Career Meaningful Quotes

I look at the blanked-out faces of the other passengers--hoisting their briefcases, their backpacks, shuffling to disembark--and I think of what Hobie said: beauty alters the grain of reality. And I keep thinking too of the more conventional wisdom: namely, that the pursuit of pure beauty is a trap, a fast track to bitterness and sorrow, that beauty has to be wedded to something more meaningful. Only what is that thing? Why am I made the way I am? Why do I care about all the wrong things, and nothing at all for the right ones? Or, to tip it another way: how can I see so clearly that everything I love or care about is illusion, and yet--for me, anyway--all that's worth living for lies in that charm? A great sorrow, and one that I am only beginning to understand: we don't get to choose our own hearts. We can't make ourselves want what's good for us or what's good for other people. We don't get to choose the people we are. Because--isn't it drilled into us constantly, from childhood on, an unquestioned platitude in the culture--? From William Blake to Lady Gaga, from Rousseau to Rumi to Tosca to Mister Rogers, it's a curiously uniform message, accepted from high to low: when in doubt, what to do? How do we know what's right for us? Every shrink, every career counselor, every Disney princess knows the answer: "Be yourself." "Follow your heart." Only here's what I really, really want someone to explain to me. What if one happens to be possessed of a heart that can't be trusted--? What if the heart, for its own unfathomable reasons, leads one willfully and in a cloud of unspeakable radiance away from health, domesticity, civic responsibility and strong social connections and all the blandly-held common virtues and instead straight toward a beautiful flare of ruin, self-immolation, disaster?...If your deepest self is singing and coaxing you straight toward the bonfire, is it better to turn away? Stop your ears with wax? Ignore all the perverse glory your heart is screaming at you? Set yourself on the course that will lead you dutifully towards the norm, reasonable hours and regular medical check-ups, stable relationships and steady career advancement the New York Times and brunch on Sunday, all with the promise of being somehow a better person? Or...is it better to throw yourself head first and laughing into the holy rage calling your name?

Life itself is your career, and your interaction with life is your most meaningful relationship. Everything else you’re doing is just focusing on a tiny subset of life in the attempt to give life some meaning. What actually gives life meaning is the willingness to live it. It isn’t any particular event; it’s the willingness to experience life’s events.

Every time you worry that you could get trapped in some kind of work you don't care about, you're dealing with the problem of meaningfulness. I guarantee that in the back of your mind is the thought that somehow you have to make a contribution to something, be acknowledged, do something that matters--or you're just fooling around.

College, after all, as those who like to denigrate it often say, is "not the real world." But that is precisely its strength. College is an opportunity to stand outside the world for a few years, between the orthodoxy of your family and the exigencies of career, and contemplate things from a distance.

When does a job feel meaningful? Whenever it allows us to generate delight or reduce suffering in others. Though we are often taught to think of ourselves as inherently selfish, the longing to act meaningfully in our work seems just as stubborn a part of our make-up as our appetite for status or money. It is because we are meaning-focused animals rather than simply materialistic ones that we can reasonably contemplate surrendering security for a career helping to bring drinking water to rural Malawi or might quit a job in consumer goods for one in cardiac nursing, aware that when it comes to improving the human condition a well-controlled defibrillator has the edge over even the finest biscuit. But we should be wary of restricting the idea of meaningful work too tightly, of focusing only on the doctors, the nuns of Kolkata or the Old Masters. There can be less exalted ways to contribute to the furtherance of the collective good.... ....An endeavor endowed with meaning may appear meaningful only when it proceeds briskly in the hands of a restricted number of actors and therefore where particular workers can make an imaginative connection between what they have done with their working days and their impact upon others.

In general, an ideal partner is (a) open and nondefensive, (b) honest and nonduplicitous, (c) affectionate and easy-going, (d) mentally and physically healthy, (e) independent and successful in his or her chosen career or lifestyle, and (f) aware of a meaningful existence that includes humanitarian values.

And speaking of options ,these kids [the ones who attend elite universities] have all been told that theirs are limitless. Once you commit to something, though, that ceases to be true. A former student sent me an essay he wrote, a few years after college, called "The Paradox of Potential." Yale students, he said, are like stem cells. They can be anything in the world, so they try to delay for as long as possible the moment when they have to become just one thing in particular. Possibility, paradoxically, becomes limitation.

The grand scheme of a life, maybe (just maybe), is not about knowing or not knowing, choosing or not choosing. Perhaps what is truly known can’t be described or articulated by creativity or logic, science or art — but perhaps it can be described by the most authentic and meaningful combination of the two: poetry: As Robert Frost wrote, a poem 'begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It is never a thought to begin with.' I recommend the following course of action for those who are just beginning their careers or for those like me, who may be reconfiguring midway through: heed the words of Robert Frost. Start with a big, fat lump in your throat, start with a profound sense of wrong, a deep homesickness, or a crazy lovesickness, and run with it.

Learn to slow down and perceive the mysterious events and opportunities that happen in life. We call them coincidences, but if we look closely we see they are meaningful. They bring us just the right information at just the right time to extend our careers, relationships, and growth. These events feel destined in some way, as though the world is set up to help us make a better life, work through our problems, and reach our dreams - if we just pay attention.

To be truly rich includes not only financial freedom but developing rich, meaningful relationships, enriching your health, and enjoying a rich balance between your career and your personal life.

Have they been educated to the level of their intellectual ability or ambition? Is their use of free time engaging, meaningful, and productive? Have they formulated solid and well-articulated plans for the future? Are they (and those they are close to) free of any serious physical health or economic problems? Do they have friends and a social life? A stable and satisfying intimate partnership? Close and functional familial relationships? A career—or, at least, a job—that is financially sufficient, stable and, if possible, a source of satisfaction and opportunity? If the answer to any three or more of these questions is no, I consider that my new client is insufficiently embedded in the interpersonal world and is in danger of spiraling downward psychologically because of that.

The purpose of college, to put this all another way, is to turn adolescents into adults. You needn't go to school for that, but if you're going to be there anyway, then that's the most important thing to get accomplished. That is the true education: accept no substitutes. The idea that we should take the first four years of young adulthood and devote them to career preparation alone, neglecting every other part of life, is nothing short of an obscenity. If that's what people had you do, then you were robbed. And if you find yourself to be the same person at the end of college as you were at the beginning - the same beliefs, the same values, the same desires, the same goals for the same reasons - then you did it wrong. Go back and do it again.

Thinking early in your career about how to help your co-workers succeed instills the right habits that in turn will lead to your own success.

My struggle seasons are all bad, but my blessings seasons are great. From both, I get the lesson and the blessing. Wisdom is discovering how your bad times were also meaningful

A career, producing of children, are all maya [illusion] compared to that one thing, that your life is meaningful.

The idea that we should take the first four years of young adulthood and devote them to career preparation alone, neglecting every other part of life, is nothing short of an obscenity.

-when he thinks of the starry-eyed puerility and narcissism of these fantasies now, a rough decade later, Schmidt experiences a kind of full-framed internal wince, that type of embarrassment-before-self that makes our most mortifying memories objects of fascination and repulsion at once, though in Terry Schmidt's case a certain amount of introspection and psychotherapy had enabled him to understand that his professional fantasies were not in the main all that unique, that a large percentage I bright young men and women locate the impetus behind their career choice in the belief that they are fundamentally different from the common run of man, unique and in certain crucial ways superior, more as it were central, meaningful--what else could explain the fact that they can and will make a difference in their chosen field simply by the fact that thy themselves have been at the exact center of all they've experienced for the whole 20 years of their conscious lives?

