Give me "meaningful work"

I had a hard time keying in at work during the worst parts of my quarter life identity crisis. I had been questioning what my “calling” was, and whether or not I was in the right job or the right company to pursue it. There was a chance that the 40+ hours I put in a week were a waste of time from a personal development, dream-chasing standpoint. It didn’t help that I was coming down from the high of an awesome season as holiday captain, where my team had posted our best results in years, but as I moved on to new projects, I wasn’t reaching quite the same levels of success.

So my first instinct was that I needed to get out of here and find a place that could guide me through this exploration process and help me find my life calling. I decided grad school was that place and cracked open a book on the MBA application process. I was in the first chapter before I read that “for most schools, an MBA just for education and exploration is not enough. You have to have a plan for your – and their – investment,” and that this plan was the cornerstone of your application essays. I wanted to throw the book off my deck.

So instead I Googled “How to make a life plan” and got about 15 pages deep without finding much of value. I shut my laptop and took off to a yoga class, a practice I’d restarted to cope with all of my life uncertainty. And I ended up getting some really great career advice from my yogi that night. He’d twisted us into a bunch of half-squatting pretzels and left us there to hold it for what felt like hours, and like most teachers prompted us to simply observe the sensations in our body without judgment, and then he pitched one of my favorite pieces of yogi wisdom of all time:

“Practicing yoga is like looking at yourself under a microscope – physically, emotionally, spiritually – and it’s only once you intimately understand every particle of your being that you can tap into them to create power and best serve those around you.”

I realized that even though at first, this all sounded like fluffy, mystical nonsense, it actually had some really practical applications to my professional development. For the first year and a half of work, I evaluated how well I thought work was going simply based on the numbers I was producing and not whether I actually liked it. And while I still questioned what my dreams and passions were, suddenly everything that I was doing at work had meaning in that I could at least evaluated it for the way it made me feel.

So I set off to work with my microscope and made an effort to check in with myself occasionally while I worked. For example, my manager asked me to pre-sell a tool I had been working on with a few of my peers before I presented it to my division, and immediately I started to feel the nervous sweat kick in. How did I feel? Anxious. Why? I dreaded getting negative feedback on it. Why? Because I’m a perfectionist and if I didn’t share my work, then I didn’t have to know if it wasn’t absolutely flawless. Is this reasonable? No. With their help and feedback, I could actually make it perfect, not just pretend. Was there a way to take the edge off? Yep, ask for their help and ideas outright. Negative feedback rarely stings as badly when it’s actively solicited. And it was through these internal interviews that I started to tap into not just my strengths and weaknesses, but also what weaknesses I could develop past and how to do so.

I also looked for moments of “flow,” the term used by psychologists to define that state where you’re doing that you love so much and you’re so good at that you completely lose yourself while you’re doing it. The hallmark researcher maps the relationship between our feelings and our abilities and the way this combination makes us feel. Flow happens when we’re well equipped to do hard things:

I noticed that a lot of my flow moments centered around data. And funnily enough, my "flow" moments and my results are strongly linked. When I’m working with stats, I feel like Tom Cruise interrogating Jack Nicholson at the end of A Few Good Men, where you push and push and push and suddenly an answer pops out that results in a most triumphant victory. It's the nerdiest way to get high. That’s what made me good at championing our holiday season. I got to spend 9 whole months combing through a single data set and learning every intricate nuance about how people shop and planned an inventory strategy that coincided. I worked late most nights and came in on the weekends, and only took one full day off between Thanksgiving and Christmas, and absolutely loved every last minute of it.

But in order to really build a career around the meaningful work that gives us “flow” moments, we have to be honest about the things that aren’t in that category. My office employs the most likable, socially gifted people I’ve ever met. And as a socially anxious introvert, sometimes I struggle with that sort of thing. The captainships and projects that require you accommodate and align different priorities within a team are definitely the most stressful for me and live in the “anxious” section in the chart above.

