One thing is for certain about this personal finance, financial independence, retire early, control spending, accelerate savings, career building and solopreneur community I blog in. And that is there is no universal truth that everyone agrees on. There are the ultra-frugal who propose saving your way to wealth, the career maximization coaches who recommend earning your way to wealth, the retire early experts who think working past 40 is unfortunate and the FI crowd who don’t care what you do with your life after you reach financial independence as long as you meet that goal. And there are dozens of other related concepts that don’t elegantly mesh with each other. That has always confused me because I have an opinion on everything and never have determined why everyone else doesn’t naturally see how right I am, all the time!
A theme that is certainly not universal but is widely held in this tribe of seekers is that the typical corporate job in America is a dull, gray, lifeless, soul sucking slow form of death. It is characterized by Dilbert quality bosses, mean spirited co-workers, self-centered managers and disengaged senior leadership. It is an existence in which you are merely a tool to be mis-used to the breaking point and then discarded. Of all the opinions I’ve seen in this space this is one of the ones most puzzling to me. Because, you see, I had a great job! For over thirty years I truly enjoyed going to work and I generally felt overpaid. My bosses treated me with great respect and even genuine affection. I had some of my best friendships there and achieved some of my proudest accomplishments in my workplace. I achieved a lot of my best growth and development as a person there.
What is with all the current hate of the 9 to 5? Somebody is clearly not seeing things right or perhaps we are looking at two different pictures? Perhaps the explanation is that most corporate jobs in America are, well, bad. But along with that maybe some of them are very nice indeed, and maybe I was one of the lucky few who found one of the rare, awesome, unicorn jobs. After a ponderous amount of pondering that is where I have landed. Working for the man is usually not that great but if you are lucky, it can be all that and a bag of chips. So how can you work that luck part to your advantage?
Here is what I think I have learned from my own career experiences about finding a dream job. First, it might not exist for you. I had several friends and coworkers who started out in the workforce and stuck with it just long enough to build a valuable skill set and a network of contacts, who then left to start up a business of their own. Some of these are millionaires now when they might never have been had they stuck to their 9 to 5 path. They range from chicken growers to construction company owners and fit the model of the Millionaire Next Door. They did not hate their jobs but they knew deep down that life had more for them if they could just be their own boss.
But being your own boss and being an entrepreneur or a solopreneur is a scary way to go. The failure rate is astonishingly high and from most of the personal accounts I’ve seen it usually takes a few fails before the first win is achieved. Becoming an overnight success usually takes ten to fifteen years. It never appealed to me, at least not until I had saved and invested enough that I did not need an income. At that point it is pretty hard to fail at doing things you enjoy because they do not have to make money. I can blog forever, for instance, because I don’t do ads or monetize my site at all, I just pay to keep it open. Can’t really fail at that, can I? But for someone starting out in adult life you have to pay the bills so frequent failure is a painful path and it is definitely not for everyone.
Since I think a 9 to 5 might be your best first option or even your best lifetime option let me share some thoughts about why my corporate job was in many ways the best ride of my life. Finding a dream job starts with putting yourself in a place where the most likely outcome is success. Oh wow, that’s pretty, duh, obvious,huh? Well sure, but it is a lot deeper than you are probably thinking. Let me tell you how I did that because it worked for me and I can prove it. I’m sitting at home typing this on my kitchen table and I’ve been doing only the things I want to do for the last three years with exactly zero money worries. The hardest thing I’ll do today after drafting this blog will be playing doubles tennis and researching a wireless stereo system for Christmas for my son and his wife and a new vacuum cleaner for us since ours just died this morning. Oh, and no alarm went off this morning, I stayed in bed as long as I liked because I don’t have a job any more.
How to get in a job where success is almost automatic? Believe it or not I was thinking about this in my earliest high school days. My dad had suggested I read Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People”. That was decades ago and DC had been dead for a long time even back then, but the book was full of timeless principles. After all, technology may have changed but people have not changed at all at their most fundamental level. It impressed on me that if you think things through that you can have an unprecedented impact on your own success in life. While it was more about selling than about the work I chose, it taught that me that you do not have to let life happen to you, you can happen to life.
So, at that early age I thought about placing myself in an area where I could succeed. I took aptitude/personality tests and took the hardest courses I could in the areas where I seemed to be a natural but where most others seemed to struggle. In my case anything related to math, chemistry, physics and writing seemed to comprise a sweet spot that made me a little unique. And that was my unique, yours will likely be different. The point was, I focused on the areas that were my natural strengths. Then as I approached the end of high school and the start of college, I began to consider what options I had for a college major that both played to my math and science skills and also promised a lot of career opportunity. It became clear that there was a big shortage of engineers at that time and that it was one of the ultimate challenges for someone with the right technical talents. And it also paid extremely well, in fact at the time chemical engineering had the highest starting pay of any four-year major in the country.
I did not get any information about chemical engineering from my high school counselors. I got it from my parents, and from a favorite teacher whose son was a chemical engineer and from looking up information about it. I got even more information when I went up to the state university for a freshman orientation and by the time I signed up for the first introductory class I was certain I was in the right place for me. That class had only nine students and out of those, only two graduated as chemical engineers. In such a small class we got to know each other pretty well and I was the only one who had chosen the major after careful study. The rest did not have any idea of what they really wanted to do and as soon as they understood just how incredibly difficult, and boring to some, the course work was going to be they left for other majors. I lost touch with all but two of those classmates. One is a lifetime friend who stayed in chemical engineering and the other was a best friend who switched majors. He became extremely successful in that field, right up to the day the corporate plane he was the only passenger on crashed, taking his life.
There is much advice about following your passion in seeking a college major. I think that is one of those things that sounds nice but results in much more harm than good. It presupposes much that simply doesn’t exist for most of us. Most of us have no all-consuming passion in high school. Maybe I had passion for the head cheerleader that didn’t know I even existed (ok, that’s getting way too personal) but not passion for a career or a college major. At the very most we might have some insight as to what our strengths are and what we absolutely hate. I did not particularly enjoy history, foreign language, art and I hated public speaking. I enjoyed math, science and writing on the school newspaper and yearbook. But my passion was bass fishing and hunting and that cheerleader, sigh.
My advice and what served me well was to view college as a vocational school only there to place you as a likely candidate for a job that does what jobs are supposed to do. A job that will pay you enough money to become financially independent and that will allow you to use and grow your natural skills to achieve excellence. And that is where passion comes in. In my opinion you will automatically become passionate about any career that allows you to use your natural talents to achieve excellence. Passion follows achievement. Doing it the other way no doubt works out for some great talents, but can you imagine anything worse than chasing a passion that you are severely untalented at? If you are honest you know some people that are just plain awful at the thing they profess great love for. That is a real risk you avoid if you follow your strengths to a career and let the passion develop organically over time as you excel at the work.
That was part one. Picking the right college major or technical training. Part two will be about picking the right job after you graduate.
What do you think, is not following your high school passion a soulless sell out to the man or is it just the most brilliant idea ever?
Do you believe that if you pick a major that fits your natural talents that it will lead you to passion eventually?
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