lifetime of career satisfaction.

Experience Everything: You never know where you will find your next inspiration or your next passion. The more things you experience the more likely you are to discover something you love, are good at, and maybe even a new career idea. Read everything and sample all different types of classes and activities. When you find something you enjoy, dig in: learn about it, practice it. It may turn into your next dream or safety career option, or maybe just a hobby. Even if not, the experience will help you better hone in on what you do and do not enjoy, and what you are and are not good at. And you never know when some obscure type of knowledge or skill that you develop in a random activity may come in useful in the future. This being said, while you should spend your entire life searching for new experiences, you also have to know when to choose an area on which you do want to focus and dedicate the time and effort to “become an expert.”

Know What You Want From Your PostSecondary Education. It is a waste of time and money to treat college as an extension of your adolescence. If you don’t know what you want out of a college education or aren’t ready to put in the effort required to learn, you’re probably better off with finding an apprenticeship position, taking a detour through community college, or postponing school in favor of structured gap year program. Even Google, once obsessed with degrees, GPAs, and test scores, now acknowledges that these are not good predictors of success. In addition to coding ability, it now seeks employees with cognitive abilities (including the ability to learn and process information on the fly, pull together disparate bits of information, ask the right questions, and think predictively); emergent leadership capabilities (not in directing people, but the ability to work productively and effectively as a member of the team); intellectual humility (as in willingness to admit mistakes and embrace better ideas of others); willingness to own problems (regardless of their cause); adaptability; and the love of learning.

Don’t Treat College as a Trade School: If you choose to go to a four-year college, you should certainly consider employment prospects as an important factor in deciding which college, major, and courses you should choose. You should, after all, approach potential employers with an actual practical skill, in addition to developable potential. That, however, does not mean that all of your coursework should focus on career preparation. Employers often contend that although many preprofessional programs do arm graduates with good knowledge of their specific discipline, they often lack the critical and creative thinking, writing, and complex communication skills and the interdisciplinary perspectives of those of liberal arts grads. True, liberal arts (and especially humanities) programs have been much maligned for producing graduates with lower employment prospects and lower salaries than for those with professional or preprofessional degree. Studies, however, show that these differences generally disappear by mid-career. They can also be mitigated with a professionally focused minor, boot camp certificate, or especially graduate degree. But even if you do choose a profession-specific program, integrating liberal arts into your major is likely to deliver greater career (not to speak of life) benefits than the next incremental professional course that you may add to a business or STEM major.

Consider Safe Career Bets: You can build a career in virtually any field in which you have a passion. This being said, your safest bets for finding a good job (either as your dream or safety career) lie in fields that offer the greatest growth prospects and face a shortage of workers with specific skills. While most such jobs require bachelor or, in the case of healthcare, advanced degrees, a number require less than a bachelor’s degree (nursing has a minimum requirement of an associate’s degree) or no degree at all. Coding and math skills can be learned anywhere and basic business skills can be learned by working in a business or by enrolling in a boot camp. High-skill manufacturing (especially those jobs involving the programming and operation of computer-controlled equipment) and construction (especially carpentry, plumbing and welding) jobs, meanwhile, typically require apprenticeships and possibly certificates.

Become an Expert: If you want to get and keep a job in a field, you have to be good at what you do. But if you want to build a high-value career that you can control, you have to be great at what you do. “Greatness” is a high bar. Not only does it require a lot of skill, education, and practice, you must also be better than others who have the same goal. Focusing on a specialty is one of the best ways of achieving mastery. This does not mean that you should strive to become a “microspecialist” in the narrowest, most obscure niche that you can find. You will find greater long-term opportunities and add more value to your company and your clients by being an interdisciplinary “macrospecialist” who combines deep (but not necessarily expert-level) knowledge and skills in two or three complementary fields that you can integrate in a way that allows you to come up with insights or approaches for exploring problems that others do not see.

Search for Breaking Waves: It is often easier for people (especially those with less traditional backgrounds) to get a job in a rapidly growing emerging field, than in a mature or shrinking field. First, emerging fields create more new job opportunities than do mature fields. Moreover, these employers are more open to employees with nontraditional backgrounds, and such fields generally offer more opportunities for advancement and a better chance for you to shape your job around your own particular interests and skills. The good news is that new fields are being created every day. Some of the most promising candidates include artificial intelligence, robotics, genomic medicine, Big Data analysis, wearable computers, mobile, digital medical devices, cloud computing, nanotechnology, 3D printing, and virtually any field which can find new uses for or better utilize the capabilities of ever cheaper and more powerful technologies.

Develop Skills over Content: Learning facts has always been overrated. This is becoming especially true now that virtually any fact or any type of information is now available at the click of a mouse. The real value, as explained by Harvard’s Tony Wagner, is in “what you can do with what you know.” But now that technology and offshoring increasingly perform many traditional cognitive jobs better and less expensively than U.S. workers, you have to look to even higher value skills to give you an edge. Although you still need core skills (reading, writing, IT, statistics, and so forth) your differentiation and value will come from higher level skills including critical thinking, problem identification and problem solving, creativity, conceptual synthesis, interdisciplinary analysis, and complex communication.

