Is Your Job Your Calling (extended interview)

As you move into your forties and fifties, the recognition of your own mortality becomes more and more a part of decision-making. You realize that you're not going to be around forever. Your choices become a lot more precious. The gap between your dreams and what you're actually doing narrows, and you start living your life more directly. What you're doing is who you are. And who you are becomes more important to you.

Waldroop: As you go from one decade to the next, the issue of loss comes up over and over. It tends to have a powerful effect on the way you make choices. It's a simple fact of life: Whenever you choose one path, you're not choosing another. You choose business, you're not choosing law. You choose law, you're not choosing business.

Some people really have a tough time coming to terms with "the road not taken." They have a sense of grief over choices not made. That's essentially what a midlife crisis is: You're eliminating alternatives-for good. You have to come to terms with the fact that a whole host of options have been permanently foreclosed for you.

Very close to the issue of grief are the internal tensions that are at work in career decisions. We all have pulls inside us that move us in different directions. These pulls can take different forms: The tension between self-interest and altruism, between taking risks and wanting security, between living for today and saving for tomorrow. Both sides are part of you, and whenever you make a decision that favors one over another, you experience a sense of loss.

We often see people responding to these real losses by trying not to make decisions. They try to avoid errors of commission and instead make errors of omission-because the decision not to make a decision is a decision.

What advice do you have for people facing a tough career choice, one that could permanently change the direction of their work life?

Butler: Everyone tries to do something that seems like the wise thing to do-but that you shouldn't do: compromise.You've got two competing needs or desires-say, independence and security-and you try to find the position that's halfway between them. Typically that doesn't work.

An equally bad approach is to jump radically from one pole to the other, to pretend that you can forget entirely about one need and recognize only the other. When you do that, the genuine need you're trying to deny simply goes underground and becomes stronger.

Waldroop: We have exercises where we ask people to choose among 13 different business reward values. An obvious one is financial gain. How important is it to you to make a lot of money? Another one is lifestyle. How important is it to you to work in a way where you're networking all the time? A third is power and influence. How important is it to you to be a player ?

It's not uncommon for an individual to have a high score on financial gain, a high score on lifestyle, and a high score on power and influence. You can try to jump from one to the other to the other, but when you choose one, the other two don't go away.

So what's the answer? To be aware of and live with this tension. It's a dynamic part of your personality. And if you try to come up with an easy solution, you're only going to get into trouble. At different times in your life, you're going to shift more toward one pull than toward the others. But the tension is never going to go away. You can't balance them out, you can't take an average of them, you can't somehow live in the middle. Ultimately what's required is to live with the tension-and to know that you have to live with it.

As hard as that is to accept, we tend to make it even harder: In this culture, most people harbor the illusion that you can be happy all the time-that in fact, you should even expect it. People spend vast amounts of energy trying to make these tensions go away, and that is utterly fruitless. It's like trying to get rid of gravity-it's not going to happen.

Butler: Another element is what kind of personal resources you bring to bear on these tough decisions. A lot of very bright businesspeople try to solve these decisions in their heads. They want to do the math, come up with the bottom-line solution, the right MBA answer, the decision that's going to solve the problem once and for all. What's it going to be? Am I going to spend a lot of time with my kids? Or am I going to start up this company and commit the 90 hours per week that it will require? It's one or the other. What's the answer?

But there's a better way: Take the decision out of the abstract and the absolute, and instead deal with the immediate and the real. Look at the next two months or four months. What's on the agenda? If you have to be on the road, can your family take the hit for the next few months? And then, in the months after that, can your family get more of your attention?