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Changing Careers? Avoid These Common Mistakes
Are you happy with your work? Do you love what you do, or at least enjoy it a fair amount of time? Do you often find yourself wondering, should I stay or should go? Many people have been asking these questions—even more so during the pandemic and its “Great Resignation”—and answering them with a job or career change. What are the most common career change mistakes? Job or Career First, let’s distinguish between a job and a career. A job is work you perform to earn money. It can be full- or part-time, and short- or long-term. A career, by contrast,
Take Advantage of that Transition Time in Your Life
I was worn out. I’d been flying around the country for years, chasing big deals with my team, with intense pressure to close them. Our company needed the cash. I was caught between two top executives secretly undermining each other. And I was beginning to recognize that the fit between the company and my values was steadily evaporating. I wasn’t taking care of myself. Slowly losing touch with my family and friends. Feeling frequent stress and pressure. The excitement I had felt when we were starting up was slowly dissipating, like air leaking from a small hole in a balloon.
The Powerful Pull of the Prestige Magnet
One of the things I enjoy most about teaching is not only engaging with students about the subject at hand but also how it may contain deeper lessons that apply to their life and work. The class readings are a reliable vehicle to those insights. One of my favorite insights recently comes from Paul Graham, the programmer, entrepreneur, writer, and investor behind the acclaimed tech startup accelerator, Y Combinator. In his article, “How to Do What You Love,” he writes about the dangers of prestige and the prestige magnet: “You shouldn’t worry about prestige. Prestige is the opinion of the rest
Why We Want Adventure in Our Lives—And How to Get It
Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road, Healthy, free, the world before me. -Walt Whitman, poet Adventure. It’s an amazing part of life and work, but often overlooked and neglected. When I was little, my Dad used to tell stories to my brother and me—always about an adventurer, with a rucksack, off on some expedition. We loved it, in part because of the surprise and danger. It turns out that adventure has much to teach us about living and leading. Of course, it’s not often that we encounter opportunities for exciting, daring, hazardous undertakings of unknown outcome. But
The Power of Awe in Our Lives
When’s the last time you experienced awe? It’s one of the most powerful emotions we can experience. A marker for life at its grandest. Awe is what we feel when we encounter something so vast or incomprehensible that it defies our current frame of reference. It’s a feeling of reverential respect, often mixed with fear, wonder, veneration, or even dread. Awe can be inspired by authority or by the sacred or sublime. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt calls it “the emotion of self-transcendence.” Awe gives us an experience of vastness, and of novelty and mystery. And it leaves an alluring and
The Power of Taking Full Responsibility for Your Life
Responsibility. It’s a word we hear a lot. We take on more responsibilities as we go through life. Responsibility for the rent. Car payments. Mortgage. Deadlines. Getting the job done. These things can be daunting. But there’s another aspect of responsibility that cuts the other way, that empowers us: taking responsibility for our lives. And not just responsibility. Full responsibility. What Does It Mean to Take Full Responsibility for Our Lives? What does this mean? Carry out the logic and it leads to a sweeping conclusion: Taking full responsibility for our lives means taking full responsibility for everything in
The Incredible Benefits of Being Action-Oriented
One of the greatest assets we can build in our lives is an action orientation. No great things are possible without action. Are you action-oriented? Dreams and visions are good, but worthless without action. Plans may impress, but they lose all value if not acted upon. Opportunities fade if we don’t seize them soon enough. If we want a good life with good work, we must get good at taking action—and putting ourselves in a position to be able to do so. Too often, we hesitate. We wait too long before acting, as we try to line things up perfectly.
The Perfectionism Trap—And How to Escape It
Perfectionism is a big problem today among ambitious professionals—and increasingly among young people in general. It’s also widely misunderstood, and even misappropriated as a badge of honor by some. Let’s break it down. First, what is it? Perfectionism entails striving to be flawless. It typically includes overly critical self-evaluations and excessive concerns about negative evaluations from others. Perfectionism entails striving for unrealistic or even unattainable goals, followed by disappointment when we fail to achieve them. That’s followed by cognitive dissonance from misalignment between perfect self-identity and imperfect performance. For a perfectionist, low performance automatically means low self-worth. Fundamentally, the assumption
Are You Living a Divided Life?
The young woman in a corporate job whose true love is animals. Unless she makes a change, she’s looking at a long slog in her career. A young college graduate on the business track who discovers he has no real interest in any of the business functions. He’s fascinated by medicine but feels trapped because of the costs of switching over. The frustrated executive in a family business, itching to get out and be creative, entrepreneurial, impactful, and generous. What will he do? Many of us are leading what author and educator Parker Palmer calls a “divided life”—a life in
Why Is Happiness So Elusive?
(This article is part of a series on happiness. See the end of the article for more articles in the series.) We want to be happy. To live well. And enjoy life. We have our moments, and if we’re fortunate some long stretches of happiness. But it’s harder than it sounds. There are struggles. Highs and lows. And not just because of the swirling vortex of challenges around us, from the pandemic to a depressing news cycle, with endless waves of shocks and worries. No, it’s not just that. (As if that weren’t enough.) In our day-to-day experience and its
The Surprising Relationship between Success and Happiness
Many people believe in the logic: When I’m successful, I’ll be happy. Sounds reasonable. After all, professional success will bring a sense of accomplishment and status. Nice. It tends to come with higher income and more wealth. So it’s likely to make us happy. The logic is sound. But wrong. Not only wrong, but backwards. According to an extensive review by researchers over many years, it works the other way around: When I’m happy, I’m more likely to be successful. Researchers Lisa Walsh, Julia Boehm, and Sonja Lyubomirsky did a massive investigation of the potential relationship between career success and
The Most Common Myths about Happiness
Happiness is a universal aspiration. We all want happiness, including a sense of wellbeing and overall life satisfaction. Here’s the problem: we’re bad at knowing what will actually bring us happiness. There are many happiness myths that get in the way. Here are 14 of the most common happiness myths—and their corresponding realities. Myth: Happiness is the goal of life—the be-all and end-all of human existence. Many of us view happiness as the point of life. Understandable. But flawed. Having happiness as our goal in life is destined to disappoint. A better goal, I believe, is to live a
The Most Important Contributor to Happiness
In our search for happiness and its close cousins, well-being and life satisfaction, we’ve seen that it’s complex. In a previous post, we noted 20 research-based practices that lead to happiness. What’s the biggest contributor to happiness? Relationships. Happiness and Relationships “No man is an island.” -John Donne Connecting with others gives us a sense of worth, meaning, and belonging. When we’re in close relationship with others, we’re more likely to receive support when we need it most. And to provide it when others need it. According to many researchers, strong social relationships are the most important contributor to enduring
What Leads to Happiness?
What leads to happiness? We all want to be happy—and for those we care about to be happy. Here’s the problem: we’re unclear and often badly mistaken about what will bring us happiness. We’re inundated with messages from family, friends, ads, and social media about what will make us happy. Most of these messages are wrong. The result: What we think will make us happy is different from what actually makes us happy. What Is Happiness? To understand what’s going on here, we should back up and clarify what we’re talking about. What is happiness? Turns out it’s not
Why Happiness Is the Wrong Goal
Let’s face it. We’re obsessed with happiness: Am I happy? I just want to be happy. I want my kids to be happy. Why doesn’t my job make me happy? Why doesn’t my relationship make me happy? We tend to view happiness as the point of life. Sounds reasonable. But it turns out to be counterproductive. Happiness is the wrong goal. To understand why and how, let’s back up and examine what we’re talking about. There are many ways to think about happiness. We often think of it as feeling contentment or pleasure. But there’s more to it. An excellent
