CHAPTER 5

Discovering Your Passions, Your Skills, and Yourself

Steps 1 and 2

The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.

—Mark Twain

To paraphrase Confucius, every journey starts with the first step. Sometimes, this first step is the most difficult. So get the hard part behind you and begin the journey. This chapter will guide you through the first two steps of designing and building a rewarding career. After a brief overview of different ways of thinking about your career, it suggests ways in which you can begin identifying the types of passions around which you can build a career that you will love. Just as importantly, it discusses the importance of continually expanding your interests as a means of finding new passions and of identifying complementary career opportunities. It then examines the critical link between passions, interests, and skills and how a viable career plan requires the melding of all three.

This requires an inventory and objective analysis of your skills and limitations, and a plan to proactively develop your skills (especially by applying them to your passions) and address or compensate for your weaknesses.

Then, in case you are finding it difficult to identify, assess, and prioritize your passions, interests, and skills, the last section provides a partial list of some of the many resources that can help you through the process.

What Do You Want to Be?

You can take many different approaches to identifying potential career directions while you are still in school. You can, for example:

1. Roll the dice, as by taking whatever courses are easiest, that your friends take, or are of interest, but with no real idea or plan as to where they will take you. Then when you finish school, applying for any job that is open.

2. Drift into a career (as I first did) by identifying something that sounds interesting (such as law or medicine) and, without deeply exploring what a career in this field actually entails, assessing the employment prospects, or following a prescribed set of steps for preparing for that career;

3. Keep your options open by preparing for multiple careers, and then deciding, toward the end of school, which way to go;

4. Follow your passion wherever it may lead and focus on developing your skills in the area, with the expectation that once you get good enough, you will find a way of turning that passion into a career;

5. Objectively plan for a career by identifying the fields that are most likely to offer the best job prospects and then diligently prepare for and pursue an entry position in your field; or

6. Identify what you are good at and love to do, explore a broad range of options for careers in that field and then prepare for a few related jobs—all while simultaneously gaining exposure to other fields and disciplines and developing skills (as via minors, dual majors, or grad school) in multiple areas of interest.

There is no real right approach and each has pluses and minuses. Option one is certainly the easiest. It is, however, also the most likely to result in a “career” of standing in lines at the unemployment office. However, even with this approach you can “luck” into an ideal job and career.

The other five options also have advantages and disadvantages. While option two worked for me in the mid-1970s, it is much more problematic in a time of high unemployment, slow growth, and intense competition for the best jobs. Option three may also yield success, while simultaneously providing you with the type of multi-disciplinary perspective that will serve you well in your life and your career. However, it could also put you at a disadvantage relative to others who have single-mindedly pursued a particular course of study and who demonstrate demonstrable skills in and a commitment to the field in which they are looking for a job.

Option four can provide the incentive and the discipline required to master a set of skills. It, however, also has dangers, such as in limiting the number of fields and experiences to which you are exposed and by leaving all of your eggs in a single basket that may not offer employment opportunities. Say, for example, that your passion is basketball; but you don’t grow taller than 5′2″ and can’t dribble or hit a free throw to save your life.

What’s the value of single-mindedly pursuing a passion if it won’t lead to a job? Or if you find out that your “dream job” comes with a number of day-to-day responsibilities that you don’t enjoy or aren’t very good at? Or that, after years of single-minded, diligent preparation, you discover another passion that turns out to be even more compelling, but in which you have not developed the required skills?

Overall, options five and six are the most likely to prepare you for a job in your chosen field. Option five may provide the best chance of getting a good job out of school, but at what cost? Committing to a particular course of study too soon could foreclose your options. Worse still, it could prevent you from searching for or identifying even better options.

Option five also has more pragmatic drawbacks. No matter how much diligence you exercise in finding a career that offers the best employment prospect, who has a clear crystal ball to guarantee that the job market will actually turn out as anticipated? And even if it does, will it result in a job you will enjoy—not only initially but also over the course of your entire career? After all, how many adults do you or your parents know that have become locked into a career they had single-mindedly pursued only to find that their one-time passion burned out and they are stuck with a job that has become a chore.

