I was sitting on a panel at Penn State in front of a bunch of students and I couldn’t believe what came out of my mouth. “Stop searching for your dream job!”

I said it and I was a little annoyed. I was partially annoyed because of how many people I felt needed to hear it, but I was also partially annoyed because I was one of those students who needed to hear it long ago. To be honest, I was pretty stubborn, so maybe I heard it and I didn’t listen.

I kept hearing students talk about what job they wanted. How they wanted to change the world. How they wanted to start the next Google. How they wanted to start the next Apple. Some of them were spending tons of time developing the perfect product that they would release to change the world. Some of them were totally incapacitated at the magnitude of their own ambition and couldn’t figure out what the first steps were.

Stop searching for your dream job.

It doesn’t exist.

Even if it did, your needs and dreams will evolve over the next few years and you’ll walk away from it to find the next dream job. You’re not always going to want to live in a studio apartment. You’re not always going to want to work hard for no recognition. You’re not always going to want to spend 80 hours a week on someone else’s dream.

The trick isn’t figuring out all the characteristics and traits of your dream job, finding that job out there in the wild, applying, and then landing it. That’s impractical. The trick is learning a little more about yourself and the experiences you want to have in your life.

When people think about “what they want to be” when they grow up, they usually have a list of job titles in industries.

They want to be a doctor or a lawyer or a teacher or a soldier or an entrepreneur. Those are titles. They have nothing to do with what you actually want. Understand that your perception of that title might not be completely real or accurate. Accept that you could be wrong in your interpretation—or at least that you might not have the full spectrum of what’s involved on your radar.

So, you want to be a doctor? Do you know that this means you might be spending lots of nights and weekends away from your family? Do you accept that this means you might miss big events in your kids’ childhoods? Do you accept that this means you might not be able to do the right thing for your patient because a hospital administrator said you can’t?

I think you get the point, here. There are some things that will be amazing about a job and other things that will drive you insane.

The trick isn’t figuring out what you want to do, it’s figuring out what you absolutely cannot do and what you absolutely can’t not do.

In her book “Big Magic,” Elizabeth Gilbert calls this the “shit sandwich.” Everything you do is going to have a nasty, smelly, shit sandwich you’re going to have to eat. It doesn’t matter what kind of work it is. One helpful way to think about your work is to evaluate what kind of shit sandwich you would be happy to eat if it meant that you got to do the other parts of the work you enjoyed. That’s a great test to see what you’re obsessed with and will stick with over time versus what you will quit on because the upside of your work isn’t worth the shit sandwich.

This is another way of thinking about and evaluating our personal and professional values. By paying attention to how we feel in these situations we will learn more about what we actually value instead of what we say or think we value.

Consider writing these lists.

What kind of work makes you feel most alive and fired up?
What have you worked on in the past that made you proud or excited?
What kind of work makes you feel the most numb or dead inside?
What have you worked on in the past that you remember hating with a firey hate?

Stop reading. Write out these 4 lists. I’m serious. Retrospecting on these experiences will help you identify what characteristics and traits exist in the kind of work that will put you in the best position for success.

While we’re thinking of experiences, let’s recognize that we think about our lives (the future and in retrospect) in experiences—not as job titles.

Here are some experiences you may want to have:

I want to live and work in another country for several months.
I want to be recognized for my social impact work.
I want to work for 6 months and then take 6 months off to travel.

Make your list of experiences. You will want to reverse engineer your work to map to the kind of experiences you want.

The bad news.

Understand that you will most likely not be able to get this right for a while. The goal isn’t to find your dream job, remember? The goal is to find something that has some of the traits you want and is directionally aligned with where you want to go. The worst thing that can happen isn’t that you journeyed in a slightly wrong direction, the worst thing that can happen is that you find yourself stuck at the starting line never having moved because the idea of going in the wrong direction was too overwhelming.

Part of this process is evolution. Your needs will change and the experiences you want will change. The goal isn’t to get to your destination in one perfect arc, the goal is to constantly evaluate and recalibrate the course trajectory.

Zig Ziglar used to say “when a plane takes off from New York and is heading for Chicago, it doesn’t stop and turn around if it’s off-course. It just adjusts the course.” In the same way, you’ve got to take off.

When I graduated from Penn State in Neuroscience, I thought I wanted to be a researcher. Actually, I knew I wanted to be a researcher, but what I didn’t know was if I wanted to go through grad school to get there.

So, I joined the Psychology club and called together a group of grad students to speak on a panel to our club. They answered a few questions about grad school that were super impactful to me. They said scary things like “you will never get your early 20s back,” and “even if you are 150% sure you want to finish grad school, you are going to question your own drive.”

This rattled me enough that I started looking for alternatives. They suggested that I find a job as a project director for a lab. It would give me insight into the grad school life and it would also allow me to keep working in research. So, that’s what I did. I started managing a developmental neuroscience lab. It was amazing.

When I realized later on that I wanted to transition into education technology, I was able to transfer my management skills to a new industry with relative ease. I was so lucky that I was able to have so many people help show light on the future of my path. It’s so critical!

Don’t miss this important step

Recruit mentors and coaches to help guide you in your life.

A mentor is someone who has gone through the path you’re on and can tell you about what will likely happen to you along your own journey.

A coach is someone who will ask you good questions, challenge your ideas, and will never stop rooting for you. You need both of these people in your life and don’t underestimate the catalytic power of their influence. Don’t get one of them, get three of each.

Stop searching for your dream job.

No job in the world is going to make you happy unless you’re already happy.

That’s a different blog post, but I hope that sentence resonates with you as it did with me.

Stop searching for your dream job.

It’s not out there. What is out there is work that is a good fit for you right now at this time in your life. What is out there is a group of people at a company or on a team or who are part of a collective who believe what you believe. What is out there is a long, evolving journey that will be imperfect for its lifelong entirety.

Stop searching for your dream job and start noticing the experiences and moments that make you feel alive and make work feel less like work—and go follow those.

“Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”
- Howard Thurman

If you are currently on the search, try reading this other post I wrote on How To Get A Job.

While you’re searching, you may also want to have a look at the post I wrote on Mission-Critical Job Interview Questions. I hope this helps.

Before you go, please consider sending this article to someone in your life who needs to read it.

I hope you got something valuable from the time you spent reading this.