Feeling unfulfilled or stuck in your professional life can be a daunting experience. Discover three practical strategies that can help you navigate through this challenging phase, reignite your passion, and propel your career forward.
Optimizing for Interesting
If we want to play the long game, one of the first things we must do is identify those goals so we’re able to make the adjustments needed in our lives to move towards achieving them.
- Our current reality isn’t our fixed, eternal reality. Our responsibility is to find our calling, and it’s our responsibility to find it.
Ask: What kind of person do you want to be?
Playing the long game means preparing ourselves for an uncertain future, where, because of the effort we’ve invested over time, we’re ready to take full advantage of the opportunities life presents.
- Too often, in our lives, we tend to look at where we are right now and say, “Where can I go from here?” But that’s asking the wrong question. If you start with your present situation, you’re limiting yourself out of the gate to what seems attainable.
About the author:
Dorie Clark is a consultant and keynote speaker who teaches executive education at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and Columbia University’s Graduate school of Business
Evaluate how you’re spending your time
See if your curiosity sustains itself over time to weed out fleeting interests
- Don’t rush to make a fascination your new mission until you’ve tested it out
- Set up interviews with people who work in the field, read books about it, or ask a friend if you can shadow him
Remember What Got You Started
When you’re unsure of where your interests lie, go back to your first principles.
- Sarah Feingold went to law school because she wanted to help artists like herself, but it didn’t turn out that way
- She got a job at a small law firm in upstate New York, where she drafted motions, drew up contracts, and worked on real estate deals, but she didn’t feel satisfied
- Etsy didn’t have an in-house attorney, and she realized she could help artists if she worked for them
- So she got the CEO of Etsy on the phone and asked if he would hire her
