How to find the right Career for you

There are a lot of how to guides for finding the right career for you. Many people have written long books explaining detailed processes for narrowing it down and figuring it all out. Usually this involves some kind of paper and pen list. You write down everything you like in the world, and as you do it you slowly get a better idea for what you like more than than other things. Then eventually your favorite activity is suppose to bubble up to the surface of your brain and you're happy and know exactly what you want.

In my experience, this has never worked. I have a lot of interests and they are often changing or are unrelated to each other. Also, part of what would make a great job for me would be that it changes frequently since I get bored with doing the same thing and often go through periods where I feel more or less inclined to work independently.

Another large factor in determining what I want to do is the pay. No, life is not all about money. I do have financial goals as well as bills to pay though, so as much as I'd like to pretend I don't need to think about money at all, that would be a lie.

So taking all of this into account, I present you with a new strategy. It's as simple as possible and involves no pencil and paper. Here goes...

Envision all of your hobbies that you are an active participant in doing the work beyond just being a member. For example, if you write on a forum all day, this does not count. If you have signed up to be an administer for that forum, then that would count. If you just attend meetings, that does not count. If you are on an executive committee or are helping out on projects, that counts.

Now that you know what you care enough about to actually put extra work into, merge those activities with your current job. Think about what position would use all of those skills or would combine those interests. It doesn't have to be exact, but should be related.

In order to offer more clarity, I will use myself as a demonstration.

Right now I volunteer as a coach for a basketball team, I am the Treasurer of the Toastmasters club that I belong to, I am a Lector at my church and I organize my own group for the MS walk. Since I play active roles in coaching, Toastmasters and the MS walk but am just a participant as a Lector, I will remove that from consideration. My day job is doing software development work.

So taking all this together, I should do a job involving coaching/teaching how to use or develop software and includes gathering and coordinating a group of people for a good cause.

Now, that's not a final result but without needing paper and a pen, I have a solid idea that I can use as a starting point and continue to refine. With the right direction in mind, I can either work to shape my current job into something that fits that, or try to jump to another position that is inline with my idea.

Formula for Success

It turns out that there is a very simple formula for success. It takes some understanding of a few basic theories, but once you accept then as truth and start applying them, it's just a matter of time and effort. I'll give you a brief overview.

First, you have to understand that everything in life is built on a few basic principles. As a society of human beings, we are all 99% the same with 1% difference, usually mainly projected in our physical appearance. We all need food, shelter, love and attention. We all have problems, experience a range of emotions, and have the ultimate goal of being a success at our specific interest. We are all members of different groups where we have roles and value placed on the opinions of the other members based on their roles.

Knowing this, the interplay between us is dictated by economic theory. We are managing different resources that we control, exchanging them with others for ones that they possess that we desire. The value we put on what we have versus what others have is determined by our own happiness as well as the value we place on the opinions and needs of our core group.

With these basic rules established, how do we become a success?

The initial step is to produce value. You can do this on your own on a small scale. If you leverage technology, nature or even other people, you can create consistent value on a larger scale. Once you start consistently producing value, then you just need to find individuals or groups that require what you are producing and are willing to exchange more value in return for it than it took you to produce it.

That is the formula for success in its most basic, elementary form. Specifics are not included, but once you can successfully execute every step in the process from production to delivery, then you cannot fail. It becomes a matter of improving the process to require less to produce more as well as either finding better target groups that have a greater need for the value you produced or increasing the value you are providing so you can get more value in return in the exchange.

It really is that simple.

Long Journey

So, after a long year, I think I'm finally back to about where I was a year ago. What I mean really, is that I'm ready to start my own business again. But I'm going to do it a little differently this time.

Last time, my idea was to do the Rich Dad approach, which basically says that it doesn't matter what business you start, just go do it. The only problem though, is if you start a business and you don't care about it, then you're not going to get very far. So that line of thinking had me deliberating for about a year about what kind of business I actually want to start. What is something that I actually care about and want to do.

I finally figured it out. I'm going to start a business doing business consulting. What this essentially means is that I'm going to find small businesses that are already operational and go in and help them to become more profitable or grow. I'm building my own model for how to do this based off of a mixture of the plethora of sources I've read that suggest different ideas. I'm going to add in my knowledge of the new technology that is available and help these small shops in this dark economic time.

Finally I feel like I have all the tools I need, the initiative and the plan as well as the confidence. There are a lot of other little tricks and details that I'm not going to elaborate on because they are my clever innovations that I don't want people to take and run with. The point though is that finally I have a solid goal again, something I can break into steps and start working towards.

