Career Guidance Book

The Different Drummer - follow your own beat to find enlivening work & lead an extraordinary life, is helpful for:

Understanding the different elements that make up vocational fulfillment to pinpoint your ideal role
Gaining the motivation to make significant changes in your career path
Learning why levels of job satisfaction are so low and how to repeal social conditioning
Combining practical advice with real-world examples of people who worked through the same issues you wrestle
Obtaining a storehouse of further resources to read and watch for inspiration and guidance
Those starting their careers as well as those reevaluating

Foreword by Glynn Curran

Work/life balance has become one of the mantras of the age. Many pay homage to the principle. Few live by it. The sad fact is that for a great number of us, work and life - far from being in balance - are in opposition. Life has become merely the underside of work; a sort of shadow existence ruled by the demands of the 9-5 routine.

With this dominance of work and marginalisation of life, we actually miss the vital core of living, which is to experience life as a journey - a sort of unfolding of who we truly are. We die no wiser than we begin. Worse still, there is the feeling of a series of fatal delays and opportunities squandered... the seeds of midlife crises.

If this type of life trajectory were rare, we could write it off as an aberration, a kind of individual pathology. But the facts speak otherwise. It seems that as many as 80% of us sense a mismatch between our work and our aspirational impulses. In other words, the state of working actually stands between us and our true work - the vocational mission that we were put on earth to do. In the process, we have consented to let work become our ruling addiction and life a mere add-on. Unfortunately, our callings don’t take well to being domesticated.

Reflect for a moment, on how freeing it would be if we could get the work/life balance right, if we could reclaim work as the seat of our passions and the pulsing engine of our better nature, giving energy and definition to who we really are. The author of this work clearly believes that this is possible, that it is possible to “relish being at work” and to “bring that feeling of invigoration back into (one’s) home life.”

This book doesn’t revert to giving you tests to take or offering packaged information on how to find your ideal career. What it will do is take you on a road trip and insist that you keep an inventory on what you see, invite you to take note of the signposts along the way and set a style of your own that is not imitative.

It is going to pitch some hard questions. It is going to ask you to do an unsparing psychological audit as to what really motivates you. It will challenge your existing value system and ask you to leave aside the conference centre junkets to take a tour of duty. It pulls no punches in terms of the ultimatum - it is your life and happiness that is at stake.

At the centre of the hero’s quest is the determination to stop paddling about in the shallows and ask yourself: What if by working you have been denying your authentic work? Having put most of your waking life into your work, what are you getting out of it? Exactly how fulfilling has your life been to date? Where has it brought you? If it were to end tomorrow would you spend your last day reflecting on how yours was a life well lived?

Whether you’re mildly unhappy, or actively desperate, be consoled. For many people, work, as well as life, has become a wilderness. But wildernesses have always been incubators for a new vision.

The sun is setting on the day where the bulk of our energy is diverted into the state of the economy, celebrity voyeurism, pseudo fears of terrorism or simply tending our own patch. Instead, it will centre on creating opportunities for ourselves and others in order to truly express who we are and what we have to offer one another. But it will take a critical mass to inspire this change. And before this, it will take pioneering voices to comprehend that change is possible. The author is one such voice.

The Quest for Rarified Job Satisfaction (excerpt from Chapter Four)

Myths typically commence with the appearance of a herald whose role is to entice a person to leave their ordinary world and discover an extraordinary one. In terms of our vocational journeys, the herald often takes the guise of job dissatisfaction.

Job Satisfaction Surveys

Gallup is a consulting firm which conducts public opinion polls. A recent one revealed that 87% of workers are not engaged (read passionate) about their work.

Australian surveys tend to be on par, with Gallup finding that 20% of people are actively disengaged - meaning they are either disruptive, unproductive, disloyal or all of the above. A further 62% were neither engaged nor committed to either their role or their employer. If these figures are sobering, spare a thought for workers in Singapore and China, of which a staggering 98% of people report being disengaged.

Upon learning that only 13% of Germans felt happy about their work, the advertising firm Scholz & Friends created over twenty visual depictions of people being trapped in dispiriting service jobs. The slogan they adopted for the campaign: “Life’s too short for the wrong job.” In tapping into the deep vocational misalignment in the collective psyche, the ads went viral and the job search site they were promoting saw its traffic skyrocket.