Raising our children isn’t just about getting them ready for adulthood. It isn’t just about preparation for a career. It’s about transforming and shaping their hearts and minds. It’s about nourishing their souls, building relationships, and forging connections. It’s about nurturing within them care and compassion for whomever they encounter.

So far in my life, I’ve been a lawyer. I’ve been a vice president at a hospital and the director of a nonprofit that helps young people build meaningful careers. I’ve been a working-class black student at a fancy mostly white college. I’ve been the only woman, the only African American, in all sorts of rooms. I’ve been a bride, a stressed-out new mother, a daughter torn up by grief. And until recently, I was the First Lady of the United States of America—a job that’s not officially a job, but that nonetheless has given me a platform like nothing I could have imagined. It challenged me and humbled me, lifted me up and shrank me down, sometimes all at once. I’m just beginning to process what took place over these last years—from the moment in 2006 when my husband first started talking about running for president to the cold morning this winter when I climbed into a limo with Melania Trump, accompanying her to her husband’s inauguration. It’s been quite a ride.

Yeah, yeah, you have the memory of an elephant. Or you’re so smart that you remember everything, right? WRONG. Not writing down your thoughts, ideas, tasks, etc, is stupid. Why? Because you’re wasting a lot of brain power when you rely on your memory. When you write everything down, you can use your brainpower for other things. Like solving problems. That’s actually useful and advances your career.

With no universal measure for meaning to compare with the seemingly solid accounting for income, we fall into the data trap. Our larger culture, and our pesky parents, push us toward decisions that seem to score well but are blind to the most important elements of healthy careers and meaningful lives.

Here is part of the problem, girls: we’ve been sold a bill of goods. Back in the day, women didn’t run themselves ragged trying to achieve some impressively developed life in eight different categories. No one constructed fairy-tale childhoods for their spawn, developed an innate set of personal talents, fostered a stimulating and world-changing career, created stunning homes and yardscapes, provided homemade food for every meal (locally sourced, of course), kept all marriage fires burning, sustained meaningful relationships in various environments, carved out plenty of time for “self care,” served neighbors/church/world, and maintained a fulfilling, active relationship with Jesus our Lord and Savior. You can’t balance that job description. Listen to me: No one can pull this off. No one is pulling this off. The women who seem to ride this unicorn only display the best parts of their stories. Trust me. No one can fragment her time and attention into this many segments.

If you devote yourself only to yourself, if your heart strives, above all else, for fame, or money, or power or even happiness, I'm not saying you're a bad person. But you are making a bad choice. Choose service instead. Not because the world needs you -- it probably doesn't. The world will be fine. And if it won't be fine, you alone can't fix it. Choose service because there is nothing more insufferable than a talented, driven person who is also completely self-obsessed. Those people are awful. They spend their lives trying to fill a hole and digging it deeper instead. Anyone can be successful. Only service can make you realize how insignificant, and yet how meaningful, your time on earth really is.

I dropped my gardening tools, threw my bicycle over a hedge and went in search of fortunes laid beneath the hangman’s noose.

It is a great victory if you learn how to survive in today’s hard times; it’s an even greater victory if you help someone else survive and find meaningful work.

Practical utility, however, is not the ultimate purpose of a liberal arts education. Its ultimate purpose is to help you learn to reflect in the widest and deepest sense, beyond the requirements of work and career: for the sake of citizenship, for the sake of living well with others, above all, for the sake of building a self that is strong and creative and free.

Perhaps it was all just another game that I can’t win, I thought. Heartbreak, a meaningful career, a dead-end ambition. I can’t win. I think it was at that moment that I was released.

If you wait until the end of the month to save what you have left, there will be nothing left over. Likewise, if you wait until the end of the day to do meaningful but not urgent things like exercise, pray, read, ponder how to advance your career or grow your organization, or truly give your family your best, it probably won’t happen, If it has to happen, then it has to happen first".

Careers are dangerous because people invest so much of themselves into their careers that they establish an identity and a social status based upon where they work and what they do for a living.

Ultimately what I’m talking about is living with controlled disorder, not trying to get rid of it or waiting to get over it. It is not done in a day, and it is not done with medication alone (although it is usually not done without it). You need to ask yourself, “How can I make my life work? How can I make my relationships work? How can I make my career meaningful?” If it means doing things a bit differently than other people, then be different; it takes courage to break through the barriers of shame and guilt to ask for support. If it means breaking the mold, then break it; it takes courage to accept that you can’t do what other people can do. If it means challenging the “way it’s always been,” then challenge it; it takes courage to celebrate that you can often do what other people can’t.

A major reason many Americans still struggle to find meaningful work is because they are using tactics from the 1990s and early 2000s. The future for employment is now here...and it's online." ~February 21, 2013 as featured by CBS Money Watch

Fortunately, our colleges and universities are fully cognizant of the problems I have been delineating and take concerted action to address them. Curricula are designed to give coherence to the educational experience and to challenge students to develop a strong degree of moral awareness. Professors, deeply involved with the enterprise of undergraduate instruction, are committed to their students' intellectual growth and insist on maintaining the highest standards of academic rigor. Career services keep themselves informed about the broad range of postgraduate options and make a point of steering students away from conventional choices. A policy of noncooperation with U.S. News has taken hold, depriving the magazine of the data requisite to calculate its rankings. Rather than squandering money on luxurious amenities and exorbitant administrative salaries, schools have rededicated themselves to their core missions of teaching and the liberal arts. I'm kidding, of course.

It’s impossible to have a meaningful conversation about happiness without understanding what makes each of us tick. When we find ourselves stuck in unhappy careers—and even unhappy lives—it is often the result of a fundamental misunderstanding of what really motivates us.

Many students come to me full of wonderful intentions hoping to change the world; they plan to spend their time helping the poor and disadvantaged. I tell them to first graduate and make a lot of money, and only then figure out how best to help those in need. Too often students can’t meaningfully help the disadvantaged now, even if it makes them feel good for trying to. I have seen so many former students in their late 30s and 40s struggling to make ends meet. They spent their time in college doing good rather than building their careers and futures. I warn students today to be careful how they use their precious time and to think carefully about when is the right time to help. It’s a well-worn cliché, but you have to help yourself before you help others. This is too often lost on idealistic students. I am often asked whether one should

That gives peace, when people feel that they are living [as] actors in the divine drama. That gives the only meaning to human life; everything else is banal and you can dismiss it. A career, producing of children, are all maya compared with that one thing, that your life is meaningful.

they wanted their son to pursue a career in religion or education, not sales. It seems unlikely that they would have approved of a self-improvement technique called “Truth or Lie.” Or, for that matter, of Carnegie’s best-selling advice on how to get people to admire you and do your bidding. How to Win Friends and Influence People is full of chapter titles like “Making People Glad to Do What You Want” and “How to Make People Like You Instantly.” All of which raises the question, how did we go from Character to Personality without realizing that we had sacrificed something meaningful along the way?

