Stop Striving for a Specific Job Title
Everyone wonders what to do after graduation.
Hell, every person in their twenties wonders what to do with their life too. The age-old career questions never go away; we just acquire better techniques for answering them.
I’ll never forget the career conversation I had with my friend Shaun four years ago. Shaun was about to graduate from college, and he was wrestling with the big life questions: What next? What should I do with my life?
Shaun was lucky enough to have a few potential options: grad school, working overseas in his home country, or taking an internship with a company here in the U.S.
Shaun had asked me to be his mentor, and he came to me assuming I could help him with these deep life questions.
(No one ever tells you that “mentors” don’t really have their shit figured out. Sure, they’ve maybe found some initial success, but they’re still rambling down the road of life just like you are. A mentor is simply someone who has stumbled upon a slightly brighter flashlight that illuminates a teensy bit more of the road than your flashlight does. That’s all.)
So there I was, trying to guide my friend through a difficult life decision that I was also trying to navigate: What next? What should I do with my life?
What Does Success Mean to You?
Halfway through my conversation with Shaun, I realized we were talking a lot about the concept of “success.” He used phrases like, “I really want to be a success” and “I don’t want to make the wrong choice and not be successful.”
I was thinking, “You and me both, man!”
Then I snapped back into mentor mode and asked Shaun to define what “success” meant to him.
He defined success in three ways:
- Earning enough money to not have to worry about finances
- Remaining close with family and friends
- Having a positive impact on the world by giving back in a meaningful way
At that point, something clicked for me.
I wouldn’t say that the angels started singing or anything, but something struck me that profoundly changed the way I will think about career choices for the rest of my life.
A person can have an incredibly successful life by choosing one of a million different roles. Job titles are not the key to success.
The key to success is to identify what impact you want to have with your life, then take gradual steps toward that “life impact goal.”
What’s Your Life Impact Goal?
As Shaun and I began to reframe our discussion around his “life impact goal,” his career options suddenly became more clear and less stressful.
Life Impact Goal = What you want to achieve with your life
We soon realized that all three potential paths would move him closer toward his life impact goal: positively impacting others by giving back in a meaningful way.
He could do that by going to grad school to learn new things, returning to South Africa to bring his knowledge back to his hometown, or accepting an internship to develop experience that he could share with others later.
In other words, Shaun didn’t need to stress out about his next step. Each potential opportunity was a step forward, and that was all that mattered.
The exact step you take matters less than the direction you’re stepping. Don’t focus on the job title you want. Focus on the impact you want to have with your life. If a job opportunity will move you closer to that life impact goal, make the leap.
The Job Mindset vs. The Impact Mindset
From a young age, we’re told the importance of building our resumes, blazing our career path, and climbing the corporate ladder.
All of this talk makes us stress out over whether to take this job or that one.
We’re so fearful of taking the wrong career step that we lose sight of what we actually want to do with our lives.
“If the ladder is not leaning against the right wall, every step we take just gets us to the wrong place faster.” -Stephen R. Covey
Rather than focusing on trivial questions like what job title we want to achieve, we should focus on directional questions: Where are we trying to go? Why does that matter? What kind of impact do we want to have with our lives?
These questions pull us out of the flawed Job Mindset and into the more fulfilling Impact Mindset.
As I talked Shaun through his career decision, my own career choices became more clear. (Sometimes the best way to crystallize a concept in your own mind is to talk someone else through a similar problem.)
For a few years, I had been debating between three separate career paths:
- Teaching business and leadership classes as a college professor
- Building a leadership consulting company and writing books/articles
- Becoming a business executive at a respected company
I realized that all three career options lined up with my personal life impact goal: teaching and training the leaders of tomorrow.
My stress dissipated. I no longer had to worry about which path to walk because I knew each would enable me to achieve my life impact goal.
Rather than focusing so much on specific roles or titles, I began to focus on what I actually wanted to accomplish with my life.
I still don’t know which of the three paths I’ll pursue, and I don’t think it really matters. All that matters is that I remain laser-focused on that life impact goal. If I continue to take steps in that direction, the rest will take care of itself.
What about you?
Do you exhibit a Job Mindset in the way you evaluate your career?
Or have you begun to feel the freedom and fulfillment of the Impact Mindset?
