Taking Charge of Your Career and Your Life  Part Two

Knowing what you want out of your career and your life is important to achieving happiness. This is a tough one.  This is the one that we all struggle with.  There are very, very, very few people, in this world, who come into life knowing exactly what they want, know exactly where they are going, and know exactly what they want to do. What they do know is, if they can figure it out, they will be happier.

The first question though is, why does this happen?  How did we get into this fine mess?  Well, let’s start off with our parents.  Our parents do not grow us up and ask what makes us happy.  Our parents tell you what they think will make you happy.  If you ever had a Jewish mother, you are guaranteed unhappiness unless you're a doctor.  That is life, that is the way it works.  You have to be a doctor.  In their mind that is the way they view happiness.  They view happiness the way they think you will be happy.  In my father’s case, he believed my happiness was getting a job as a mail carrier.  Because security was critical to him, he said to me: "a mailman works for the government and therefore, will never get fired." 

It was so important to him that he tried to put his need for security inside me.  Sooo, you wind up with parents that, as you grow up, do what they think best to make you happy.  Believe me that is their goal.  They are not doing this to make your life miserable, although it may seem like it at the time.  Their goal is to make you happy, but it is their happiness.  Whatever they valued, whatever they thought was important, that is what they would do.  If you wanted to be a lifeguard, they would say: "that is no way to be happy."  I was a singer.  I loved singing.  Maybe nobody thought I was great, but in a rock -n- roll band you don’t have to be great.  My father would say: Kenny this is no way to make a living.  This is no way to be happy."  These were the things my parents said to me.  What made me real happy, didn’t make them happy.  They did so because they loved me.

OK, so parents aren't the best way to find a way to take charge of your career and your life.

Then we go off to school.  Is School going to focus on our happiness?  Is school going to help us figuring out what we want to do in our career and life?  Schools don’t do that.  That is not the purpose of schools.  Schools don't try to sort through what we are good at and what's going to make us happy.  That's just not what schools do.  Their purpose is to give us a broad curriculum and allow us figure it out for our self.   There are some unique schools that do try to help certain children focus in areas that they are very good at - that they feel will make them happy.  But in general, 99.9% of the people going through schools are getting a broad curriculum.  That means, Picasso is getting 10 math classes whether he likes it or not.  He is probably not even going to get one drawing class. 

Sooo, forget about schools - they are not going to help you take charge of your career and your life.

Then we go into our wonderful world of corporations.  Corporations are about the corporate ladder.  What does this have to do with what you want?  What does this have to do with happiness?  This has nothing to do with happiness.  This is about going up the corporate chain.  This is about getting the next box ahead of you.  This is about making your boss look good. 

Let's say you wind up in a finance job.  I never heard of a boss in business come up to an employee and say: "you know Kenny you are a great financier.  You are really fantastic at what you do.  You're making this department really grow.  You're helping me move up the chain.  We are really happy with your contribution, but I know you would be happier being a marketer so I am going to knock myself out and do everything I can to get you a great job in Marketing."  Forget it.  This is not going to happen because, very few bosses want their best employee to move to a different department - it won't help them get promoted.  They will tell you: Going to marketing will be a lateral change and will not help you move up the chain.  Moving laterally is a bad strategy.  You move up the chain by becoming a bean counter and then after you're a bean counter you're a manager of bean counters and then you're the head bean counter and then you're the head of the head bean counter. 

This is how you go, you just keep going up the chain.  Taking a side track by moving laterally to marketing and starting all over again is not the way corporations work.  This is not the way American corporations work.  It is about moving up the ladder especially if you are the best finance person. 

You would think that if I am good at what I do then they would really help me get to do the thing that I want to do.  It just doesn't work that way.  However, if you are lousy at what you do, then they might find a way to get you the hell out of finance and get you into marketing.  "You know Kenny, you are really not very good at finance, let’s try marketing.  You don’t need a brain to do marketing."  Sooo, if you are good at what you do, it is even harder.  You actually have to request (sometime demand) a change. 

I was a field systems analyst and programmer and I was good at it.  I was so good they made me a manager, a branch manager and then regional manager.  Then they wanted to make me national manager and I said : "hey, time-out guys, I want to go into sales."  They looked at me like I was from Mars.  I had to threaten to quit to get into sales because it was something I wanted to try.  My whole goal was to become president so I thought to myself: "I don’t know many presidents that are systems engineers but sales guys, they get to be presidents.  

I thought that was the right thing to do, but it didn’t matter because I was not doing it for my happiness.  I didn’t understand all this happiness stuff then.  I was just doing it to move up the chain and do what I thought I needed to do to move up that chain.  The bottom line was I had to almost threaten to quit just to get them to allow me to take a what they called a demotion. I didn't call it a demotion because to me promotion is something I want to do that is a new or incremental experience over what I am doing today.  So to me, going into sales was a major promotion not demotion.  To them this was, hey you are already a regional manager, what are you crazy, you want to be a salesman?  Corporations in America don’t do that.

Now in Japan, it's different.  There is a slight difference in Japan because in Japan their system is not a move up the chain type of system.  Their system wants their top employees to be well rounded before they get to become an executive.  They will take an engineer and make him go into marketing and finance if they think he or she has the potential to move up in the company.  They look at things on a long term basis.  We don’t look at things like that because we don't want to train this guy in finance, then in marketing and then as an engineer and have him quit.  The Japanese look at employees as if they are going to stay forever.  American corporations look at employees as someone who will use them to get trained and then quit.

Sooo, what do we have left?  We know parents, schools, and corporations aren’t going to help you take charge of your career and your life..  What is left is YOU.  It's going to be on you.  Now, the first thing you might say to yourself is: "why me God.  Why does it have to be me?  Why can’t they do it for me." 

At 40 years old I went into therapy and the therapist asked me why are you here and I said to him: I don’t have a clue why I am here.  If everybody would stop treating me like this I wouldn’t need to be here."  What a victim statement that is.  Having the responsibility for your career, your life, and your happiness is not a burden it is empowerment.  What do I mean by that?  If I have to count on them making me happy and getting my career and life going, what control do I have?  I am at the mercy of them.  If I am able to count on me then I have been empowered. 

The fact of the matter is, being on YOU means empowerment.  It means you have the power to be happy.  Whatever you define that to be.

Part three of "Taking Charge of Your Career and Your Life" will be coming soon - look for it.