White noise, impersonal roar. Deadening incandescence of the boarding terminals. But even these soul-free, sealed-off places are drenched with meaning, spangled and thundering with it. Sky Mall. Portable stereo systems. Mirrored isles of Drambuie and Tanqueray and Chanel No. 5. I look at the blanked-out faces of the other passengers—hoisting their briefcases, their backpacks, shuffling to disembark—and I think of what Hobie said: beauty alters the grain of reality. And I keep thinking too of the more conventional wisdom: namely, that the pursuit of pure beauty is a trap, a fast track to bitterness and sorrow, that beauty has to be wedded to something more meaningful. Only what is that thing? Why am I made the way I am? Why do I care about all the wrong things, and nothing at all for the right ones? Or, to tip it another way: how can I see so clearly that everything I love or care about is illusion, and yet—for me, anyway—all that’s worth living for lies in that charm? A great sorrow, and one that I am only beginning to understand: we don’t get to choose our own hearts. We can’t make ourselves want what’s good for us or what’s good for other people. We don’t get to choose the people we are. Because—isn’t it drilled into us constantly, from childhood on, an unquestioned platitude in the culture—? From William Blake to Lady Gaga, from Rousseau to Rumi to Tosca to Mister Rogers, it’s a curiously uniform message, accepted from high to low: when in doubt, what to do? How do we know what’s right for us? Every shrink, every career counselor, every Disney princess knows the answer: “Be yourself.” “Follow your heart.

This shift in culture has changed us. In the first place, it has made us a bit more materialistic. College students now say they put more value on money and career success. Every year, researchers from UCLA survey a nationwide sample of college freshmen to gauge their values and what they want out of life. In 1966, 80 percent of freshmen said that they were strongly motivated to develop a meaningful philosophy of life. Today, less than half of them say that. In 1966, 42 percent said that becoming rich was an important life goal. By 1990, 74 percent agreed with that statement. Financial security, once seen as a middling value, is now tied as students’ top goal. In 1966, in other words, students felt it was important to at least present themselves as philosophical and meaning-driven people. By 1990, they no longer felt the need to present themselves that way. They felt it perfectly acceptable to say they were primarily interested in money.20 We live in a more individualistic society. If

When I think about what would make me happy, I am struck by how basic my desires are. I want to feel that I'm progressing through life; I want a meaningful relationship and an engaging career. I want to live in a place that feels like home. What I want is what everyone wants - so ordinary as to be cliched. Why is that so hard to find?

And the shitty jobs made the good ones more meaningful. Most people don’t land their dream job right out of the gate, which means we all have to start somewhere. You’ll appreciate your amazing career so much more when you look back a your not-so-amazing jobs in the past, and hopefully realize that you learned something from all of them.

The most important outcome of education is that students have a good quality of life and are productive members of society. Employment is the critical component for a successful quality of life for people with disabilities. Good jobs and/or careers that offer meaningful work, good pay and benefits, and social inclusion provide the key for successful outcomes. Page 3.

This had been part of her training, part of her career, part of herself: whatever was going on, live like a normal person. Do normal things, see normal people. Don't give anyone a reason to question you, investigate you. Don't give them any meaningful answers to prying questions that might be asked after you've disappeared. Don't create any suspicion that you were not who you claimed to be.

INFJs believe overly competitive environments are harmful to the creative process. They have a visceral, instinctual aversion to workplace dynamics that set one employee against the other, and they abhor backstabbing and office politics almost as much as they despise social injustice and wasted human potential—probably because they see such behavior as a contributing factor to our society’s dysfunction.

the only thing there is to get from life is the growth that comes from experiencing it. Life itself is your career, and your interaction with life is your most meaningful relationship. Everything else you’re doing is just focusing on a tiny subset of life in the attempt to give life some meaning. What actually gives life meaning is the willingness to live it. It isn’t any particular event; it’s the willingness to experience life’s events.

Operating from the idea that a relationship (or anything else) will somehow complete you, save you, or make your life magically take off is a surefire way to keep yourself unhappy and unhitched. Ironically, quite the opposite is true. What you really need to understand is that nothing outside of you can ever produce a lasting sense of completeness, security, or success. There’s no man, relationship, job, amount of money, house, car, or anything else that can produce an ongoing sense of happiness, satisfaction, security, and fulfillment in you. Some women get confused by the word save. In this context, what it refers to is the mistaken idea that a relationship will rid you of feelings of emptiness, loneliness, insecurity, or fear that are inherent to every human being. That finding someone to be with will somehow “save” you from yourself. We all need to wake up and recognize that those feelings are a natural part of the human experience. They’re not meaningful. They only confirm the fact that we are alive and have a pulse. The real question is, what will you invest in: your insecurity or your irresistibility? The choice is yours. Once you get that you are complete and whole right now, it’s like flipping a switch that will make you more attractive, authentic, and relaxed in any dating situation—instantly. All of the desperate, needy, and clingy vibes that drive men insane will vanish because you’ve stopped trying to use a relationship to fix yourself. The fact is, you are totally capable of experiencing happiness, satisfaction, and fulfillment right now. All you have to do is start living your life like you count. Like you matter. Like what you do in each moment makes a difference in the world. Because it really does. That means stop putting off your dreams, waiting for someday, or delaying taking action on those things you know you want for yourself because somewhere deep inside you’re hoping that Prince Charming will come along to make it all better. You know what I’m talking about. The tendency to hold back from investing in your career, your health, your home, your finances, or your family because you’re single and you figure those things will all get handled once you land “the one.” Psst. Here’s a secret: holding back in your life is what’s keeping him away. Don’t wait until you find someone. You are someone.

While I enjoy the work because of my love of mathematics, I luckily realized that this career path was simply designed to exploit inefficiencies in markets in order to extract profits from others. This financial realm known as trading is a zero-sum game where for every dollar you make, someone else loses a dollar, and I know I’m not destined to become such an obvious parasite on society. I only aspire to lead a meaningful, impactful life where I can apply my skills as an extremely analytical individual toward the benefit of humanity. I’m

Many have argued with me that ambition is not the problem. Women are not less ambitious than men, they insist, but more enlightened with different and more meaningful goals. I do not dismiss or dispute this argument. There is far more to life than climbing a career ladder, including raising children, seeking personal fulfillment, contributing to society, and improving the lives of others. And there are many people who are deeply committed to their jobs but do not - and should not have to - aspire to run their organizations. Leadership roles are not the only way to have profound impact.

… beauty alters the grain of reality … pursuit of pure beauty is a trap, a fast track to bitterness and sorrow, that beauty has to be wedded to something more meaningful … everything I love is illusion, and yet … all that’s worth living for lies in that charm… a great sorrow and one that I am only beginning to understand: we don’t get to chose our own hearts. We can’t make ourselves want what’s good for us or what’s good for other people. We don’t get to choose the people we are… how do we know what’s right for us? Every shrink, every career counselor, every Disney princess knows the answer. Be yourself. Follow your heart.

We feel pressured to do something extraordinary with our lives, or to an extraordinary standard of merit, or in a way that’s applauded by an extraordinary number of people – even though it’s true by definition that only a few people can ever be extraordinary in any given domain. (If we could all stand out from the crowd, there’d be no crowd from which to stand out.) Why shouldn’t an anonymous career spent quietly helping a few people get to qualify as a meaningful way to spend one’s time? Why shouldn’t an absorbing conversation, an act of kindness, or an exhilarating hike get to count? Why adopt a definition that rules such things out?