Option six also has the inherent drawback of being a compromise solution. It invites you to spread your time and efforts so thinly that you don’t develop sufficient skills in your primary area of interest. It is an attempt to thread the needle—pursuing a passion, while simultaneously keeping your options open: Focusing on this passion while simultaneously exploring and developing other interests and skills: Balancing your passion with the realities of the cold, cruel job market. But if you carefully plan, you can take this path to pursuing your dream while simultaneously providing the foundation for one or two safety careers (see Chapter 6 that may provide greater potential of landing a job in a field that is closely aligned with your passion.

But no matter how carefully and thoroughly you plan, as 18th-century philosopher David Hume once said: “Stercus Sccidit,” which is Latin for “Shit happens!”

You will always run into unanticipated obstacles. Say you diligently prepared for and got the job of your dreams, but what if that career path you had so carefully crafted is suddenly blocked or eliminated by an industry-wide restructuring? What if the job is offshored or, more likely, eliminated or totally transformed by technology?

Getting a good job out of school is tough enough. Building a high-value and sustainable career doing something you love is even tougher. Still, you have to attempt to accomplish both of these goals in an era of unprecedented volatility, where assumptions and rules can change overnight.

This requires a diligent pursuit of your goals, but also the flexibility to adapt to changing circumstances. It requires an idealistic pursuit of your aspirations, but also brutal realism in assessing your prospects.

Finding Your Interests and Passions (Step 1)

Regardless of what career you hope to pursue, your first step should be get to know yourself: Who are you? What are your passions, your interests, your skills, and your weaknesses?

Why should this the first step in identifying and planning a rewarding career? It all goes back to one of the most valuable life lessons I ever learned from my father who told me to:

Find a way of doing what you love. You will you enjoy your work and you will do it much better than something you don’t love.

I built upon this and added my own tweak to his advice:

Identify your skills and weave them into your passions in a way that will establish you as a highly differentiated, high-value “brand.”

But passions are double-edged swords. When carefully nurtured, developed, and managed, they can bring meaning and joy to your life and your career. If not, they can lead to a spiral of hedonistic disaster, as by using them as a justification for blindly following a path that is highly unlikely to ever lead to a career or personal fulfillment. You must keep your eyes open and maintain a genuine willingness to learn from and adapt to your experiences.

The first step is to identify your passion—and hopefully, your passions. In an ideal world, you should begin identifying, diligently pursuing, and building a solid foundation around your interests and passions when you are in middle school. But even if you are well past that point in school, it is never too late for you to figure out exactly who you are, what your skills are, and what you love to do. The problem with beginning late is that it will probably take a lot of work and much time to hone your skills in your chosen field and develop the background you will need to compete for your dream job with those who had a head start in preparing themselves.

But whenever you begin, identifying your passions is a great first step, not only in identifying a career that will allow you to pursue and live that passion but also in developing the skills and the personal attributes you will need to succeed. And if your passions change? No problem! The very act of diligently pursuing your passion (whatever that passion may be) will help you develop skills and especially many of the critical personal attributes (initiative, self-direction, perseverance, adaptability, curiosity, and so forth) that, as discussed in Chapter 3, will be required for success in virtually any career or careers in which you eventually find yourself.

Forget for the time being about practicality and your ability to find a job in the field in which you have a passion. That comes later. Don’t limit yourself to “practical” interests or even things you can do now, or are ever likely to be able to do. Do you love to play music or basketball, but know you will never be good enough to play professionally? No problem. Do you think you would love to travel, even if you have never left your home town? That’s fine. So too are things such as spending time with friends and family, or even playing videogames or keeping up with friends on Twitter. Think broadly—as if there were no limits to what you might be able to do.

And if nothing quite qualifies as a passion, what interests do you have? Do any of them have the potential of becoming passions?

