Whatever you’re doing now is enough
It’s tempting to look back and dwell on what could’ve been
I get together with public relations students every year to warn them against making the same mistake I made as a freshly minted grad.
I left university with a pair of degrees back in 1992. I’d made it on the dean’s honour list for three of my four years as an undergrad thanks to electives in creative writing and film studies. I got some real-world experience with a month-long internship during my master’s degree. And I drew a cartoon strip for the student paper.
I assumed the world would beat a path to my door. That didn’t happen. Hundreds of resumes went out. About a dozen rejection letters came back. I wore the suit my parents bought me as a graduation gift to just one job interview. It was a long and brutal year of wandering through the wilderness.
But then I started doing what Bill Burnett and Dave Evans recommend in their book.
“The best way to get a job is not to ask for a job, it’s to ask for the story,” say Burnett and Evans, authors of “Designing Your New Work Life.”
“Ask for (lots and lots of) stories and you’ll find a job. The most effective way we know of to pursue and land new job opportunities starts with prototype conversations, rooted in sincere curiosity, with professionals in your area of career interest.”
It’s advice that worked for me. I quit looking for a job and started having conversations. I met with pretty much everyone in town who worked in public relations. They told their stories. I told mine. I never asked if they were hiring or left my resume as a parting gift.
One of those PR pros posted a job a few months after we met. My curiosity and initiative made an impression. I got the job and the rest is history.
Burnett and Evans also have sound advice for those of us who are close to becoming freshly minted retirees.
It’s tempting to look back on our careers and dwell on what could’ve been, compare ourselves to colleagues who climbed further and faster and fool ourselves into thinking we’ve yet to pass our career peak and should take one last big swing at the plate.
Replace all those second thoughts with this one truth — whatever you’re doing right now is good enough for now.
“Isn’t that a relief? Good enough for now is one of the big reframes of this book,” say Burnett and Evans.
“In our society, the message from the media, from our culture and from all around us is that enough is never enough. That nagging voice in your head, the one that compares you to everybody else, is saying that everyone else has more and I’d be happier if I had more, too. You’re pretty sure that everyone else already has more than you and you’re missing out. You know the voice we’re talking about. It plays in an endless loop in your head.
“This idea of always needing or wanting ‘more’ can make us profoundly unhappy and a little crazy too. You can use this never-enough, wanting-more, not-good-enough mindset to ruin just about anything in life.
“The real question isn’t: how much money, time, power, impact, meaning, status, retirement savings, (fill in the blank with your favourite thing to want more of ) do you have?
“The real question is: how’s it going, right now?”
Chances are it’s going great on the career front. You likely already have more than enough and all you really need. There’s nothing left to prove and you’re not missing out on anything that truly matters.
Think back to your wildernesswandering days as a freshly minted grad. If you’d been told this is how your career would play out — the places you’d go and the people you’d meet — you likely would’ve been relieved, a little dumbfounded and so very grateful. Your future would’ve have seemed far more than just good enough.
JAY ROBB SERVES AS COMMUNICATIONS MANAGER WITH MCMASTER UNIVERSITY’S FACULTY OF SCIENCE, LIVES IN HAMILTON AND HAS REVIEWED BUSINESS BOOKS FOR THE HAMILTON SPECTATOR SINCE 1999.