Not that I can throw stones, since, as a woman without a career or children, so much effort is poured into curating the perfect life. Your house must always be pristine because if not, people will wonder what the fuck else you do with your time. Your hosting skills must be tip-top; guests’ glasses should never be empty – like radio, there should never be dead air – and every aspect of the meals you serve must be impeccable because if not, people will wonder what the fuck else you do with your time. Your marriage must be loving and fun, but also meaningful, and you must make sure others know your marriage is loving and fun, but also meaningful, because if not, people will wonder what the fuck else you do with your time. It’s important to note they must know about your fun, loving but also meaningful marriage without you shoving it in their face like a cream pie. It is a pie to be smelt and displayed on a window ledge and admired.

Another painful irony is that, in exile, many refugees strive to stay alive, while watching an absurd show of fraud politicians, experts, pundits, academics, and journalists on the empire’s payroll fighting about them merely to serve their own careers and fortunes. Some promise to imprison refugees, some promise to build walls to stop their influx, some promise to deny them any human rights, others promise to publicly shame and attack them. Many ask refugees to ‘fuck off and go back to their countries,’ forgetting that their empire left nothing to go back to. Yet, conveniently, nobody promises to stop waging wars against refugees. Nobody promises to stop destroying and economically exploiting the places from which refugees escaped. They discuss everything except the actual solution to the refugee crisis, which is simple: stop waging wars of any sort against other people! Everyone loves hearing themselves talking about the refugee crisis, but almost never talking with refugees in meaningful and honest ways. If they talk with them, it is only to depict them as victims or villains in the unjust courts of the empire’s arrogance. They defend them or hate them, depending on the direction in which they wish to advance their fortunes and careers. It all depends on what they need to put on their CVs at any given time or in any given situation. The last piece of this absurd game is that the careers of every self-appointed mouthpiece for refugees are almost always dependent on paychecks paid by those who directly or indirectly run the military-industrial-complex, the biggest producer of refugees. This last piece is precisely what makes breaking the vicious cycle almost impossible. And such continues the game, all while refugees are sitting and watching in bitter silence.

We're constantly reminded that this precious life is what you make of it. But what if you're not sure of what you want to make it into? On the one hand there are those resolute in their life's agenda and objectives, often set by the scriptural society they choose to adhere to, or one passed down from parents and family. They know what they want because they allow themselves to be told what is important, to be guided by those who have gone before. A proven formula maybe, or an unrealistic dream. Is true success in ones life fairly measured against someone else's achievements, should we use those achievements of others as our own check list? Surely we will find happiness just as they have, or not, at the end of it. The opposite end of the spectrum sees the tragic dreamers, unable to answer the question of why they're even here, the absence of knowing what their true calling is drives them close to insanity, desperate to live a meaningful life but haunted by the inability to see what constitutes as such. Often turning to artistic release to try and express themselves, their own high standards against which they measure themselves tragically, often fatally high. I find myself somewhere in the middle. I know what society expects but I don't agree with all of it. Much I have to adhere to simply to exist. Fortunately an education grants me a career not a job, that in the current world gives me choices that others do not and I am thankful. But I'm concious that the well beaten paths lead to the same final destination that others have arrived at and been disappointed in themselves, for not aiming higher or being brave enough to be different. Life is what we make of it, but regardless of how lofty or how humble our desired achievements are we should never lose sight of the fact that it is our life to live. We should all feel comfortable enough to make our own mistakes, to make deviations from the main path, to explore with our own eyes and minds. We should ignore those who tell us our dreams are too big, or to lowly or just plain wrong. Deciding whose own advice and guidance to follow, or ignore is often the hardest thing.

The Personal Job Advertisement These two activities are likely to have encouraged some clearer ideas about genuine career possibilities, but you should not assume that you are necessarily the best judge of what might offer you fulfilment. Writing a Personal Job Advertisement allows you to seek the advice of other people. The concept behind this task is the opposite of a standard career search: imagine that newspapers didn’t advertise jobs, but rather advertised people who were looking for jobs. You do it in two steps. First, write a half-page job advertisement that tells the world who you are and what you care about in life. Put down your talents (e.g. you speak Mongolian, can play the bass guitar), your passions (e.g. ikebana, scuba diving), and the core values and causes you believe in (e.g. wildlife preservation, women’s rights). Include your personal qualities (e.g. you are quick-witted, impatient, lacking self-confidence). And record anything else that is important to you – a minimum salary or that you want to work abroad. Make sure you don’t include any particular job you are keen on, or your educational qualifications or career background. Keep it at the level of underlying motivations and interests. Here comes the intriguing part. Make a list of ten people you know from different walks of life and who have a range of careers – maybe a policeman uncle or a cartoonist friend – and email them your Personal Job Advertisement, asking them to recommend two or three careers that might fit with what you have written. Tell them to be specific – for example, not replying ‘you should work with children’ but ‘you should do charity work with street kids in Rio de Janeiro’. You will probably end up with an eclectic list of careers, many of which you would never have thought of yourself. The purpose is not only to give you surprising ideas for future careers, but also to help you see your many possible selves. After doing these three activities, and having explored the various dimensions of meaning, you should feel more confident about making a list of potential careers that offer the promise of meaningful work. What should you do next? Certainly not begin sending out your CV. Rather, as the following chapter explains, the key to finding a fulfilling career is to experiment with these possibilities in that rather frightening place called the real world. It’s time to take a ‘radical sabbatical’.

When I launched my AI career in 1983, I did so by waxing philosophic in my application to the Ph.D. program at Carnegie Mellon. I described AI as “the quantification of the human thinking process, the explication of human behavior,” and our “final step” to understanding ourselves. It was a succinct distillation of the romantic notions in the field at that time and one that inspired me as I pushed the bounds of AI capabilities and human knowledge. Today, thirty-five years older and hopefully a bit wiser, I see things differently. The AI programs that we’ve created have proven capable of mimicking and surpassing human brains at many tasks. As a researcher and scientist, I’m proud of these accomplishments. But if the original goal was to truly understand myself and other human beings, then these decades of “progress” got me nowhere. In effect, I got my sense of anatomy mixed up. Instead of seeking to outperform the human brain, I should have sought to understand the human heart. It’s a lesson that it took me far too long to learn. I have spent much of my adult life obsessively working to optimize my impact, to turn my brain into a finely tuned algorithm for maximizing my own influence. I bounced between countries and worked across time zones for that purpose, never realizing that something far more meaningful and far more human lay in the hearts of the family members, friends, and loved ones who surrounded me. It took a cancer diagnosis and the unselfish love of my family for me to finally connect all these dots into a clearer picture of what separates us from the machines we build. That process changed my life, and in a roundabout way has led me back to my original goal of using AI to reveal our nature as human beings. If AI ever allows us to truly understand ourselves, it will not be because these algorithms captured the mechanical essence of the human mind. It will be because they liberated us to forget about optimizations and to instead focus on what truly makes us human: loving and being loved. Reaching that point will require hard work and conscious choices by all of us. Luckily, as human beings, we possess the free will to choose our own goals that AI still lacks. We can choose to come together, working across class boundaries and national borders to write our own ending to the AI story. Let us choose to let machines be machines, and let humans be humans. Let us choose to simply use our machines, and more importantly, to love one another.