Master the Habits of Success: High-level skills are certainly critical for success. However, they are not sufficient. A number of personality traits may be even more important. These include flexibility, adaptability, initiative, self-direction, accountability, responsibility, integrity, the self-control required to defer gratification, and perhaps most importantly, persistence. It requires the ability to not only bounce back from inevitable failures but also to learn from these failures and to adapt your approach. It also requires a delicate, ever-changing balance between persistence and flexibility to allow you to recognize when it is best to redouble your focus and efforts, and when it may be best to pivot to Plan B, or as discussed later, possibly even to Plan Z.

Exceed Everybody’s Expectations: When you get a job, don’t just do the job, do a great job. You must certainly do everything your employer asks, but you must do it better and faster than she expects. Then show her how much more value you can provide by applying these same skills to other jobs that you identify. One of the best ways of exceeding expectations (beyond hard work) is by continually demonstrating a perspective that transcends that of your specific job or department: one that demonstrates that you have an understanding of the goals of your entire company, the dynamics of its industry (as well those that currently touch, or are likely to touch your industry), and hopefully, the broader social, economic, or political milieu in which your company operates.

Own Your Professional Brand: Whether you plan for it or not, you will be branded by how you are perceived. Although you can’t control all aspects of your brand, the more you can define and shape it, the better your chances that your brand will help rather than hinder your career. Be proactive in creating a brand around your own aspirations, skills, and strengths—build a brand that not only shows what you have done in the past but also shows how the disparate, and perhaps random experiences that have shaped your life all work together to make you the ideal person for the job to which you aspire. Once you define your brand, continually evolve it, adding to it as you develop new skills and repositioning it as your visions of your next job and long-term career trajectory change.

Sell Thyself: Fame, especially in today’s world of reality shows, social networking, and viral videos, can come from anywhere, at any time. But when it comes to building your career, you can’t count on the market’s whimsy. You have to continually promote yourself and your brand to potential employers, clients, and partners. No, don’t blatantly hawk your brand like a two-bit barker at a county fair sideshow. You have to market yourself subtly and discretely. Leave behind a trail of good work; create a reputation as a good team member and leader; build a network of previous mentors, managers, co-workers, clients, and acquaintances, who have an interest in promoting you and the value you can bring to a job or an organization. Although this network must certainly include the broad business-focused social media networks (such as LinkedIn), the real power comes from the type of deep networks you build from former and current managers, references, mentors, and sponsors.

Plan, But Don’t Over Plan: Just as you must find a delicate balance between persistence and flexibility, you must also find one between planning and spontaneity. On one hand, you have to always know where you want to go and the steps that you must take to get there. But you also have to understand when enough is enough. If, after repeated attempts and tweaks, Plan A just can’t gain traction, it may be best to modify your approach to Plan B, and, just in case, have a worst-case fallback position—a Plan Z. Good planning, after all, is all about creating options for yourself. And the more options you create, the more likely you are to be presented with new opportunities of which you have never dreamed: An unanticipated call from a previous boss who just got a job at a new company or a friend of a friend of a friend who is starting a new company in a promising new field. Not that you should take every new opportunity that comes up, but you should certainly evaluate every option, regardless of how far from your original plan.

Become an Entrepreneur: Even if you don’t have a burning desire to hang out your own shingle, you must always be prepared to do so. You may, after all, get laid off during a terrible job market or you may decide to leave a long-time employer after being passed over for a new position that should have gone to you. Or one day, you may come up with a business idea that is too promising to pass up. Whatever the reason, an estimated 40 percent of all U.S. workers are expected to be contingent workers within five years. You must keep your options open. And the more opportunities you have for creating new revenue streams, the more options you will have. This requires that you maintain a solid brand that can be leveraged into your own company or a freelance business; a network of potential references and clients; and a core set of sales, marketing, financial, and organizational skills. Even if you never use these entrepreneurial skills in your own business, they are likely to be helpful in just about any job you have, regardless of the size or nature of the organization.

Complement Machines: Don’t Compete with Them: Computers are becoming small and inexpensive enough to be used everywhere and powerful enough to do virtually everything. Just as it has become impossible to out-power factory machines or to be more precise and reliable than a robot at certain jobs, it will become equally impossible to outthink computers at virtually anything they are programmed to do. It’s a fool’s errand to deny or to seek to compete with microprocessor-based computers and machines over the long term. You will have far more opportunities, and have far greater earning potential by doing something that machines can’t do (as long as you are prepared for the day when they will be able to do even that), by using the machines to help you do your job better than that can be done by people alone, or by helping machines do their jobs more effectively. Better yet, you can design the machines that will be capable of doing new jobs or develop the programs that will allow them to master new skills.