Don’t yet have a passion or deep interest? Find one! You can focus on and begin to develop some of your current interests that have the potential of growing into passions. You can look for new experiences that may, once you learn more about them, evolve into passions.

Where do you begin your search? Everywhere. Think about subjects that you enjoy in school, hobbies, extracurricular activities, jobs of family members or acquaintances, things you read about or see on television or on the Internet that you find interesting.

Now that you may have identified things that might intrigue you, how do you narrow it down? By asking yourself a few questions:

• What do I currently do when I have some free time or extra money?

• What would I most want to do if I could do anything I wanted for a full day? For a month? For a year?

• What are the things that I do in which I “lose myself”—
get so involved and interested in what I am doing that I lose track of time or lose consciousness of what is going on around me?

• What are the things in which I am most driven to excel?

• What do I consider my single, most overriding passion? What secondary and tertiary passions?

• What other things do I enjoy?

• What are the types of things that I used to love doing, but in which I have lost interest or no longer have the time?

• What other areas do I find of interest that may have the potential of becoming passions if I were able to explore them?

Running out of ideas? Think broadly. Ask friends and family what they see as your passions, your interests. Don’t limit yourself. As I discuss in the next chapter, many of the best career plans may be based on a combination of two or even three interests and passions.

Brainstorming to create a list of what your passions are or may be in the future is relatively easy. Now it becomes a little more difficult. Take your list and rank them, from those that you are most passionate about to those that have the potential of being passions in the future.

Then comes the more difficult part—what specifically is it about each of these passions that you most enjoy? That most inspires you? That most drives you to excel?

If you get a particular type of self-satisfaction from doing something well, exactly what is that “something”? Is it the satisfaction of solving a complex problem? Learning new things? Developing mastery? Escaping from the demands of day-to-day-life? Gaining the respect and admiration of friends, families, or teachers? The more specific you can get about the rewards you get from pursuing each of these passions, the better. For example, if you get satisfaction out of solving problems, what type of problems? Qualitative, quantitative, physical, or social?

And what is it about doing these things that you most like? Is it the act itself? A particular component of the act? Or is it the self-satisfaction or the external validation you get from accomplishing something? All, as you will see, are important questions that you must think about.

Great start. Now it’s time for some matching exercises:

• What are the commonalities or similarities among these passions?

• What are the common themes among the types of satisfaction I gain?

• Which types of satisfaction do I find most rewarding?

• What other things that I do or enjoy provide similar types of satisfaction?

• Are there any other areas beyond my current passions and interests that I think have the potential of providing similar types of satisfaction?

Exploring and Nurturing New Interests (Step 1, Continued)

By now you may have narrowed down your passions and interests and think you are ready to write your career plan. Right? Wrong! First, don’t be afraid to continually reassess your passions as you have new experiences. After all, your life is just beginning. Once you leave the confines of school and enter the “real world”—and especially if you move from one country to another country, or from a small city to a large city—you will be exposed to far more experiences and stimuli than you can imagine.

When I completed graduate school and moved from Syracuse, New York, to Chicago, Illinois, for my first professional job, it was like a rebirth. I was exposed to so many new cultural, social, work, and academic experiences that the number of my interests exploded. I developed lifelong passions in areas that I had not previously heard of, much less learned about or experienced. The interests I developed over the first 24 years of my life were swept away, many never to resurface. From hindsight, many seemed to be insignificant in comparison with my new interests.

Not only did these new experiences enrich my life, they totally transformed my career—away from tax law to marketing consulting in the still emerging computer industry. And this is for somebody that hated, and barely passed the only computer programming course I had been required to take.

My wife, meanwhile, could have never dreamed that her initial passion for teaching French would have ever transformed into one for retail marketing, or that she would develop an even longer career in helping professional services companies plan and finance their growth.

Nor did either of us imagine that our few high school and college trips would morph into a consuming passion for global travel, or that lunches at McDonalds would evolve into passions for fine food and wine. And where did our interests in art, theater, and architecture come from? Or my fascination with international business and political science (which led me to yet another graduate degree)?