Throughout the history of the church, Christians have tended to elevate the importance of one over the other. For the first 1,500 years of the church, singleness was considered the preferred state and the best way to serve Christ. Singles sat at the front of the church. Marrieds were sent to the back.4 Things changed after the Reformation in 1517, when single people were sent to the back and marrieds moved to the front — at least among Protestants.5 Scripture, however, refers to both statuses as weighty, meaningful vocations. We’ll spend more time on each later in the chapter, but here is a brief overview. Marrieds. This refers to a man and woman who form a one-flesh union through a covenantal vow — to God, to one another, and to the larger community — to permanently, freely, faithfully, and fruitfully love one another. Adam and Eve provide the clearest biblical model for this. As a one-flesh couple, they were called by God to take initiative to “be fruitful . . . fill the earth and subdue it” (Genesis 1:28). Singles. Scripture teaches that human beings are created for intimacy and connection with God, themselves, and one another. Marriage is one framework in which we work this out; singleness is another. While singleness may be voluntarily chosen or involuntarily imposed, temporary or long-term, a sudden event or a gradual unfolding, Christian singleness can be understood within two distinct callings: • Vowed celibates. These are individuals who make lifelong vows to remain single and maintain lifelong sexual abstinence as a means of living out their commitment to Christ. They do this freely in response to a God-given gift of grace (Matthew 19:12). Today, we are perhaps most familiar with vowed celibates as nuns and priests in the Roman Catholic or Orthodox Church. These celibates vow to forgo earthly marriage in order to participate more fully in the heavenly reality that is eternal union with Christ.6 • Dedicated celibates. These are singles who have not necessarily made a lifelong vow to remain single, but who choose to remain sexually abstinent for as long as they are single. Their commitment to celibacy is an expression of their commitment to Christ. Many desire to marry or are open to the possibility. They may have not yet met the right person or are postponing marriage to pursue a career or additional education. They may be single because of divorce or the death of a spouse. The apostle Paul acknowledges such dedicated celibates in his first letter to the church at Corinth (1 Corinthians 7). Understanding singleness and marriage as callings or vocations must inform our self-understanding and the outworking of our leadership. Our whole life as a leader is to bear witness to God’s love for the world. But we do so in different ways as marrieds or singles. Married couples bear witness to the depth of Christ’s love. Their vows focus and limit them to loving one person exclusively, permanently, and intimately. Singles — vowed or dedicated — bear witness to the breadth of Christ’s love. Because they are not limited by a vow to one person, they have more freedom and time to express the love of Christ to a broad range of people. Both marrieds and singles point to and reveal Christ’s love, but in different ways. Both need to learn from one another about these different aspects of Christ’s love. This may be a radically new concept for you, but stay with me. God intends this rich theological vision to inform our leadership in ways few of us may have considered. Before exploring the connections between leadership and marriage or singleness, it’s important to understand the way marriage and singleness are commonly understood in standard practice among leaders today.

10 Practical Strategies to Improve Your Critical Thinking Skills and Unleash Your Creativity In today's rapidly changing world, the ability to think critically and creatively has become more important than ever. Whether you're a student looking to excel academically, a professional striving for success in your career, or simply someone who wants to navigate life's challenges with confidence, developing strong critical thinking skills is crucial. In this blog post, we will explore ten practical strategies to help you improve your critical thinking abilities and unleash your creative potential. 1. Embrace open-mindedness: One of the cornerstones of critical thinking is being open to different viewpoints and perspectives. Cultivate a willingness to listen to others, consider alternative opinions, and challenge your own beliefs. This practice expands your thinking and encourages creative problem-solving. 2. Ask thought-provoking questions: Asking insightful questions is a powerful way to stimulate critical thinking. By questioning assumptions, seeking clarity, and exploring deeper meanings, you can uncover new insights and perspectives. Challenge yourself to ask thought-provoking questions regularly. 3. Practice active listening: Listening actively involves not just hearing, but also understanding, interpreting, and empathizing with the speaker. By honing your active listening skills, you can better grasp complex ideas, identify underlying assumptions, and engage in more meaningful discussions. 4. Seek diverse sources of information: Expand your knowledge base by seeking information from a wide range of sources. Engage with diverse perspectives, opinions, and ideas through books, articles, podcasts, and documentaries. This habit broadens your understanding and encourages critical thinking by exposing you to different viewpoints. 5. Develop analytical thinking skills: Analytical thinking involves breaking down complex problems into smaller components, examining relationships and patterns, and drawing logical conclusions. Enhance your analytical skills by practicing activities like puzzles, riddles, and brain teasers. This will sharpen your ability to analyze information and think critically. 6. Foster a growth mindset: A growth mindset is the belief that your abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work. Embracing this mindset encourages you to view challenges as opportunities for growth, rather than obstacles. By persisting through difficulties, you build resilience and enhance your critical thinking abilities. 7. Engage in collaborative problem-solving: Collaborating with others on problem-solving tasks can spark creativity and strengthen critical thinking skills. Seek out group projects, brainstorming sessions, or online forums where you can exchange ideas, challenge each other's thinking, and find innovative solutions together. 8. Practice reflective thinking: Taking time to reflect on your thoughts, actions, and experiences allows you to gain deeper insights and learn from past mistakes. Regularly engage in activities like journaling, meditation, or self-reflection exercises to develop your reflective thinking skills. This practice enhances your critical thinking abilities by promoting self-awareness and self-improvement. 9. Encourage creativity through experimentation: Creativity and critical thinking often go hand in hand. Give yourself permission to experiment and explore new ideas without fear of failure. Embrace a "what if" mindset and push the boundaries of your thinking. This willingness to take risks and think outside the box can lead to breakthroughs in critical thinking. 10. Continuously learn and adapt: Critical thinking is a skill that can be honed throughout your life. Commit to lifelong learning and seek opportunities to expand your knowledge and skills. Stay curious, be open to new experiences, and embrace change.

The question I've always had about this army of young people with seemingly endless career options who wind up in finance is: What happens to them next? One moment they're young people: They have young people's idealism and hope to live a meaningful life. The next they're essentially old people, at work gaming ratings companies, designing securities to fail so they can make a killing off the investors they dupe into buying them, rigging various markets at the expense of the wider society, and encouraging all sorts of people to do stuff with their capital and their com panies that they should never do.

Every aspect of your life is directly related to how well your career fits you. People who are engaged in satisfying, challenging careers that match their talents, personalities, and goals usually achieve a higher degree of success than people who do not care passionately for what they do. They are healthier, live longer, and tend to be more satisfied with other aspects of their lives. They feel their lives are meaningful and a source of joy. An ill-fitting career contributes significantly to stress and depression, and has a profoundly negative effect on self-esteem.

Empaths are naturally driven to make the world a better place. They share a strong desire to help people and often sacrifice themselves in the process. It is, therefore, important for empaths to find work that is meaningful to them, that will make a positive impact on the lives of others. They tend to stay away from competitive careers and those driven by money. Careers in the healing field like teaching and counseling appeal more to empaths.

College is an opportunity to stand outside the world for a few years, between the orthodoxy of your family and the exigencies of career, and contemplate things from a distance.

Marco Rubio, nobody's idea of a hippie, has had this to say about his mother and father: "Early on my parents drove it into us that a job is what you do to make a living; a career is when you get paid to do something that you love. They had jobs so I could have a career.

It’s time to shun the sure thing and the status quo. Time to boldly leap into the void with an idea that might not work (but then again, just might). Lean into your endeavor, even though it’s very likely to not turn out exactly as you imagine.

Adecade ago, Bill Gates wrote: “The most meaningful way to differentiate your company from your competition, the best way to put distance between you and the crowd, is to do an outstanding job with information. How you gather, manage, and use information will determine whether you win or lose.

