Is Your Job Your Calling (extended interview)

The more you can bring your decisions into the immediate and take them out of the abstract, the more you're going to be able to stay on top of these dynamic tensions-and even be energized by them.

Even good decisions don't always work out the way we plan. What advice do you give people to help them feel like they've made a good choice, no matter how their decision plays out?

Waldroop: Three things go into making good decisions-decisions that you feel you can stand behind, no matter how things ultimately turn out. First, you have to give a decision the time it requires. You can't push it, hoping to make it happen faster or just to get it over with.

Second, a good decision involves clarity. By that I mean knowing who you are and how you picture yourself in the future. You need to develop a very clear picture in your mind of how you want and expect to work and live. Does it involve lots of travel? Are you after glitz and glamour? Do you see yourself with a family? Be as specific as you can: How many people in the family? The more clarity you bring to the decision, the better the decision will be.

Several years ago, I worked with a man who came to a very clear picture of what he wanted in his life: He wanted to own a sports team. Once that became clear, he worked out, step by step, what it would take to reach that goal: "To own a sports team, I have to amass great wealth. To do that, I have to be an entrepreneur. To do that, I have to learn about running a business-and it needs to be in an industry where there's a great deal of upside potential." As he worked out the logic, it not only made a lot of sense, it also helped guide his decisions.

Third, good decisions involve courage. The enemy of a good decision is fear-fear of failure, fear of humiliation, fear of making a mistake. A few years back, I worked with a woman who had earned an MBA from a top school and had always done the kind of work that typically goes with having an MBA. But she was never quite satisfied. One day, she came to see me and said, "I finally decided that just because I spent $100,000 on a hammer, I don't have to spend the rest of my life driving nails." She blew out of her job. She even left that whole world of work. She completely changed directions. That takes courage.

The biggest decision that people face in the world of work is which career to choose. What advice do you have for people who aren't sure what their career-or their vocation-should be?

Waldroop: Good career decisions have to be based not just on your aptitudes, but also on your "deep" interests. The most common mistake that people make in their career decisions is to do something because they're "good at it." It's a story I hear all the time. Someone will say to me, "I'm an engineer, but I don't like it." Why did you become an engineer? "I was good at science and math, so people told me I should be an engineer." Did you ever like engineering? "No, but it was easy."

The real question is, Where are your deep interests? Think of your interests as a deep geothermal pool. Once you tap your interests, you can be express them in any number of ways. You may have a particular aptitude-science and math, for instance-but without a deep interest in expressing that aptitude, you'll fail.

Butler: Identifying those deep interests has been the focus of our research for the past 10 years. Once you recognize that those deep interests are the best predictor of job satisfaction, the next step is to get in touch with your interest patterns and connect them with the activities that go on in business. Human interests are quite difficult to measure until we reach our early twenties. At that point, they gel-we can measure and describe them. We each develop a unique signature of life interests. And that signature remains virtually constant over time. The pattern won't change.

Our research tries to tap into this deep structure of interests and translate them into the kinds of work that go on in business. There are eight core business functions-not functions like marketing, sales, and finance, but basic activities such as quantitative analysis, theory development, perceptual thinking, managing people, enterprise control, and creative production. If you look at your deep interests and think about how your interests can be expressed in specific business behaviors, then you'll have the elements of a good career decision.

There's one thing that everyone should do in the course of making a career decision: some reflection. You're going to need some systematic way of thinking through what you know about yourself, thinking through those times in your life when you were deeply excited about what you were doing and deeply engaged in doing it. And then you need to identify the themes that were present during those times.

You may come up with a list of times in your life when you were doing apparently different things-but at each of those times, you were deeply engaged. When you analyze those times, you'll find themes that connect them. Those are your core interests. Thinking about them in a systematic way gives you the information you need to make a good decision.

You can find Timothy Butler and James Waldroop's model for matching your deep interests to the opportunities in the workplace by visiting the Web http://www.careerdiscovery.com .