Contents Title Page Contents Copyright Dedication Introduction FINDING YOUR PASSION Why Good Work Is No Longer Good Enough Why “Safe” Jobs Are a Myth How Logic and Evidence Will Find You Work You Love The Most Common Career Mistakes CREATING YOUR CAREER PLAN Getting Yourself Ready Find Your Edge Sell Yourself by Selling Your Idea Execute and Revise CONFRONTING FEARS AND EXCUSES Anatomy of the Excuse How Great Careers and Loving Families Go Hand in Hand The Bottom Line of Great Careers When Your Passion Collides with Your Fears Conclusion: Taking Action Acknowledgments Appendix: Preparing Your Plan Index TEDx Talk: “Why You Will Fail to Have a Great Career” About the Author Footnotes Copyright © 2016 by Larry Smith All rights reserved For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016. www.hmhco.com Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Title: No fears, no excuses : what you need to do to have a great career / Larry Smith. Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016. Identifiers: LCCN 2015037676 | ISBN 9780544663336 (hardback) | ISBN 9780544663282 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Career development. | Vocational guidance. | BISAC: BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Careers / General. | BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Motivational. Classification: LCC HF5381 .S627 2016 | DDC 650.1—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015037676 Cover design by Brian Moore v1.0416 This book is dedicated to my students. They have taught me so much and inspired me so often. INTRODUCTION Passion is a word we use often when we talk about our love lives, but rarely when it comes to our work lives. When you feel passionate about your work, there is no great difference between the way you feel on Monday morning and the way you feel on Saturday morning. When you feel passionate about your work, your workplace is not a prison that is meant to encase you until you’ve earned your freedom, and your work is not a means to an end. When you feel passionate about your work, you do not set rigid boundaries between work time and personal time, because the work itself is personal. When you feel passionate about your work, your talent has room to stretch and to grow. I believe that such passion in work is available to everyone, without exception. It may not be a simple matter to identify it and achieve it, but it is available nonetheless. And by the time you’ve finished this book, you will see how. Why am I so confident? Simply because I have watched many hundreds of people from many different backgrounds with many different goals achieve great success using a handful of straightforward techniques. I work in the heart of a university, and I see such a great waste of talent all around me. I have been cursed to watch such waste for decades. Young men and women enter my life when they are just students, filled with energy and drive. They hope to undertake wondrous adventures. They have amazing ideas and penetrating insights, ideas I would never have had at their age. They can make a computer or a cello sing, they can intuit solutions to mathematical problems I cannot understand, they can spin a tale or design a cupboard no one has ever seen before. Theirs is—without a doubt—real talent. Yet, theirs is also raw talent. It is often naive, incomplete, unrefined, and so chaotically slapped together that its effect is weakened. Talent is sometimes found in a disheveled seventeen-year-old; other times it’s in the polished demeanor of a twenty-seven-year-old; sometimes it’s in those who will be the first in their families to be educated beyond high school; other times it’s in those whose families are better educated; sometimes it’s in someone newly arrived in the country. But the talent is there nevertheless, should you care to look. I care to look. And I watch, waiting for these talented individuals to set their chosen worlds afire with their vision and commitment. Unfortunately, they then grow up. The grownup world is where talent goes to die. The grownups I meet, whether former students or not, have all too often been captured by our worker-bee culture. The rules are clear: do what you are told and you get paid; work to live on the weekend and dread Monday; look forward to retirement and hope you do not end up dreading that as well; expect that pleasure or satisfaction in the work is an uncommon bonus. This epidemic of lowered expectations has taken many victims, prompting the ever-common phrase: I had to get realistic. Consider how many people end their day at a bar or the dinner table, complaining about the boss or the work, and how many sit in frustrated silence. My concern has increased over the years, and it has even led me to record a TEDx talk at the University of Waterloo, where I’m an adjunct associate professor of economics and a career counselor. The talk was called, “Why You Will Fail to Have a Great Career.” There was no intent to craft a dismal message; I just tried to tell the truth as I’ve experienced it, drawing on the more than 20,000 conversations I have had about career success. (Yes, I actually do count and log my conversations. I’m an economist—I love data.) The