Many students come to me full of wonderful intentions hoping to change the world; they plan to spend their time helping the poor and disadvantaged. I tell them to first graduate and make a lot of money, and only then figure out how best to help those in need. Too often students can’t meaningfully help the disadvantaged now, even if it makes them feel good for trying to. I have seen so many former students in their late 30s and 40s struggling to make ends meet. They spent their time in college doing good rather than building their careers and futures. I warn students today to be careful how they use their precious time and to think carefully about when is the right time to help. It’s a well-worn cliché, but you have to help yourself before you help others. This is too often lost on idealistic students.

In the end, Castro’s revolutionary message reached a massive audience through a superconnector—a radio—but the rebels won the people’s hearts because they showed that they sincerely cared. The movement harnessed the power of the superconnector by giving service as a publisher and educator. J. J. Abrams built his career by collaborating with talented, fast-rising, and well-connected people and by making them look great. And Mint grew business via its own broadcast on the Web, tapping superconnected people and then helping the members of those people’s networks through meaningful content. No matter the medium or method, giving is the timeless smartcut for harnessing superconnectors and creating serendipity. What happens post-serendipity—as we’ll learn in the final part of this book—is where things start to get really interesting.

...a large percentage of bright young men and women locate the impetus behind their career choice in the belief that they are fundamentally different from the common run of man, unique and in certain crucial ways superior, more as it were central, meaningful—what else could explain the fact that they themselves have been at the exact center of all they've experienced for the whole 20 years of their conscious lives?—and that they can and will make a difference in their chosen field simply by the fact of their unique and central presence in it...

Follow Your Passion” Is Terrible Advice “I think it misconstrues the nature of finding a satisfying career and satisfying job, where the biggest predictor of job satisfaction is mentally engaging work. It’s the nature of the job itself. It’s not got that much to do with you. . . . It’s whether the job provides a lot of variety, gives you good feedback, allows you to exercise autonomy, contributes to the wider world—Is it actually meaningful? Is it making the world better?—and also, whether it allows you to exercise a skill that you’ve developed.” * Most gifted books for life improvement and general effectiveness Mindfulness by Mark Williams and Danny Penman. This book is a friendly and accessible introduction to mindfulness meditation, and includes an 8-week guided meditation course. Will completed this course, and it had a significant impact on his life. The Power of Persuasion by Robert Levine. The ability to be convincing, sell ideas, and persuade other people is a meta-skill that transfers to many areas of your life. This book didn’t become that popular, but it’s the best book on persuasion that Will has found. It’s much more in-depth than other options in the genre. * Advice to your 20-year-old self? “One is emphasizing that you have 80,000 working hours in the course of your life. It’s incredibly important to work out how best to spend them, and what you’re doing at the moment—20-year-old Will—is just kind of drifting and thinking. [You’re] not spending very much time thinking about this kind of macro optimization. You might be thinking about ‘How can I do my coursework as well as possible?’ and micro optimization, but not really thinking about ‘What are actually my ultimate goals in life, and how can I optimize toward them?’ “An analogy I use is, if you’re going out for dinner, it’s going to take you a couple of hours. You spend 5 minutes working out where to go for dinner. It seems reasonable to spend 5% of your time on how to spend the remaining 95%. If you did that with your career, that would be 4,000 hours, or 2 working years. And actually, I think that’s a pretty legitimate thing to do—spending that length of time trying to work out how should you be spending the rest of your life.

I was stunned. I had never even considered this possibility. But then I really looked at her. I saw a forty-year-old woman who – while vibrant and busy and with a thriving career – was also single with no pets or children and little time for socializing. Her family lived a thousand miles away and even when she got together with friends, a cursory hug was not enough to satisfy her need for human contact.

It is sometimes argued that since most couples do in fact suffer feelings of disenchantment shortly after marriage, the experience of romantic love must be a delusion. Yet many people experience disenchantment somewhere along the line in their careers, and it is not commonly suggested, therefore, that the pursuit of a meaningful career is a mistake. Many people experience some degree of disenchantment in their children, but it is not commonly supposed that the desire to have children is inherently immature and neurotic. Instead, it is generally recognized that the requirements for achieving happiness in one’s career or success in child-rearing may be higher and more difficult than is ordinarily appreciated.

The takeaway: you need to learn how to leverage communication techniques to achieve your positive impact goals. Some form of influence is relevant to all of us committed to living meaningfully within a society, and we will be assessed as economic and social actors by our impact on the communities around us.

How to Quantify Achievement Stories When hiring managers, recruiters, and staffing firms see a resume or LinkedIn profile or attend an interview with verbiage but no numbers, they don’t know what those words mean. In fact, they know next to nothing until you add the numbers that explain the impact of your work. Here’s how you can resolve this issue. Work With Finance Sometimes the impact of our work is not always clear. At times like this, reaching out to one of your friends in the Finance Department can be very helpful. Finance has access to numbers that are not always readily available to other departments. If you’re no longer with the company, explain to the Finance associate that the numbers he provides could make the difference in determining whether you land another position. Using a Range Per Lily Zhang of the Muse, one reason job seekers avoid quantifying is not knowing the exact number. Lily suggests using a range. Using my work experience, here’s what that means: Before: Chaired weekly product manager meeting. After: Chaired weekly meeting with 7 to 12 product managers so plans could be discussed and coordinated. Confusion and rework were eliminated. Frequency Lily shared that one of the easiest ways to add numbers is to identify the frequency with which you perform a given task. This can help the hiring manager understand how much you can handle. For example: Before: Responded to pricing requests from the Sales Force. After: Responded to 15 to 20 pricing requests from the Sales Force on a daily basis. Scale Everyone on the hiring side of the business loves when candidates provide numbers, because numbers explain the impact of what you’ve done. The most meaningful numbers are those associated with making money, saving money, and driving productivity. Here are a couple examples from my work experience: Before: Reduced time to perform Operations Manager’s role; after analysis showed tasks could be batched and performed at the end of the month. After: Reduced time to perform Operations Manager role by 66%; after analysis showed tasks could be batched and performed at the end of the month. Asked Director if I could take on the responsibilities of employees who were laid off. Before: Analysis revealed misconfigured offers; worked with other departments to correct errors. Implemented process to prevent future errors. After: Analysis revealed misconfigured offers; worked with other departments to correct errors. Recognized $7.2M. Implemented process to prevent future errors.

Granted, employees are a very different type of customer, one that falls outside of the traditional definition. After all, instead of them paying you, you’re paying them. Yet regardless of the direction the money flows, one thing is clear: employees, just like other types of customers, want to derive value from their relationship with the organization. Not just monetary value, but experiential value, too: skill augmentation, career development, camaraderie, meaningful work, a sense of purpose, and so on. If a company or an individual leader fails to deliver the requisite value to an employee, then—just like a customer, they’ll defect. They’ll quit, driving up turnover, inflating recruiting/training expenses, undermining product/service quality, and creating a whole lot of unnecessary stress on the organization. So even though a company pays its employees, it should still provide them with a value-rich employment experience that cultivates loyalty. And that’s why it’s prudent to view both current and prospective employees as a type of customer. The argument goes beyond employee engagement, though. There’s a whole other reason why organizational leaders have a lot to gain by viewing their staff as a type of customer. That’s because, by doing so, they can personally model the customer-oriented behaviors that they seek to encourage among their workforce. How better to demonstrate what a great customer experience looks like than to deliver it to your own team? After all, how a leader serves their staff influences how the staff serves their customers. Want your team to be super-responsive to the people they serve? Show them what that looks like by being super-responsive to your team. Want them to communicate clearly with customers? Show them what that looks like by being crystal clear in your own written and verbal communications. There are innumerable ways for organizational leaders to model the customer experience behaviors they seek to promote among their staff. It has to start, however, by viewing those in your charge as a type of customer you’re trying to serve. Of course, viewing staff as customers doesn’t mean that leaders should cater to every employee whim or that they should consent to do whatever employees want. Leaders sometimes have to make tough decisions for the greater good. In those situations, effectively serving employees means showing respect for their concerns and interests, and thoughtfully explaining the rationale behind what might be an unpopular decision. The key point is simply this: with every interaction in the workplace, leaders have an opportunity to show their staff what a great customer experience looks like. Whether you’re a C-suite executive or a frontline supervisor, that opportunity must not be squandered.