It's been way too long :)

Philosophizing

So everything is going very well. My job is picking up and changing into new areas that I'm more interested in pursuing. There always seems to be some social event to go to and I feel comfortable with just calling people up and seeing what they are up to (before I always thought I would be interrupting something or bothering them). My extracurricular activities are teaching me new skills and opening up some new opportunities (running, speaking, coaching).

The only thing is that I feel like I'm missing a guiding direction. Like some true passion or calling that should keep me directed in the right direction, doing the right things to accomplish some great big goal for what I want out of life. I'm still not sure what that is or what kind of thing it even should be. It's like I'm playing an open world videogame, and I've been doing all the side quests, but now I want to keep going with the main quest but I don't know what it is.

My only current theory goes along with what I was saying to the kids on my team at our first basketball practice last night. We started with the basics, just shooting, passing, defense. And once you have a good feel for the basics, then you start building on them, give-and-go, back door, trapping, different elements that are more complex, but have greater results. That's my only theory right now as to what to aim for next. Now that I have all the basics, now it's time to build on them. You've got to keep the basics fresh and strong, otherwise the new layers will collapse the whole thing, but that is the best idea for the next direction that I've had as of yet.

What I've been mainly trying to add is a dip into the dating scene. I'm trying to get more comfortable with just meeting new people and talking to them. Forget trying to put together dates, forget deciding if this person is marriage material, I just want to meet someone new and talk to them. I did that on Friday night and it was a good time. I didn't feel like there was anyone new that I should really start trying to see again, but I had fun just chatting with new people. Previously I had a lot of inhibition about doing this because everyone else drank and I didn't and I'd go out by myself and feel like a lonely loser. But I've recently discovered the miracle that is beer and it's made everything a lot more fun with a lot less stress.

Next week I'm flying out to Maine and then I'm flying out to IL for Halloween with my brother. He's a social guy and can have a good time without me feeling like I have to babysit him like some of the people I've been hanging out with. Really, he completes this element I'm missing, which is just having someone else who knows how to have fun to go out and do stuff with. It's funny because he's always kinda been the Ying to my Yang in a sense, so I should have really thought about this before, but he's been out in IL so that's been the limiting factor. It should be a great time so I'm really looking forward to it.

Reaction

Read this:
http://sivers.org/tim-ferriss

Stuff like this makes me hyper ventilate.

Why? Because he's right, and I know he's right. I've read so many books about how to run a business, how to live your life, how to do things in effective ways. And it's all right and it all gives me the same reaction. I feel excited, I feel like there is this wave pulsing through my veins, I feel alive.

And it bothers the hell out of me, because I can't use it in my life. I can, but I can't. Not how my life is now. But I don't know how to change.

I feel very trapped in my current job. I do bullshit work and waste most of my time and it eats away at me because it's so pathetic and I could be doing so much more. Not necessarily spending more time, but making a bigger difference. But instead I play this role of a kid who doesn't know anything because older people don't believe that younger people could know more or different but useful things than they do. It sucks.

My sister said to me at one point, "Everyone thinks they know everything when they get out of college and get into the working world." Maybe that is true, but everyone is not the same as me. Everyone doesn't read the books I read. Everyone doesn't naturally turn everything into a system. Everyone doesn't adapt and learn as fast as I do. I'm genetically built for this, I'm the Michael Phelps of systemization of businesses. That was what was the only thing that attracted me to Computer Science. I don't like to sit around and type out code, I like to figure out how to make something work in an efficient, creative, new way.

But I don't know how to change my life. I don't know who I need to talk to or where I need to go to actually have the chance to do it. I keep thinking about "As a Man Thinketh" or some book that I read that talked about people giving up everything looking for an opportunity when all along the opportunity was sitting right under their nose. So I keep trying to make this work, or see what I'm missing, but I can't do it all on my own.

So that's why I'm doing something very different. I'm picking up a part time job at Game Stop, which sounds ridiculous. But I'm doing it because of something I read on Steve Pavlina's blog. He said, start today earning any money at all doing something you love, and eventually you'll change the way you think so you see more and more opportunities to make money doing what you love. You just have to take that first step.

So I'm doing it. I'm going to work at this specific Game Stop because I love the environment there and the people that work there are great. So I'm taking the risk and I'm hoping it will start opening up the world of opportunity that I know is out there but I cannot seem to see.