The point is, no matter how much you think you have experienced, and no matter how consumed you are with your current interests and passions, you don’t know what you don’t know. The more you search for and embrace the opportunity to experience new things, the more interests and passions you will discover.

This search for new interests and experiences is, and certainly should be, a lifelong mission. At no time in your life, however, it is more important than when you are young. It is at that age that you have the best opportunity to nurture these interests into passions, to study and build extracurricular activities around them, to meet new people and learn of the opportunities for careers in their field, and to develop the type of resume that will give you a leg up over less prepared applicants for scholarships, fellowships, internships, and, of course, jobs.

But why focus all this time and effort on a passion or interest that may be a flash in the pan? Something that may be superseded by your next big interest? For many reasons, including:

• You never know where this focus and effort may lead. Even if you lose interest in it, it may spark an interest in something else;

• You may meet new and interesting people;

• Persistence, especially to the extent that it results in some type of accomplishment or mastery of skills, is a great addition to your resume (especially one in the form of a digital portfolio); and most importantly

• The journey, as Greek philosopher Homer said, is often its own reward. The very process of rigorously pursuing your passion provides purpose and helps you develop the 21st-century skills and traits you will need for career success: especially traits such as self-motivation, initiative, discipline, persistence, and, if you use your focus to continually push your personal boundaries, patience, self-control, and resilience (see Chapter 3).

This, however, is not to suggest that you should find a passion and then focus all your energies on it. While single-minded commitment to one and only one thing may pay-off for a handful of incredibly talented people, it can foreclose more opportunities than it opens. It can make you one-dimensional, limit the perspective required to make informed and balanced decisions, and severely constrict the size and scope of the social network that, as discussed in Chapter 9, is so critical in finding and capturing job opportunities. As with virtually anything, you must balance focus against a continual quest for new experiences and the development of skills in a broad range of areas.

You should, of course, look at school as an opportunity to develop the knowledge and the core skills that will be required for success in any field. You must, however, also look at school (and indeed, your entire life) as a means of exploring as many new areas as possible to discover a broad range of interests and passions—then to drill more and more deeply into a few.

Why drill down into a few interests, rather than just one? First, as mentioned, it will make you a better rounded person and often lead to a richer life. More pragmatically, a thoughtful combination of disciplines can, as discussed in Chapter 6, be one of your most effective strategies for building yourself into the type of high-value, differentiated brand that will maximize your chances of providing value to an employer or client, and of controlling your own career. And of course, pursuit of secondary and tertiary interests can also serve as a hedge in case you lose interest in the first.

On the other hand, an attempt to focus on too many interests is no focus at all. The whole point of focus is to allow you to drill down into a particular area—to dive beneath the surface to discover hidden secrets and ideally achieve some level of mastery.

But before jumping from passions and interests into career choices, you have to take a slight detour through reality. Although passions and interests are a great way to engage your interests, they do not provide a sufficient foundation on which you can build an entire career plan. The next step, and in some ways the most critical, is to objectively assess your skills, your aptitudes, and your personality.

Who are you? What are your greatest strengths, your weaknesses? What is your nature or personality type? Such questions are profoundly important in helping you understand not just what you enjoy, but what you are or can be good at, and in what type of careers you are likely to have the greatest chances for success.

Skills as the Critical Link Between Dreams and Reality (Step 2)

So, you’ve explored the passions that get you up in the morning and the interests that occupy your days. That’s a good start in your quest for a potential career. Unfortunately, passion alone does not make a career path.

Remember the boy who has a passion to play basketball, but is only 5′2″ and can’t shoot? His chances of making a living by playing basketball are somewhere between zero and nil. But does this mean that he should forget about basketball and his passion for the game? Not at all. You don’t have to be a great player to be a great coach. Or if not a coach, an official, a trainer, a sports doctor, a player’s agent or lawyer, or an accountant or marketer in a team’s front office. Your opportunities to play the game may be limited to occasional pick-up games (like those of Barack Obama), but you can still build your career and even live your life around this passion, and be an integral part of the sport you love, albeit in a somewhat different role than you originally planned.