It may not be your job, but it’s a job worth doing.

the same way, when individuals are involved in too many disparate activities—even good activities—they can fail to achieve their essential mission. One reason for this is that the activities don’t work in concert, so they don’t add up into a meaningful whole. For example, pursuing five different majors, each of them perfectly good, does not equal a degree. Likewise, five different jobs in five different industries do not add up to a forward-moving career.

Well,” I said, “right now I make a living as a freelance writer and part-time English teacher. I never wanted to teach school. I want to write, but my journalism career hasn’t gone anywhere. I can’t seem to get beyond writing puff restaurant reviews for what’s basically an advertising circular, and I’m desperate to do something more meaningful, and interesting, and challenging with my life.” “Ministry is certainly all that,” he said. “But why ministry in particular?” Hearing him preach, I said, had given me the idea. I was drawn to how he immersed himself deeply in a spiritual concept, then reported back to us what he’d learned. Also, I had developed an intense interest in the church—how it functioned and what it gave to its members. “And what does a church give to its members?” I hadn’t prepared an answer to this. “I can really only speak for myself,” I said. “Church is the one place I know that privileges the soul, that focuses on spiritual values and bases a community on them.

Joining IAS Gurukul is not just a step towards a career; it's an immersion into a community of like-minded individuals who share the same vision – a vision of serving the nation with integrity and dedication. Here, we go beyond syllabi, delving into real-world challenges through case studies, discussions, and experiential learning. Our goal is to create not just successful IAS officers, but leaders who can inspire and drive meaningful change in the dynamic landscape of public administration.

And so Andy Malloy became the first of many managers I was to have throughout my career. Up to the time I teamed up with Jack Kearns, the managers I had were mostly my friends or well-meaning acquaintances who tried to help me get fights, arranging the small details so that I could dedicate myself to my training. I never signed a contract with any of them, not even Kearns. It just didn’t seem necessary in those days; a handshake was stronger and more meaningful than any inked signature. The only ingredients necessary were respect and trust. There is no doubt in my mind that a fighter needs a manager. Ideally, a manager gets up good likely bouts, arranges suitable dates and times and living accommodations, hires and sometimes fires sparring partners, “sells” his fighter’s ability and skill to others by taking scouting trips and being a good press agent, and honestly handles all accounts as well. This gives the fighter more time to keep himself in shape, running miles, punching bags, jumping rope, sleeping. Together the fighter and the manager are a team, pulling and pushing toward the same goal. If either takes advantage of the other, underestimates or oversteps the given role, then that’s it; a loss of respect sets in and the whole relationship is shot to hell. If such a split does take place, it is usually the fighter who winds up with the short end of the stick. I learned many things from my manager Andy Malloy. I learned to make my body a complete unit, the muscles of my feet, legs, waist, back and shoulders all contributing to the power of my arm. He taught me, in short, that my entire body was at stake in the ring, not just my fists. He was a good teacher.

I’ve been told again and again, at school after school, that career service offices have little or nothing to say to students who are interested in something other than the big four of law, medicine, finance, and consulting. At the recruitment fairs, the last two dominate the field. And some schools go even further. Stanford offers companies special access to its students for a fee of ten thousand dollars—and it is hard to believe that Stanford is the only one. Selling your students to the highest bidder: it doesn’t get more cynical than that. But though the process isn’t often that direct, that’s basically the way the system works. As a friend of mine, a third-generation Yalie, once remarked, the purpose of Yale College is to manufacture Yale alumni. David Foster Wallace (Amherst ’85), has a character put it like this: The college itself turned out to have a lot of moral hypocrisy about it, e.g., congratulating itself on its diversity and the leftist piety of its politics while in reality going about the business of preparing elite kids to enter elite professions and make a great deal of money, thus increasing the pool of prosperous alumni donors.

It will be the most meaningful assignment of your career.

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Not long ago, it dawned on me that impostor syndrome is a paradox: Others believe in you You don’t believe in yourself Yet you believe yourself instead of them If you doubt yourself, shouldn’t you also doubt your low opinion of yourself? I now believe that impostor syndrome is a sign of hidden potential. It feels like other people are overestimating you, but it’s more likely that you’re underestimating yourself. They’ve recognized a capacity for growth that you can’t see yet. When multiple people believe in you, it might be time to believe them. Many people dream of achieving goals. They measure their progress by the status they acquire and the accolades they collect. But the gains that count the most are the hardest to count. The most meaningful growth is not building our careers—it’s building our character. Success is more than reaching our goals—it’s living our values. There’s no higher value than aspiring to be better tomorrow than we are today. There’s no greater accomplishment than unleashing our hidden potential.

Many people dream of achieving goals. They measure their progress by the status they acquire and the accolades they collect. But the gains that count the most are the hardest to count. The most meaningful growth is not building our careers—it’s building our character. Success is more than reaching our goals—it’s living our values. There’s no higher value than aspiring to be better tomorrow than we are today. There’s no greater accomplishment than unleashing our hidden potential.

They are, in fact, more likely to elevate the general mood, but not necessarily by talking the most or by running the show. More often, they contribute through quiet encouragement of whoever is motivated to speak or lead. Like many of those who get stuck in loneliness, some of the socially gifted are actually quite shy. Some have a threshold for connectedness that predisposes them to feel the pain of disconnection very acutely, and for them, shipping out to manage offshore operations in Singapore might not be the best career move. Susan did a very simple thing: She showed genuine interest in another human being, expecting nothing in return. That’s all it took to make a meaningful connection, which, at least briefly, improved life for each of them. Understand that much of your friend or loved one’s disagreeable behavior may be the result of fight-or-flight responses to a sense of being unsafe in the world, and that you can’t win by arguing. The most effective approach often is to directly address the person’s most basic emotions, which include dejection and fear. Remember that we humans often use words and logic merely to rationalize our primitive emotions and prior expectations.

I subscribe to the view that I was looking for something very hard, perhaps with uncommon desperation. I think I understand the psychological reasons I was on that endless hunt, and I submit there was less of deviation, perversion or obsession than of loneliness and a determination to find answers. I’m constantly perplexed at the dichotomous position of people who laud a student’s seeking everywhere to find the answers to life, or creativity, or the existence of God, or the direction of the student’s career…who cluck their tongues and badrap the same attempts to discover the answers to interpersonal relationships by those who seek in every area that: presents itself. If the true purpose of living a fulfilled life is in establishing meaningful liaisons with people, if it’s part of that fulfillment to seek and find and give and accept love, then why should the search be looked on with such moral disapproval?

The point at which you have acquired enough career capital to get meaningful control over your working life is exactly the point when you’ve become valuable enough to your current employer that they will try to prevent you from making the change.

