Stop Searching For Your Dream Job

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.

1. What kind of work makes you feel most alive and fired up?

2. What have you worked on in the past that made you proud or excited?

3. What kind of work makes you feel the most numb or dead inside?

4. 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.”

Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash

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.

4 Life Lessons And The Psychology of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Before we get to the turtles, we have to take 2 minutes to understand the root of the Ninja Turtles’ personalities and the archetypal formula that is used — and has been used — many, many times before.

The Four Humors:

Back in the day, a bunch of old greek guys came up with the idea that the balance of fluids in the body had something to do with your personality and behavior. I’m not going to tell you about Alcmaeon of Croton, no, you can look that up for yourself if you want.

It might sound ridiculous at first, but it’s not that crazy if you just swap out the word “fluids” for “hormones.”

Of course, the old greek guys didn’t articulate it that way, but I digress.

Here’s the breakdown of the 4 main “humors” and the temperaments with which they supposedly correspond:

• Blood: Enthusiasm, intensity, social.

• Yellow Bile: Aggression and anger.

• Black Bile: Melancholy.

• Phlegm: Apathy.

Later on, Aristophanes (another old greek guy), started using these 4 different humors in dramatic theatre. Today, these are known as “The Comedy of Humors” and have been replicated again and again.

While we can confidently say that your balance of blood doesn’t change that much, and the amount of phlegm in your sinus doesn’t really alter you personality — we do know that hormones can dramatically impact human behavior and biology.

Here are some somewhat modern examples where you may have seen these archetypes already:

• Sex and the City

• Seinfeld

• Scooby-Doo

• The Fantastic Four

• The 4 Houses in Harry Potter

Personality

But what about the ninja turtles?

Although personality is a very complex concept, an assessment that is commonly used is called the DISC. DISC is an acronym for the four personality categories it measures.

Dominance. Influence. Steadiness. Conscientiousness.

Let’s place our turtles into the four DISC categories and see why they landed there.

Raphael

DISC Type: D

Raphael is a classic D in the DISC assessment. He is primarily motivated by anger, which isn’t always a bad thing. It charges him up and prepares him to face challenges with intensity. It also means that Raphael is the most straightforward, blunt, and confident.
 
Of course, this doesn’t win him any friends, but it does make him an effective voice of reason (on occasion) since he can focus on the bottom line.
 
Raphael is focused more on the outcome of the situation than how he got there — which is where he needs help from his brothers. Even though he’s fighting for good, he can rub people the wrong way with his consistently bad attitude. This means he relies on his brothers to recruit allies.

Raphael picking a fight in a trench coat from the 1990 live-action TMNT movie.

On the flip side, Raphael struggles with managing his anger. Anger is one of his primary motivators for fighting and improving, but he does not always effectively channel it. When he makes mistakes, Raphael turns his anger inward, causing him to separate himself from his brothers making him vulnerable to self-doubt, self-criticism, and external threats. He and Donatello seem to be the introverts of the bunch. In the 1990 live-action movie, Raphael makes a mistake in the turtles’ first fight. Instead of reconciling this with his brothers, he impulsively walks out on his own and gets into trouble with Casey Jones.

Our society worships this personality type. It’s believed that the challenger is the most desirable. For men, especially, the emotion of anger is the most socially accepted and normalized of all the emotions. Our society sometimes misconstrues kindness as weakness and values strength over all other traits.

“Raphael is cool, but rude.” 

The lesson here is that while anger can be a useful emotion, we can also easily lose our grip. We can lash out at others and we can beat ourselves up. Raphael reminds us to manage our anger and benevolently channel it. If you follow the Harry Potter universe, Raphael is likely a Slytherin — likely due to his decisions to do whatever it takes to complete the mission.

Mikey

DISC Type: I

Michelangelo is seen as a goofball, but his role in the team is critical. He doesn’t like conflict in general since he’d rather just be having fun, but sometimes a well-placed gag can diffuse stressful situations. Mikey is also typically the first of the four to win over new allies. Since he values relationships he prefers to use social influence to achieve collaboration instead of hard-hitting assertions like Raphael.

Sketch of Mikey hitting a punching bag in the 1990 live-action TMNT movie.

In contrast to Raphael, Mikey channels his anger effectively. When discussing the thought of losing their sensei, Splinter, in the 1990s live-action film, Mikey avoids the conversation and hits a punching bag. In fact, for nearly the entire retreat at the farm, Mikey is silent.