Another job site to harness the zeitgeist of unfulfilling workaholism was Monster.com, which parodied Nike’s aspirational approach. It showed a succession of children speaking about growing up and savouring the multitude of employment humiliations awaiting them in the corporate world. The ad starts with a child proclaiming, “When I grow up, I want to file all day.” Triggering nostalgia for that moment in time where we once felt hopeful about career possibilities, it provoked a reaction that made its website a household name overnight.

Evolving Expectations

From a historical perspective, the idea that people should love what they do for work is a recent one. It challenges the entrenched belief that work is something to be endured. Millennials are leading the charge, with consulting firm Deloitte finding that 7 out of 10 of them want to be creative at work. Furthermore, they want their work to be meaningful with more than 7 out of 10 expecting their employers to focus on societal problems.

Previous generations have underestimated the importance of job satisfaction. With burgeoning choice and more awareness of concepts like Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, things are changing.

As we step through the five levels of job satisfaction in this chapter, consider where you find yourself and ask yourself whether or not you are among those who have stopped searching too early.

Level 5 - Misery

Perhaps there are not so much terrible jobs as there are jobs that are a terrible match for our individual preferences. The social scientist Malcolm Gladwell believes that when it comes to finding fulfilling work, we need three things: autonomy, complexity and a correlation between effort and reward.

I thought about this while sitting in an optometrist’s chair. Surely looking at people’s eyes all day couldn’t be very appealing? So I asked her if she found her job enjoyable. She told me that having spent years in hospitality while at university she now found it liberating to no longer have to answer to bosses. She liked the challenge of determining defects in people’s sight and spoke of the fulfilment that came from improving a person’s quality of life. Not only was she meeting Gladwell’s requirements for job satisfaction but she also relished the social aspect to the work and found herself constantly meeting interesting people.

Majorly Mismatched

How you feel about a job is determined by how closely it aligns with how you are wired. The state of extreme dissatisfaction comes from doing repetitive, unchallenging work, involving interaction with people with whom you have little in common.

Over the years I have had plenty of jobs that have failed to inspire - washing dishes in midsummer, delivering pizzas in a sprawling city where I continually got lost, doing the graveyard shift in a takeaway, robotically rolling newspapers into plastic bags, delousing kids at a summer camp and countless others.

Despite the tedious nature of the roles, they each had aspects that made them bearable, unlike my stint doing data entry where I did nothing but type numbers into a computer hour after hour. On top of the monotony, I was in a regimented environment where even the toilet breaks were timed. There was no social interaction to break the dullness, no challenge, no creative input and the work felt entirely meaningless.

Anaïs Nin once said that there is something inherently ugly about doing a job we don’t care for. Cities spend enormous sums of money employing architects and designers to make our physical landscapes more pleasing. Imagine if civic bodies directed a similar amount of energy into beautifying our working lives? Unless this occurs, people will continue working half-heartedly or forever cycle through one unsuitable job after another.

The Only Way Is Up

Ironically, extreme job dissatisfaction can often become our herald or catalyst for change. Reaching a certain level of despondency can get us thinking about what else might await us, as well as galvanise us into the state that Elizabeth Gilbert called ‘NOT THIS!’

Consider the example of Alan Hughes. He was both creative and civically minded but found himself working as a sheet-metal worker in a factory surrounded by people who hated their work. It was repetitive, detached from any sense of meaning and performed in a hostile environment. He returned home each day thoroughly dispirited. The extent of his despair prompted him to retrain and study visual communication at an evening college.

Upon graduating, he left the factory to become a graphic designer for an organisation that shared his value system. He found his tribe and a sense of fit in the human rights magazine New Internationalist. After his gifts were given an opportunity for expression, he went on to write articles for them as well. Having discovered work that vivified him, Alan flourished there until retiring thirty years later.

The Quest for Vocational Fit

Some people are fortunate in that they have always had a very clear sense of direction in terms of the career or life they want to lead.

Despite this being the minority of people there is still this cultural expectation that we should have clarity in terms of the career we feel best suited to.

In meeting and researching people who are doing unique and satisfying things, I’ve learnt that they have typically gone through a long process to find their passion or gifts, develop them and then work out how to express them in a way they can also earn a living.

This has also been my own experience in striving to find an authentic career match.