The same holds true for most other high-value professions. Not everybody can be a doctor, an astronaut, or a movie star. Anybody, however, can develop a professional career around these professions: a career that allows you to be deeply involved in similar work and experience similar types of job satisfaction. And who knows, just your very involvement in the music industry and day-to-day work with artists and producers may even improve your chances of being discovered. Training and working as a nurse or a nurse practitioner may help prepare you for and ease your way into medical school. Or maybe, after working as a nurse, you may decide that you prefer the personal relationships you can form with your patients over the very different rewards of being a doctor. Or perhaps you discover that your interests lie more in, and that your skills are better suited to being a hospital administrator. Or, who knows, maybe a patient, so impressed with your knowledge, your dedication, and your empathy, may offer you a job in her new start-up company.

In fact, one career book author, Cal Newport contends that most people’s passions can’t be readily transformed into dream jobs. He believes it is best to find something you are good at, work at it to get even better, and then trade your “career capital” in for the lifestyle you want.1 Dilbert creator Scott Adams goes even further, insisting that “passion is bullshit”: that you to have a greater chance of success, and indeed are likely to more enjoy pursuing a career in a field in which you have skills, than one for which you have a passion.2 The logic is that doing something well results in self-satisfaction and recognition by others. This, as mentioned above, creates a self-reinforcing feedback loop through which you will come to love what you do well. Fruitless pursuit of a passion for which you do not have the requisite skills can become demoralizing drudgery.

On one hand, I agree that finding something you are good at can be a great start to developing a career. Moreover, success can turn into a passion. On the other hand, being good at something does not necessarily mean you will enjoy doing it, or that you will have the temperament to do it every day. In my mind, it is better to find a way of applying your skills to your passion, rather than hoping passion will somehow emerge. After all, the idea is to find something to which you will dedicate the time and the effort to develop competence, and eventually, mastery. It’s a lot easier to motivate yourself to mastering something you love, than to something you know you should or have to do. After all, if author Malcolm Gladwell is right, the key to success in virtually any task, be it surgery, pitching a baseball, or playing a violin, is to practice that task for at least 10,000 hours.3 That’s a lot of time to devote to something you don’t enjoy.

Besides, I believe that it is possible to build a financially, as well as a psychically rewarding career around virtually any passion. Some may be much more difficult and take far more work than others, but if you get good enough at your passion, explore enough options, and build a really good network, you can dramatically improve your chances. No, you may not have the skills required to play first violin in a world-renowned symphony orchestra, but you may well be able to pursue your passion (and possibly even earn a living) by playing in a local string quartet. Besides, even if you don’t ultimately succeed, do you really want to go through life continually wondering if you could have done it?

Passion, especially if based on skills and honed through practice, is great. But just in case you can’t earn a living, or decide that you can be just as happy playing music for yourself or for friends, you should also seriously consider preparing for a reliable safety career (possibly doing something in the music industry)—ideally one based on some combination of your other skills. (See for example, my Chapter 6 discussion of contingency planning and safety careers.)

But, while I generally disagree with Adams and Newport as to the value of pursuing your passion, I totally do agree with Newport’s advice that:

If you experience and develop skills in enough new things, you will find it, or just as likely, it will find you. So pursue your interests while aggressively exploring others. In fact, set an annual agenda of at least five or six new things you want to experience, plus another five or six that you want to learn about or do over the next year—continually monitoring your progress and ensuring you address your goals. Set goals aggressively. Not just dabble in something, but to really learn it.4

But I digress. The point is that passion and interests are only one part of a complex equation that you—and you alone—must solve to identify and launch yourself on the career path of your dreams. You must also determine for which type of role your skills and temperament are best suited.

