Finding your "right work"

To discover your career path, go with the flow

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It all starts with the question: What’s the biggest and most important problem I can solve with my gifts and skills? Even to form a preliminary answer to that question is to begin to define an appropriate path.  —  Derrick Jensen

I have had the privilege of advising many people on their work and careers, largely around the question of how they can be optimally satisfied and successful in the work they do. One important part of the satisfaction/success equation is finding our “right” work.

The question “What should I be when I grow up?” is particularly front of mind for young adults as they approach the completion of their high school/college years and prepare for either further professional training or entry into the job market. Defining our right work continues to be important throughout our lives (especially in mid-career) as we and the world of work both evolve and change.

Picking a career

Where your talents and the needs of the world meet, there lies your vocation.  — Aristotle

The most popular prescriptions for choosing your right work/career include

• Follow your PASSION

• Do what you LOVE (and the money will follow)

These recommendations have enough face validity to make sense to most people. If someone loves what they do for work and are happy, then they are happy because they are doing what they love. Simple. But there are some downside risks to this somewhat romantic prescription for choosing a career (and for selecting a life partner!).

Most people find that the emotions of love and passion tend to be time-limited in duration and weaken over time and experience (habituation). So they can be a shaky foundation for long-term career (and relationship) planning. In addition, many people confess that there isn’t any kind of work that evokes a “passionate” response in them, so how can they decide on their best career path?

In order to select your right work, I would recommend replacing terms like love and passion with the following positive states:

• Intrinsic interest

• Absorption

• Fascination

These are much closer to the emotional truth about how people find and build a satisfying and successful career over the longer term.

I’m glad to report that even now, at this late day, a blank sheet of paper holds the greatest excitement there is for me. I can remember, really quite distinctly, looking a sheet of paper square in the eyes when I was seven or eight years old and thinking, ‘This is where I belong, this is it.’ — E.B. White

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Here is a little formula for your happiness at work:

H = I + C +A

H = happiness at work

I = intrinsic interest in the work; absorption, fascination

C = competence, skill, ability, talent for the work

A = autonomy, wide span of control, decision-making authority, discretion (this relates to your boss and your work environment)

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People who engage in work in which they are intrinsically interested, for which they have high competence and where they are given high levels of autonomy to decide how best to do the work tend to experience a state called Flow. Being in a flow state (also known as being “in the zone”) is a pleasurable experience of focused immersion in an activity. It is described in very similar terms by people who experience it:

It felt effortless. I was completely focused on what I was doing but it wasn’t like “I” was doing it. I wasn’t trying or pushing myself. It was just happening and I was letting it happen. It’s like my self was getting out of the way. I had no sense of time passing. It was a very blissful experience.

People who experience flow at work tend to have high levels of job satisfaction and overall life happiness. The best way to select your right work is to look for memories of experiences in which you were so absorbed and engaged in what you were doing that you experienced something like a flow state as described above.

Go with the “Flow”

We are having experiences all the time which may on occasion render some sense of this, a little intuition of where your bliss is. Grab it. No one can tell you what it is going to be. You have to learn to recognize your own depth.  — Joseph Campbell

If you are going in search of work that will enable you to experience flow, then it will help for you to have a pretty clear picture of what flow looks and sounds and feels like. A good example of finding the flow at work is described by Robert Caro, the Pulitzer prize-winning biographer, in his book Working and in this New Yorker profile. Caro describes his fascination with doing the research for his biographies, a process that involves years of delving into thousands of boxes of documents in archives and libraries. Rather than finding that research tedious, Caro finds it fascinating and absorbing as he describes in this experience of being assigned by his newspaper editor to do his first research project:

There are certain moments in your life when you suddenly understand something about yourself. I loved going through those files, making them yield their secrets to me. [snip] Each discovery I made that helped to prove that was a thrill. I don’t know why raw files affect me that way. In part, perhaps, it’s because they are closer to reality, to genuineness — not filtered, cleaned up, through press releases or, years later, in books. I worked all night, but I didn’t notice the passing of time. When I finished and left the building on Sunday, the sun was coming up, and that was a surprise.

Caro’s fascination, focused absorption and sense of timelessness are the hallmarks of the flow state, and reveal that he was doing work that aligned closely with his core skills and interests. That first research experience was like a compass that pointed true North and guided Caro into his rewarding and successful career.