TEDx video repeated the common and routine excuses I have heard too many times. Perhaps, I thought, it would stir a few people into action. But as it turned out, millions watched, and my concern deepened. The challenge of finding a great career was affecting more people than I had thought. Some watched the video because they felt they needed the tough love the title of the talk promised; others because they were sure the title was wrong and needed to figure out why. Either way, an amazing range of email messages arrived: grateful, heart-rending, angry, inquisitive, skeptical, desperate, and confused. They came from parents, teenagers, educators, senior citizens, university students, recent graduates, middle-aged professionals, PhDs, men and women. The emails came from Canada, the United States, Mexico, Britain, France, Denmark, Portugal, Russia, Croatia, Greece, Turkey, and India. Some found inspiration in my words. Some found cause to object. Others invented more excuses. Many asked for more guidance. And I had to wonder whether I did indeed have more guidance to offer. Career—your life’s work—is too important to speculate about what might be true or useful. I decided to respond with this book for three reasons. First, in spite of all the obstacles, I have seen plenty of people from diverse backgrounds create great careers for themselves, careers that give them profound satisfaction and create meaningful impact on the world around them. These people are a credit to their communities and role models to their families. They are happy. So I know it is possible. Second, I happen to be one of these happy people with a great career. I found my passion early in life when, as a kid, I felt my teachers weren’t doing a good my passion early in life when, as a kid, I felt my teachers weren’t doing a good enough job. While other kids built forts in their backyards, I created my own miniature classroom, complete with imaginary students. So I knew I’d be a teacher. But what would I teach? A history instructor in high school had a collection of books about finance and economics. I started reading them and never really stopped. But that doesn’t mean everything fell into place. After I finished graduate school, I worked as an economist, ultimately finding a secure, stimulating job working for the Canadian government. There was room for growth, I enjoyed the people I worked with, and I had an opportunity to make real impact on public policy. In short, it was a good job, but it wasn’t a great career for me. I wanted to start my own consulting business, where I’d have more freedom to pursue my many areas of interest, from physics to architecture. I knew what I wanted, and yet my letter of resignation still sat on my desk for a week before I turned it in. I am afraid to think what I would have missed if I hadn’t gone through with it. That’s not to say that everything has been simple from the day I decided to pursue a great career. My very first client as a consultant turned out to be a crook who fled the country one step ahead of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. I was financially stressed, embarrassed, and my confidence took a hit. I didn’t see that I had any choice but to keep my head down and keep working. I couldn’t go back, so it was clear my only choice was to move forward. And I did. After a while, I was ready to bring my love of teaching into the mix. Years earlier, professors and other advisors in my life told me I’d have to choose: economic research in the private sector or university teaching. I could delay the choice, of course, but ultimately I’d have to choose just one. This advice was well intentioned, but I decided to challenge it. It didn’t make sense to me: If you like to do multiple things, I thought, why wouldn’t you? I began to experiment, teaching just one course in Economics at University of Waterloo, and thirty years later, my teaching life is as active as my consulting business. With teaching and economics firmly part of my work, it was time to incorporate a third passion: technology. I grew up on a farm in the country and, like most children, was fascinated by the farm machinery that seemed (and probably was) one hundred times bigger than me. My grandfather had used a flail to separate wheat from chaff, which is about as archaic a farming tool as you can imagine. But then came the reaping machine. And then the tractor and then the combine. Machinery, and the pace of technology, did not cease to amaze me as I grew older. I began to advise students about their startup tech companies and outside clients about their own work with emerging technologies. I can’t write code, yet I get to help move such fields as robotics forward by advising companies on their marketing strategies. advising companies on their marketing strategies. I’d go crazy if I didn’t have a plan to keep my life organized, and putting plans in place is something you will hear a lot about in this book. It’s crucial. But so is passion. Because it is an amazing feeling when you don’t really care if it’s a weekend or not; it’s so energizing to look forward to your work and not even think about retirement—why would you? The way I feel about my career is available to