No one constructed fairy-tale childhoods for their spawn, developed an innate set of personal talents, fostered a stimulating and world-changing career, created stunning homes and yardscapes, provided homemade food for every meal (locally sourced, of course), kept all marriage fires burning, sustained meaningful relationships in various environments, carved out plenty of time for “self care,” served neighbors/church/world, and maintained a fulfilling, active relationship with Jesus our Lord and Savior. You can’t balance that job description.

Like me, Gayle Tzemach Lemmon, deputy director of the Council on Foreign Relations’ Women and Foreign Policy Program, was encouraged to prioritize marriage over career. As she described in The Atlantic, “When I was 27, I received a posh fellowship to travel to Germany to learn German and work at the Wall Street Journal. … It was an incredible opportunity for a 20-something by any objective standard, and I knew it would help prepare me for graduate school and beyond. My girlfriends, however, expressed shock and horror that I would leave my boyfriend at the time to live abroad for a year. My relatives asked whether I was worried that I’d never get married. And when I attended a barbecue with my then-beau, his boss took me aside to remind me that ‘there aren’t many guys like that out there.’ ” The result of these negative reactions, in Gayle’s view, is that many women “still see ambition as a dirty word.”20 Many have argued with me that ambition is not the problem. Women are not less ambitious than men, they insist, but more enlightened with different and more meaningful goals. I do not dismiss or dispute this argument. There is far more to life than climbing a career ladder, including raising children, seeking personal fulfillment, contributing to society, and improving the lives of others. And there are many people who are deeply committed to their jobs but do not—and should not have to—aspire to run their organizations. Leadership roles are not the only way to have profound impact.

Here is part of the problem, girls: we’ve been sold a bill of goods. Back in the day, women didn’t run themselves ragged trying to achieve some impressively developed life in eight different categories. No one constructed fairy-tale childhoods for their spawn, developed an innate set of personal talents, fostered a stimulating and world-changing career, created stunning homes and yardscapes, provided homemade food for every meal (locally sourced, of course), kept all marriage fires burning, sustained meaningful relationships in various environments, carved out plenty of time for “self care,” served neighbors/church/world, and maintained a fulfilling, active relationship with Jesus our Lord and Savior.

Making is a way of bringing engineering to young learners. Such concrete experiences provide a meaningful context for understanding abstract science and math concepts. For older students, making combines disciplines in ways that enhance the learning process for diverse student populations and opens the doors to unforeseen career paths.

By harnessing freedom and meaning earlier in our careers and putting it into our work, we can now live freer, more meaningful lives that help others, and get rich doing it.

I highly recommend Marci Alboher’s One Person/ Multiple Careers. It includes lots of practical strategies for living the slash. Malcom Gladwell is also a constant source of inspiration for me. In his book Outliers, Gladwell proposes that there are three criteria for meaningful work—complexity, autonomy, and a relationship between effort and reward—and that these can often be found in creative work.2 These criteria absolutely fit with what cultivating meaningful work means in the context of the Wholehearted journey. Last, I think everyone should read Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist3—I try to read it at least once a year. It’s a powerful way of seeing the connections between our gifts, our spirituality, and our work (slashed or not) and how they come together to create meaning in our lives.

In the providence of God, some people who hope to become artists never reach their desired goal. This may be for reasons of practical necessity, or because they never reach the level of excellence required to sustain a career in the arts. In such cases it is important not to focus on the frustration of not achieving one's ambitions, but to recognize that there are other meaningful ways to participate in the arts. A full understanding of the arts recognizes both the unique vocation of the professional artist and the value of other forms of artistic expression. Even if our art must become an avocation rather than a vocation, it should still be pursued with deep joy and a strong sense of purpose. The church can help in this pursuit by serving as a community of encouragement that affirms the calling of artists and nurtures the artistic aspect of every human soul.

The people with thriving careers and healthy personal relationships get the same amount of time each week as the burned-out professional who can’t remember their last meaningful conversation with a family member.

The Second Control Trap The point at which you have acquired enough career capital to get meaningful control over your working life is exactly the point when you’ve become valuable enough to your current employer that they will try to prevent you from making the change. On

Design doesn’t just work for creating cool stuff like computers and Ferraris; it works in creating a cool life. You can use design thinking to create a life that is meaningful, joyful, and fulfilling. It doesn’t matter who you are or were, what you do or did for a living, how young or how old you are—you can use the same thinking that created the most amazing technology, products, and spaces to design your career and your life.

Early in my sales career, various sales trainers taught our teams how to use matching and mirroring to build rapport and earn trust with our clients. When done well, it would inevitably help us improve customer service and closing ratios. It was not encouraged as a deceptive sales practice to manipulate, but rather a subtle way to make a great first impression and connect on a meaningful level.

A Role Model for Managers of Managers Gordon runs a technical group with seven managers reporting to him at a major telecommunications company. Now in his late thirties, Gordon was intensely interested in “getting ahead” early in his career but now is more interested in stability and doing meaningful work. It’s worth noting that Gordon has received some of the most positive 360 degree feedback reports from supervisors, direct reports, and peers that we’ve ever seen. This is not because Gordon is a “soft touch” or because he’s easy to work for. In fact, Gordon is extraordinarily demanding and sets high standards both for his team and for individual performance. His people, however, believe Gordon’s demands are fair and that he communicates what he wants clearly and quickly. Gordon is also very clear about the major responsibility of his job: to grow and develop managers. To do so, he provides honest feedback when people do well or poorly. In the latter instance, however, he provides feedback that is specific and constructive. Though his comments may sting at first, he doesn’t turn negative feedback into a personal attack. Gordon knows his people well and tailors his interactions with them to their particular needs and sensitivities. When Gordon talks about his people, you hear the pride in his words and tone of voice. He believes that one of his most significant accomplishments is that a number of his direct reports have been promoted and done well in their new jobs. In fact, people in other parts of the organization want to work for Gordon because he excels in producing future high-level managers and leaders. Gordon also delegates well, providing people with objectives and allowing them the freedom to achieve the objectives in their own ways. He’s also skilled at selection and spends a great deal of time on this issue. For personal reasons (he doesn’t want to relocate his family), Gordon may not advance much further in the organization. At the same time, he’s fulfilling his manager-of-managers role to the hilt, serving as a launching pad for the careers of first-time managers.

Here’s a fact that should grab your attention. If you don’t have ambitions and goals of your own, you’ll be destined to spend your entire life working hard to help others achieve their ambitions and goals at the expense of your own. Goals that are not clear are clearly not goals. What cannot be identified cannot be attained. So the starting place for helping you identify your next job or career opportunity is not by determining what kind of job you want to work at, but rather by determining what kind of life you envision for yourself and your family. Once that vision is clear and you are jazzed about attaining it, meaningful job and career options will appear.

the secret to a meaningful new career was directly related to making people feel good about themselves.

I would have been prepared to like a relationship with him had he been capable of affection or willing to show any. From the first day of our encounter, I had come to a sad conclusion about him. If you allow yourself to love that man, you will be the unhappiest creature on earth. This man is thoroughly immature, unaware the affect of his actions to others, carousing with others, sacredly looks at you, talks of nothing but his lei sureness and such things, and pays more attention to any other people than yourself. Never such two minds resemble each other less than ours. I love reading so did he, but what did he read? He reads stories of high woman and novels that were not to my tastes (trashy novels), while I read about philosophy, history, economics, and politics to prepare me for a life career and meaningful purpose to contribute to society as well as my own personal endeavors.