Six years ago, the tech economy had crashed, the economy was stalled, and 9-11 had radically altered the nation's mood. The New Year came around, always a time of introspection and goal-setting. At that very moment, my article, and my book by the same name, "What Should I Do With My Life?," were simultaneously published, triggering an enormous response: the vast majority were inspired to challenge their thinking, while at the same time there was a healthy push-back to the article's thesis.
Six years later, the economy is even more so at a dead stall, and the article (and book) are again being looked to for guidance. So the question is, with the benefit of six more years of perspective, what else can I add?
Generally, when people simply see the phrase "What Should I Do With My Life?" in print, it conjures a notion of deep introspection that is implicitly economically-self-indulgent -- the guy who quits his job for no reason other than a bout of career-ennui, who lays around on the couch wondering where he belongs, or even more indulgently, spends his precious savings traveling abroad to find his purpose, while his friends and family muttered, "How pathetic -- you were lucky to have a job. Any job."
But the article itself flipped that connotation inside-out. It argued that with the economy in a tailspin, it was unsound economic theory to have millions of drone workers shuffling to work every day doing jobs at quarter-speed they didn't care about, so they weren't very productive at, and certainly didn't add value at. The economy would never get kick-started if our workforce was uninspired and didn't innovate. So the article -- really a manifesto -- suggested that the way to get business going again was for its basic building blocks -- the workers -- to do something they were really good at, or were inspired by, or cared about, where they would work extra hard, and innovate their way out of this black hole. Now it was not a permission slip to quit your job, nor a doctor's note to take a year off (I've never taken more than two weeks off in 23 years), but it did suggest the economy might be better off, long-term, if the square pegs found their square holes and the round pegs found their round holes, rather than everyone just wondering where the next big thing would be and gravitate to it like moths.
Note that the article offered no economic or statistical evidence to back this suggestion up; it was pure theory, with a few individual case studies that proved nothing, merely illustrated the concept. But there was a scene in the book, near its very end, which is worth summarizing. Michael Dell had invited me down to its annual meeting of The Business Council, and I was put on a panel with several other CEOs, which was moderated by the tremendous journalist Michael Lewis. The topic of our panel was, "What Do Employees Want?" And the CEOs took their turn describing all the benefits they gave their employees, and how they gave out free M&Ms on Wednesdays, and appeased them with stock options and free parking spaces. When I spoke, I thought everyone would laugh at me, snickering "How indulgent! How naïve!" Because my point was essentially a variation on the theme of this Fast Company article -- employees don't want M&Ms, they want to love what they do. Highly-motivated people are the productive engine of modern civilization. But rather than laugh at me, the tone in the ballroom changed dramatically, and the roomful of CEOs stood up, one by one, to agree with me: the value in their companies came from the employees who were motivated to be there, and one passionate employee was worth ten dispassionate ones.
Anyway, over the last six years, that self-indulgent, pathetic, slackerish, pie-in-the-sky connotation to the question "What Should I Do With My Life?" still triggers a number of misunderstandings and fallacies, which fog their thinking and basically lead people astray. So let me bust through a short list of the top fallacies that I think people project onto this dilemma.
1. First, most people are not the architects of their own change. Extremely few are quitting as a result of career ennui. Rather, most people struggling with this question were pushed into it, forced into it, because they were laid off -- or because they couldn't make ends meet on their paycheck, or their job never allows them to see their children, or because their new boss (post-merger) is an absolute asshole who doesn't value them -- and they need to find a new career simply because there are no jobs anymore in the field they developed their expertise in. They are not naïve idealists, they are people simply trying to get by.
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