It’s slightly unknown but somewhat important that Mikey is also a master of one of the toughest weapons in ninjitsu; the nunchaku. It’s an illustration of his ability to make something extremely difficult look easy when he dedicates his attention. If you didn’t already know this about nunchaku, this detail would likely slip right by — just like the value of the friendships and relationships, he creates with the world outside the sewer.

“Michelangelo is a party dude.”

On the flip side, Mikey’s biggest weakness is that his interest in fun and pizza can mean a lack of interest in what’s important for the mission. This sometimes gets the team in trouble — but his brothers can’t help but forgive him when he delivers comedic relief. By Hogwarts standards, Mikey is a Hufflepuff.

Leonardo

DISC type: S

Leo has a difficult role. He is his brothers’ peer, but he is also their leader. Raphael sometimes resents that Splinter chose him to lead, but this is because Leo is the most loyal and focused of the four.

Sketch of Leo from the 1990 live-action TMNT movie.

Leo is driven by ambition, honor, and loyalty. In this sketch from the original 1990 live-action turtles movie, April O’Neil’s character depicts Leo waiting faithfully over his injured brother, Raphael.

His commitment to his family and mission also makes him arguably the most skilled of his brothers. When faced with free time, Leonardo chooses to spar with Raphael while Mikey and Donny split for some fun.

It’s important for a leader to be calm, focused, and dependable. Leo takes his job very seriously. He gathers information, usually from Donny, and makes sound decisions that benefit the team as a whole — not just his own self-interest. It’s this characteristic that earns Leo respect with his brothers. Despite the occasional eye-roll, Leo is sincere in his pursuit of justice. This, and his ability to mediate disagreements mean his team can confidently go into battle together.

We love watching leaders like Leo in movies. Calm, collected, steadfast, they give us a sense of stability during chaotic and uncertain challenges. Leo is totally a Gryffindor. 

Donatello

DISC type: C

Smart, creative, and thoughtful, Donny is the philosopher of the bunch. He’s usually tied up in a challenging technical project, meticulously improving existing tools or inventing something new (like the time scepter in TMNT III). Donny cares about accuracy and likes to think things through before making a decision. In fact, without Leo, Donny might have a hard time making things happen fast.

Sketch of Donny from the 1990 live-action TMNT movie.

Since Donny is usually wrapped up in his own projects, he can sometimes have similar avoidance behavior like Mikey. He’d just rather be building or evaluating something than arguing with Raphael. He also prefers to talk or think things through and tends to use violence as a last resort.

Donny is inspired by knowledge and deep expertise.

Though Leo is the most serious about their mission, it’s Donny who sets the standards, evaluates performance, and provides the quality assurance that Leo and the turtles need to continuously level up. If Donny were placed under the sorting hat, he’d absolutely land in Ravenclaw. 

5 Life Lessons From The Ninja Turtles

Now that we’ve covered all the personality profiles of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, let’s highlight some main takeaways from their interactions as a team.

1. Teamwork requires the diverse skills/talents/input of everyone. 

You don’t all have to agree on what to do as a team, but you do have to align on what you’re going to do.

Just look at the fractured United States and its response to the COVID-19 pandemic as a great example. We don’t all have to agree on the protocol, but we do need to align with one and start acting like a team.

“Leonardo leads, Donatello does machines.

Raphael is cool, but rude. Michelangelo is a party dude.”

2. Make strategic allies.

It’s tempting to want to do everything yourself and there’s a small, small chance that maybe you could — but a more feasible approach is to put people around you who supplement your weaknesses. The turtles, living in the sewer for many years, had no platform to speak out against crime or to show the world that they were the good guys. By creating allegiances with characters like Casey Jones and April O’Neill at Channel 4 News, they afforded themselves the ability to have influence and get new information to which they might not have had access.

3. Have mentors.

We haven’t talked much about Master Splinter. A mentor is someone who has experience in the domain you’re in and can help guide you strategically and tactically. A coach serves a different purpose. A coach asks good questions and can help you work through problems, but they might not have domain expertise. Get a mentor. Get a coach.

4. Uncle Phil from Fresh Prince was the voice of Shredder.

I’m not sure there’s a really great lesson to be learned but I felt it was worth noting how ridiculous this fact is. James Avery, the actor who played Uncle Phil on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air also played the voice of Shredder on the original 1990s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon.

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That’s it.

What did I miss? What’s a life lesson you learned?

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