But I’ve been fighting that fact ever since I started working. My manager mentioned reshuffling projects in one of our meetings and reassigning some of my work to my coworkers. “This isn’t a sign of failure or anything,” he tried to assure me, “you’re working on a lot right now.” But it was failure, I explained. The girl I had backfilled managed the same business, the same projects, the same captainships and completely crushed all of them. His response? “True. But these are all the things she’s good at. You’re more geared towards research and strategy development.”

It made sense. Equal results don’t necessarily mean equal effort between two people. I think in an office with hundreds of new grads in very similar roles, it’s so easy to get sucked into comparison and competition. Who’s getting promoted? Who’s getting awards? I stumbled across a quote from Brene Brown’s book The Gifts of Imperfection that helps free me from that: “When we compare, we want to see who or what is best out of a specific collection of like things. The comparison mandate becomes this crushing paradox of ‘fit in and stand out!’” But when we understand and lean into our own gifts and talents and preferences – things that are completely original and unique to ourselves – it “helps us stay mindful that what we bring into the world is completely original and cannot be compared. And without comparison, the concepts of ahead or behind or best or worst lose their meaning.”

By letting go of work I wasn’t good at, I could stop hustling for competent and reallocate my time to things that me stand out. And I could start to fall in love my work again.

We can’t find our professional sweet spot of meaningful work – work that we find challenging and where we create stellar results – unless we're willing to differentiate it from the stuff we’re not good at. And that means swallowing our pride and admitting that we’re not good at everything. For a generation educated in an era of grade inflation, where A’s are given out like free condoms at orientation, it’s a little foreign and uncomfortable.

You might be wondering, “What about development though? Shouldn’t we be working to improve our weaknesses?” And for that, I’ll share some advice that came out of one of my interviews for Sr. Analyst. I’d been thinking about career development and asked my interviewer about whether I should be looking for positions that showcased my strengths or gave me an opportunity to practice weaker skills, he gave me the following answer:

“Definitely one where you can leverage your strengths. Every job at Target employs every facet of leadership; it’s just a matter of to what extent. You might have a job that’s centered around innovation or strategy, but at some point, you’ll be involved in the parts where you build a process around it or communicate your vision. You’ll get a chance to practice. But to try and build your career around a skillset you don’t really have is setting yourself up for failure.”

So with that, I've made a list of promises:

• I vow to keep using the microscope, to keep keying into the things that make me jazzed about my work. 
• I promise not to be smug when my strengths are yielding big wins and likewise I won’t tear myself apart for not being good at everything. 
• I’ll ask for help and patience from others when I’m working on the things I’m bad at and provide the same in return. 
• I promise to drop out of the comparison game. It's killing collaboration and creativity for all of its players.
• I’ll ask for the work that I want, even if that means it’s the less glamorous and less prestigious positions.

Because where passion and challenge collide, success is almost inevitable.

A Quarter Life Crisis

I think I’m having a quarter life crisis.

I know what you might be thinking. “Wow! That sounds all sorts of intense and dramatic! What sort sensational and traumatic thing could cause such an existential crisis?” And the answer is: nothing. Literally nothing.

It’s not that nothing happened. A lot of little things happened. When I looked at all of the closest people in my life, there was a lot to celebrate. A friend got a sweet gig at Amazon. Another got a sweet gig at Apple. A friend got promoted into management at her non-profit. A friend got matched for residency. A friend got into med school. Another friend got into med school. A friend got into med school and got engaged. My brother got married. My brother turned thirty. My brother finished a post-doc researching fuel cells for the army. Yes, these are all the same brother. The other one? Moved to Miami for a job in banking that he really seems to like and enjoys international travel with his girlfriend of almost a decade. Thanks for setting our parents’ expectations low, guys.

Meanwhile, I’m working movies through retail supply chains, developing a recreational happy hour habit, and serial dating a handful of the cities’ yuppies. I honestly think my biggest life accomplishment or societal contribution over the past year is renewing my car registration (three months late and after two tickets).