everyone, if only they know where and how to look. Let me make clear what I mean by passion. A passion is more than an interest, although a passion may first appear as an interest. An interesting idea is easy to think about; when you have an idea that evokes passion, you cannot stop thinking about it. When you find a domain that engages passion, you want to understand it totally; you naturally see gaps that should be filled, errors that should be corrected, and innovations that cry out for creation. With passion, there is an inherent tendency to take action. None of those elements is necessarily present when you find something “interesting.” Passion invites an intensity of enduring focus. Interests, by contrast, ebb and flow and sometimes vanish. Yes, passion also evolves as we gain experience; it may broaden or deepen, or stretch into adjacent areas. And you may, of course, have more than one passion, or you may discover a new one. With passion, you have the wind at your back, just as I have for so many years. But the final reason I wanted to write this book is perhaps the most critical. I am in a unique position to draw on the experiences of the thousands of people I have advised about careers. Indeed, I have collected 30,000 career statements over the years. You should know something about the University of Waterloo, too: It is a unique environment, with an unparalleled co-op program, the largest in the world. This means that more than 19,000 of our students will devote alternate semesters of their education to gainful employment. We have more than 6,000 active employers who visit campus and hire our students for degree- related jobs. Our students get real-life work experience, even as they are pursuing their degrees. You can see, I think, why career conversations at Waterloo tend to be very robust? My students work at Goldman Sachs, Microsoft, in Hollywood, and at small startups in the United States, Canada, and Asia. You would be hard- pressed to name a midsize or large company in North America where a student of mine hasn’t worked. My students, who come from many diverse backgrounds, ask for my advice when they’re nineteen, and they return to my doorstep at thirty to report on their progress. In some cases, they didn’t take my advice when younger but now feel ready. When you consider that I’ve been at this for thirty years, you realize that what I have is, in effect, a thorough, long-term study. This book is therefore not a recipe concocted from the idiosyncratic pathway This book is therefore not a recipe concocted from the idiosyncratic pathway of an individual, celebrity or otherwise. Rather, it’s driven by a weight of evidence that some career strategies work and others don’t. These strategies have been applied to almost every kind of career, from the skilled trades to the work of PhDs to creative endeavors. They have been used by those young and old, shy and loud, nervous and confident. You will read many stories in this book about my students and those I have advised. Some have agreed to be identified by their real names. For the others, to protect their confidentiality, I have disguised their attributes, changed some portions of their stories, and, in some cases, created composites of several students. While I have opted to give the students popular names like “John” and “Trent,” it should be noted that many of those featured in this book come from diverse populations. I opted for overly common names in order to prevent perpetuating stereotypes or inadvertently allowing any student to be recognized. Nevertheless, every strategy discussed in this book has been validated in actual employment situations. The approach of this book is straightforward. It offers the evidence of experience, organized in response to the most common questions arising from the TED correspondence. The book will address such questions as the following: Isn’t a great career just a bonus? Don’t most people just learn to “love” their work? How can I find passion? How can I reconcile the pursuit of a great career with family responsibilities? How can I find a great career if I’m not special? What if my passion doesn’t afford a livelihood? How can I overcome my fear of failure? Isn’t money enough to make a career “great”? What really makes a career “great”? The answers strive to be realistic. They are neither easy nor magical. They acknowledge that you live in a world hostile to the realization of talent. But a great career is within your grasp, if you choose to learn from the experiences of those who have already succeeded. To ensure that you have fully grasped the message of a chapter, I’ll ask you several questions at the end of each one. Please think about these questions and answer them honestly—they’ll help you prepare for the chapters that follow. By the end of the book, you will understand what you need to do to have a great career, and why you need to do it. I must warn you—it won’t always be comfortable to read what I have to say. My purpose isn’t to put you to sleep with soft words, but to wake you up. As Vitor, a gentleman from Portugal, wrote after he heard me speak on the matter, “I considered [your speech] disruptive, extremely uncomfortable to listen to,