Identifying and Validating Your Skills (Step 2 Continued)

Your first step in assessing your skills, like that in assessing your passions, is to determine exactly what you think your skills are. Not that your own assessment is necessarily objective or correct, but it is a good starting place. So, just what do you believe you’re good at?

• Which subjects do you enjoy or do well at in school? What capabilities and attributes do you think make you particularly good in these fields (in addition to enjoying them)? Pay particular attention to things at which you are good, but do not particularly enjoy. Why are you good at it (innate aptitude, shear determination, etc.), what about it do you not enjoy (too rigid a methodology, too much memorization, etc.)? Hopefully, if you can discover why you don’t like something, and work with parents and teachers to find a way around this issue, you can turn a strength into an interest, and possibly even a passion. While it may not necessarily become the foundation of your career path, an interest in something you do well can always be leveraged into an advantage, somewhere down the line.

• Which sports? Do you have any particular skill in this area, such as speed, agility, anticipating teammate or competitor actions, anticipating which plays are appropriate, team leadership, and so forth? If so, you can probably leverage them into other activities, including some that may offer better career prospects than professional sports. Even if not, disciplined pursuit of a sport can always help you develop some of the career skills discussed in Chapter 3: skills such as teamwork, responsibility, adaptability and persistence.

• Which school and extracurricular activities—class leadership, yearbook, theater, photography, and so forth? What do you do particularly well in these activities?

• Do you work? Which jobs and at which parts of these jobs do you think you are particularly strong?

• Do you have any particular social skills? Meeting and establishing friendships with a wide range of people, public speaking, working in teams, leading groups, empathy, and so forth?

• Do you feel you have any attributes that are of particular help in your schoolwork, hobbies, and day-to-day life? Curiosity, planning, perseverance, organization?

• What about attitudes? Are you outgoing, thoughtful, usually know the right thing to say in a difficult situation, optimistic, and so forth?

• What do others think you’re good at? Ask your friends, family members, and especially objective third parties, such as teachers, coaches, and managers for their opinions—they might surprise you!

Identifying what you believe to be strengths is a good start. It is, however, only a start.

What are the particular aspects of a skill at which you excel? Why do you think you are good at each of these? What are the commonalities or linkages among these strengths?

Say, for example, that you are good at golf. What does that mean? Do you have good hand–eye coordination? Are you patient and thoughtful about planning your shots? Are you diligent in reading about and practicing the game? Are you good at forming meaningful relationships with others in your foursomes or on your team?

What else do you enjoy and are you good at? Reading, writing, math, science, acting?

Next, go through the same type of exercise to assess your limitations. Yes, everybody has some—even you.

Self-assessment is always a good starting point. But let’s face it, no one can be totally objective in assessing themselves, especially their faults and limitations. You must, therefore, look for objective, nonbiased help in discovering, or at least in validating, your limitations. This means you have to ask. After all, while people may spontaneously mention or complement you on your strengths, few will volunteer their views of your limitations.

Your parents, siblings, friends, and relatives may be a good starting point. However, even if they are objective in identifying and judging your limitations, they may be tempted to shade the truth, to complement you, or to not offend you. Therefore, you must seek feedback from others that do not have these types of vested interests. What do your teachers say? Your coaches? Your employers? Your guidance counselors? What other people know you well enough to assess your strengths and limitations in particular areas—and are willing to tell you the truth?

If few friends will volunteer to tell you about your weaknesses, even fewer third-parties will do so. Explain what you are looking for and ask for their help. You can, for example, tell them that you are trying to do a self-assessment of your skills and limitations as part of your efforts to think about college and career goals.

But rather than putting them on the spot and having them provide off-the-cuff responses, it may be best to give them time to think about it. Ask if you can set an appointment.

When you do sit down with them, begin with general, open-ended questions, rather than lead them in a particular direction. For example, ask what they see as your strengths; your limitations? What do they think you do well and what skills do you have to work on? Then, after they give their opinions as to your strengths and limitations, drill down. Ask for examples of how they saw this. Ask what areas of study and what types of careers they think may best employ your skills. You can then ask specifically about strengths and limitations that you see in yourself, or that others have already brought up.