Don’t Fall into the Salary Trap: All too many college students consider salary to be the single most important criterion in assessing a potential job and employer. However, taking and remaining in a job for the money is one of the most frequently cited career regrets of accomplished mid-career professionals. Taking a job for the salary is particularly dangerous trap for your first job out of school, where you should be much more focused on factors including what you will learn, what you will enjoy, the opportunities for advancement, and for enhancing your long-term marketability.

Embrace and Learn from Failure: Failure is a necessary component of success. Every failure is—or at least should be—a learning experience. As Thomas Edison famously said, “I have not failed 1,000 times. I have successfully discovered 1,000 ways to NOT make a light bulb.” So valuable are the lessons of failure that some venture capital firms are more inclined to invest in a founder that has failed than in one who has not. Failure tests—and is critical in—building resolve and resilience. The ability to learn from failure demonstrates adaptability. It is also an important marker of ambition. If you haven’t failed at a significant undertaking, it suggests that you haven’t really stretched yourself; that you are not comfortable in venturing outside your comfort zone.

Invent Your Own Jobs: This is one of the most important and inclusive themes in this book. It allows you to engage your skills around your interests and passions, extend your brand in directions in which you want to take it, and to further develop and promote your specialty—all while maximizing the value you deliver to employers and clients. True, you will be hard pressed to find an employer who will allow you to define your own job (especially in one of your first jobs out of school). However, once you have proven your capabilities and understand the needs of the organization, you may be in a position to identify a pressing company need that you are ideally suited to address. In addition to directly helping you and your employer, it will also demonstrate your enthusiasm and entrepreneurialism and provide a high-profile opportunity to prove yourself. And who knows, once you’ve honed your skills, achieved your objectives, and cataloged demonstrable achievements, you may even be able to sell your value proposition to a new employer or package it in a way that you can deliver it to multiple clients as a consultant or a packaged offering.

Continually Reinvent Yourself: In the not too distant past, you could learn to do your job once and keep doing the same thing, over and over again for your entire career. True, it may not be a very interesting existence and it wouldn’t put you on a fast track for promotion, but it could allow you to keep your job and your paycheck. Today’s world, of course, changes far too rapidly to tolerate such stasis. You must, at the very least, keep up with changes in your field and adapt to changing organizational requirements. More importantly, you must continually survey the landscape for any type of change, no matter how far from your core business, if you are to anticipate emerging competitive threats (such as the threat that online bookseller Amazon would come to pose to electronics and grocery stores), identify new business opportunities, or identify a new way of changing the rules against competitors. Continual learning is also required to keep your skills current, to develop new skills to qualify you for new positions, to forecast and prepare for changes in your own company and industry, and to identify new employment or business opportunities in emerging new fields.

Taking Charge of Your Life

Turning your dream career into reality requires a lot more than conceiving of dream and safety careers, coming up with an education and a career plan, and getting your first job. It also requires a lot of self-reflection, determination, initiative, and adaptability. And regardless of how much you put into it, there’s no guarantee that your plan will work as you hope.

There is, however, one guarantee. If you diligently follow a logical set of steps in choosing your career and then work to develop the skills you will need for it, you will have a big advantage not only in getting a good career-track job out of school but also in building the foundation for a rewarding, high-value career doing what you love. The very process will be a journey of self-discovery through which you identify your real skills and interests, understand what does and does not motivate you, and discover what you really want out of your career and your life.

Just as importantly, the very process of planning and executing this plan will help you develop many of the skills and attributes that will be required in every stage of your education and career. It all comes down to creating a plan, doggedly working that plan, and continually adapting it on the basis of experience and new evidence (all while remaining open to the type of unanticipated, serendipitous opportunities that make it worthwhile to change even the best plans).

In case you missed it, each of the steps in this book’s 20-step process has a common requirement: You!

Don’t get me wrong. Nobody can create and build a career all by themselves. You need the help of others through every step of the process. For example, you need help in evaluating your skills, identifying weaknesses you should address, understanding and evaluating potential careers, and meeting people who can explain career opportunities in your chosen field or even offer you a job. You should look for professors who can guide your academic interests and suggest career opportunities, attract mentors and sponsors who can help open new career doors, and friends and acquaintances to keep you in mind if they hear of interesting opportunities in other departments and companies.

But no matter how much help you need, you can’t count on other people or institutions to define and prepare you for, much less to manage your career for you. You certainly can’t count on them to identify your dream!

Heck, most schools haven’t yet fully agreed on the types of skills you will need to succeed in the new world, much less how to most effectively teach these skills. Even the most prescient of economists can’t always predict forthcoming economic shifts or recessions or the most far-sighted of business executives anticipate challenges that have the potential of obsoleting their companies or their industries.

So regardless of how much you look to institutions or individuals for help, in the end, you must take responsibility for defining your own dream; for identifying your own career objectives; for ensuring that you develop the skills and get the education required to achieve these objectives; and for managing your own career.

This is as it should be. After all, if you don’t take responsibility for your dream, your career and your life, who will?