I can remember the first time I experienced flow. I was in the fifth grade and one of my best friends told me about a problem he was having. We were sitting and talking together in a quiet part of our school’s playground; there were other kids around but not nearby. I recall feeling that something very special, almost sacred, was happening as my friend shared his fears about some things that were happening in his family. No one had ever taken me into their confidence like this before.

As he talked, I felt the rest of the world fade away as all my attention was focused on my friend: what he was saying, how he was feeling. It was like tunnel vision. I felt deep concern for my friend, honored that he trusted me with such important matters, and strongly motivated to help him (though I did not know how at the time). When we were finished talking, the rest of the world came back into view as we headed off for the rest of our recess.

I have spent much of my life learning and practicing and refining my ability to do the special work of listening and understanding and helping others. Keeping this deeply meaningful activity as the core of my work has enabled me to experience a continuous flow of positive energy, meaning and purpose throughout my career.

Finding Your Flow

Traveler, your footprints are the path and nothing more. Traveler, there is no path, the path is made by walking. — Antonio Machado

If your happiness and success at work can be built on a foundation of doing the “right work” that creates flow experiences because you are both interested and talented in those tasks, what is the best way to discover what that right work is from among the hundreds of career options available? As always, the best teachers are experience and experimentation.

Just as finding the “right” life partner usually involves meeting a lot of people and kind of stumbling upon a person who triggers a certain fascination, so too does finding the right work involve being exposed to a wide range of activities (which is what a good K-12 education should provide, but often does not) and monitoring your level of intrinsic interest. You can use a hot-warm-cold meter or a red-yellow-green light system or a 0–10 rating scale to evaluate your reactions to various tasks and subjects.

To help focus your search for the types of activities that are most likely to trigger flow, the research on career “fit” (the alignment between various kinds of work tasks and a person’s interest/ability profile) can provide a map of the various domains in which you are most likely to experience flow states. While there are many theories of career choice and adjustment, John Holland has developed the most validated and widely used system for matching people with jobs that fit their interest, abilities, values and personal style. His so-called “RIASEC” model describes six different work styles and aligned jobs:

• Realistic (“Doers”) — People who have athletic or mechanical ability, prefer to work with objects, machines, tools, plants or animals, or to be outdoors.

• Investigative (“Problem-solvers”) — People who like to observe, learn, investigate, analyze, evaluate or solve problems.

• Artistic (“Creators”) — People who have artistic, innovating or intuitional abilities and like to work in unstructured situations using their imagination and creativity.

• Social (“Helpers”) — People who like to work with people to enlighten, inform, help, train, or cure them, or are skilled with words.

• Enterprising (“Persuaders”) — People who like to work with people, influencing, persuading, performing, leading or managing for organizational goals or economic gain.

• Conventional (“Organizers”) — People who like to work with data, have clerical or numerical ability, carry out tasks in detail or follow through on others’ instructions.

By determining which of these work styles are most like you (by taking Holland’s Self-Directed Search interest survey, or the Campbell Interests and Skills Survey which measures not only your interests but also your skills), you can then explore the specific careers/jobs that fit you best (search the free occupational databases at O*Net) and are most likely to create the deep absorption/fascination of flow.

Another map of work/career domains is provided by Howard Gardner’s work on what he calls multiple intelligences. The traditional notion of general intelligence (often referred to as “g” in cognitive science research) refers to the ability to process words and numbers by reading and thinking. So-called intelligence tests are designed to measure “g” and arrange people on a scale from low to high (IQ) based on their scores. It is a uni-dimensional concept: you are more or less “smart” … period. Gardner makes a contribution by defining multiple modes in which people can be “smart” and talented and interested. These include:

• musical-rhythmic

• visual-spatial

• verbal-linguistic

• logical-mathematical

• bodily-kinesthetic

• interpersonal

• intrapersonal

• naturalistic

• moral

A person who is talented/interested in one of these domains will tend to experience flow states when engaged in aligned activities. Again, a well-rounded education will ideally expose every student to activities in all of these domains so they can determine their right work for optimal career planning and satisfaction.

Conclusion

The way to find out about happiness is to keep your mind on those moments when you feel most happy, when you are really happy — not excited, not just thrilled, but deeply happy. This requires a little bit of self-analysis. What is it that makes you happy? Stay with it, no matter what people tell you. This is what is called following your bliss.  — Joseph Campbell

A high-quality career is a foundation component of a high-quality life. You will be most happy and successful if you build your career on work for which you have both deep intrinsic interest and solid talent. You can discover clues to finding your right work by searching your memory banks for times in your life when you experienced flow and defining the specific tasks/activities in which you were engaged at those special moments.

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