Asking is important. It is even more important that you recognize that anyone that is willing to give you an honest assessment is doing you a huge favor. Do not—I repeat “DO NOT”—get defensive, make excuses, or begin to argue with them. Instead, ask them to explain and give examples, ask for any recommendations they may have as to how you might begin to address these limitations. Then, thank them for their candor and honesty and ask if you can speak with them again after you have had a chance to think about what they have told you.

It’s then time to go home and think long, hard, and objectively about what they told you. If you agree, come up with a plan for addressing these limitations. Ask others, such as parents, guidance counselors, psychologists, or ministers how you may address them. If you disagree, or simply do not see these traits in yourself, ask others.

If these objective parties validate your own views of yourself, great. If not, you should understand why not. But remember, no matter how great they believe your strengths to be, and how great you believe they are, be sure to keep it into perspective. You may be valedictorian of your high school or all-county quarterback. But when you move on to the next level, everybody may be a high school valedictorian or all-county quarterback!

You will be required to assess your own capabilities and performance relative to others through your entire career. Significant and/or repeated errors in these assessments can lead to big disappointment, severe embarrassment, strained relationships, and can seriously limit your career.

Testing Yourself (Steps 1 and 2 Continued)

Although this chapter focuses primarily on self-assessments and the seeking of other people’s opinions, you can also find all types of tests to take to get independent validation and, hopefully, new insights into your interests, your skills, and how they can be employed. These tests include:

• Intelligence tests, such as Raven’s Progressive Matrices, Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children, Stanford-Binet, Woodcock-Johnson Tests of Cognitive Abilities, and Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children, and those from high-intelligence societies, like Mensa;

• Periodic state-administered high school exit and assessment exams5 and international PISA tests6 that compare your and your school’s performance in specific subject areas to those of students in other districts and countries;

• The dreaded SAT college admissions, ACT, college readiness assessment and graduate admission tests7 that assess your ability to apply your intelligence and learning in specific subjects, and your broad quantitative and qualitative reasoning skills as assessing your readiness for college and different graduate programs; and

• Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) tests, which assess capabilities such as critical thinking, analytical reasoning, and communication, rather than knowledge.

And for those who are less interested in specific measures of intelligence and performance relative to grade level or readiness for advanced study, there are scores of skills assessment8 and aptitude tests9 that help assess your suitability for specific occupations. Such tests can be helpful in suggesting interests and directions that you may not have considered.

Speaking of tests, there is another category of test that assesses not your intelligence, capabilities, or interests, but your personality type. Tests such as those from Caliper or Myers-Briggs assess an individual’s temperaments, predispositions, and character as a means of, in the case of Myers-Briggs, dividing people among one of 16 personality types, based on an assessment of how they fall on each of four continua:

• Extraversion or Introversion: how you relate to the world, through others or internally, through your own mind and thoughts;

• Sensing or Intuition: how one best takes in information, through their five senses or through the discerning of patterns;

• Thinking or Feeling: how you make decisions, objectively or through your own perceptions; and

• Judging or Perceiving: how you see, live in and interact with the world, via a structured or a flexible perspective.

You can use such personality types to assess your own predisposition toward and suitability for different types of professions, what type of personality types are most and least likely to work together in marriages and in partnerships, and how a parent, a manager, or a salesperson can most effectively work with children, employees, or customers based on their individual types. An entire mini-industry has grown up around Myers-Briggs, in particular, with dozens of books (I particularly recommend Please Understand Me II10) and consultants11 who specialize in these assessments and can help you assess the type of occupations for which you may be best suited or the type of education that is best suited to your particular learning style.

Now that you think you understand the areas about which you are passionate, your interests, and your strengths and limitations, you’re ready for the next step: taking an initial cut at identifying potential careers, career paths, and your own professional brand—the aspirational identity by which you hope to portray yourself to employers, managers, peers, clients, and customers.