HIGH SCHOOL GRADS TAKE NOTE: FOLLOWING YOUR HEART ISN’T AS EASY AS YOU THINK
Career advice you won’t get taught in class
Across the country this month, hundreds of thousands of Canadians will graduate from high school and take the first steps toward deciding on a career. And you can bet most are getting the same piece of advice: “The most important thing is to follow your heart.”
If only it were that easy. Aligning your passions with your career makes sense. But for some, the challenge can be uncovering exactly what you’re passionate about, then keeping that flame alive while the rest of life happens all around you. That’s especially the case for the entrepreneurial, and was certainly the case for me.
Following are a few pieces of career advice you won’t hear in the classroom:
Live first, your calling will follow. Some people were born knowing they want to teach, or dance, or design cars. My interests, on the other hand, ran in lots of directions. I loved computers and the outdoors and video games and paintball.
I majored in business in college, but it all felt too abstract. So, I dropped out to open a pizza joint in my hometown. It took me a few years to realize what I liked about the pizza business wasn’t pizza. It was marketing, getting into people’s heads and figuring out ways to boost sales.
Passions won’t always jump out at you and that’s fine. Steve Jobs, for instance, wandered India, experimented with psychedelics and even dabbled in calligraphy before starting Apple. Sometimes, you have to do a little living before you figure things out.
Put yourself in the path of good luck. It didn’t take me long to realize people were making a lot more money working with the Internet than I was selling pizza. I didn’t know exactly how to break into tech, but I knew it wasn’t going to happen in my hometown. So, I sold my restaurant and moved to Vancouver. I home-schooled myself on the basics of web design and scraped together a portfolio. The tech space in the late 1990s was so hot, I landed a job at a dot-com with almost no experience.
So many entrepreneurial success stories seem to begin with a twist of fate — from Zuckerberg meeting the Winklevoss twins to Henry Ford landing his first job at Edison Illuminating Company. What’s important to recognize is that successful entrepreneurs put themselves in positions to get lucky. F ind small ways to keep your passion alive. In 2000, months after I struck out to start my own business, the dot-com boom went bust. I plugged away, designing websites for companies and building marketing apps to pay the bills. It wasn’t always thrilling, but it was at least in my wheelhouse … and it kept the lights on. I didn’t abandon my passions. I found ways, sometimes small ones, to build them into my work life.
More often than not, entrepreneurship is a slog, not a rocket ship ride. Steven Boal of Coupons.com, which recently went public for more than $1 billion, said it best: “I get a lot of amusement out of people who call us an overnight success. (It was a) 12-year night.” Finding ways to say inspired — when the work may not be all that inspiring — is critical. Y our decisive moment will come. In 2008, my team hacked together a tool to help companies manage multiple social media accounts from one website and called it HootSuite. Hundreds of thousands
Successful entrepreneurs put themselves in positions to get lucky
of people signed up in the first few months. I decided to pour everything I had into it at the expense of other projects bringing in good revenue.
Nearly every successful entrepreneur has a decisive moment — usually in the middle of a long journey. Real passions grow clearer and mere distractions fade given time. At the same time, critical skills have time to develop — the essence of Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000-hour rule. Then, if you’re lucky, you get a shot to double down on your dream.
Doing what you love rarely comes without risk and is never easy or convenient. But managing risk is something entrepreneurs need to get very good at. E mbrace the hard years in limbo. My social media management tool is now used by 11 million people, including most of the Fortune 100 companies. A childhood passion for computer games has come full circle, though not how I might have expected.
I don’t think I’d be here if I had just followed my heart all those years ago. I probably would have ended up studying computer science in college. I might have loved it. But I’m glad I didn’t go down that path.
Instead, I waded into that grey area most of us live in, where desire for career fulfilment clashes with the need to make money. Almost every entrepreneur I know has spent hard years in this limbo, figuring out exactly what they love and ways to act on it.
It may not be as romantic or inspiring as, “Do what you love,” but for aspiring entrepreneurs, you need to know you can’t always follow your heart, but you shouldn’t ever give up on your dreams. Where passion and pragmatism meet, great things happen.