So as all my friends started taking their “next big steps,” I started thinking about mine. And that’s when the nothingness set in. I don’t have a clue. Other than a career with some serious power and influence that generates some sort of positive output into the world and a graduate degree in something at some point (because that's not vague or anything), I’m not super sure what I want out of life.

To me, it reminds me a lot of my move to Minneapolis. Open up your closets and re-evaluate every last thing you’ve amassed over the past twenty two years. Except instead of stuff, it’s my life. And this time I don’t get to know where the destination is that lies ahead.

Some people might see this as some sort of fun adventure. The possibilities are endless. And then there are people like me, the type A, high strung, and endearingly neurotic. And instead of feeling a rush of adventure, I experience a full-fledged panic attack.

I’m really, really good at following a plan. I’ve had a lot of practice. From the time I was a kid, Mondays and Wednesdays were dance nights; Tuesdays and Thursdays alternated between soccer and swimming, depending on the season. Fridays were for sleepovers and the rest of the weekend revolved around meetings for my Odyssey of the Mind engineering team and fulfilling my assigned viola practice hours before the next week’s orchestra class. I kept busy and ate my fair share of dinners in the backseat of a mini-van (which, to my mother’s credit, were a lot more nutritious and creative than they sound). This pattern continued right on up through high school to cultivate a strong, well rounded college application. And even right on through undergrad, the path for success was pretty obvious. Get good grades, get involved, be a leader, volunteer, and do some research. Check, check, check, and check.

While the critical life choices have been few and far between, they’ve never been easy. Decisions around colleges, majors, and entry level jobs all followed the same process: build a giant spreadsheet of options, get overwhelmed, procrastinate, cry, go with the most familiar option, and question your decision for the next two to three years.

So after 17 years following the highly structured and regimented formal education system, I find that I’m actually kind of ill-prepared to some of the most important adult things: creating your own definition of success, ascertaining your values and boundaries, and drafting up your own action plan to make it come to fruition. And while dabbling in a bit of everything helps pad your college application, “well rounded” doesn’t make for a very great life direction; it’ll only lead you in circles.

So why am I writing about this on the internet? Because I’ve always been more committed as a blogger than as a journaler, obviously. And the more I’ve reached out and talked to friends over the past week or so, the more normal I realize this is. We might put up pictures of our city apartments, patio happy hours, and weekend getaways, but a lot of us feel like we’re in the ugly, awkward middle school stage of real life. And we all hope it only lasts three years, max. I think we do too much to pretty-up and perfect our existence in hopes we might convince ourselves that we have our shit together.

Now, I should note that I hope this doesn't come across as whiny. See, in my extensive Google-searching any and all solutions for a QLC, I came across this really great piece from Humans of New York:

 

"I think we’re both going through a quarter-life crisis right now."
"What does that mean?"
"Well, so much of your energy in college, and immediately afterwards, goes into finding that first job. Then you finally get a job, and you get settled in, and you get past that initial hump of excitement. Then you start to ask yourself some big questions.”
"What kind of questions?"
"Things like: Is my work getting recognized? Is this job leading me toward my larger goals in life? Do I have balance?"

And it was one of those really great moments where I’m like “Ah, yes, that’s exactly it; they get it.” And then I scrolled to the comments section, full of #FirstWorldProblems lamentations. In a sense, I agree; I’m lucky. I don’t think you can have an existential crisis when you’re worried about making rent for the month, stressed about crushing college debt, or constantly trying to juggle the demands of work and family. I’m at a really unique time in my life where I have both the time and the resources to dream big and take risks, and I’m grateful for it. If big and influential and positive and powerful are in my long term goals, I’m both well-equipped and ill-prepared to make it happen. It’s that paradoxical combination that rouses a combination of hopeful possibilities, overwhelming possibilities, chaotic ambition, crippling anxiety, bewildered excitement, and paralyzing fear all at the same time. Here we go.