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?
If you would like to leave a comment, and please do, just click on the title of the blot at the top of this post!
“Follow your dreams, do what you love” is some of the most dangerous and miguidedly damaging career advice anybody has ever given.
It tells the audience what they want to hear, which makes for an easy sale.
Your approach resonates: do something you actually have some talent for, and you probably won’t hate it. It doesn’t guarantee success, but it certainly won’t hurt!
Passion projects and vocational callings are wonderfully rewarding things for those who have put themselves in a position that they can afford to pursue them… inevitably via some combination of good management and good fortune.
It surprises me though how many bloggers and parents still encourage kids to follow their passions without figuring out how they are going to eat. I’m not saying everybody has to be an engineer but everybody has to come up with marketable skills and training and it only makes sense to focus on things you are good at. I’ve rarely seen anyone who was absolutely world class at something they hated. I enjoy your blog! Thanks for commenting.
If you are lucky enough to land a job that matches your talents and lifestyle then I agree it will make it seem like you are getting paid for something you love and does not seem like work at all.
Unfortunately this is getting rarer and rarer. A lot of people feel trapped into a job they do not love and solely do it for the money as they are living paycheck to paycheck. Even as physicians there are doctors out there getting burnt out because they are killing themselves to get money (worsened by the continued declining reimbursement trend) as their burn rate is so high.
The happiest docs are the ones that are able to cut back or remove elements of their specialty that they do not like. OBGyn Docs, for example, often remove the OB part of their practice when they are FI as it reduces the stress of their specialty a ton and allows them to keep more regimented schedules as they get older. I myself have cut back a day a week and that has helped me as well. This is only possible when you get to a level of wealth that you are not chasing that last dollar (which is your least valuable dollar as it is taxed at your highest margin)
So true, my son is an MD still in residency and I gather from physician friends that the job satisfaction among MD’s has been trending downward. I could say that might be true for engineers as well. The last few years of my career it felt like we were doing more compliance work to stay within the myriad of government mandated safety and environmental regulations than we were focusing on being efficient and profitable for our shareholders. And I agree that not chasing incremental dollars takes away a lot of stress. I make money now as an unnecessary by product of consulting in regulatory areas that I do to keep my skill set sharp and to be productive. But because I don’t need the income I only work a day or two a week. And when I told a recruiter I had no interest in a job that paid seven figures earlier this year, the third job I had said no to since retirement, I realized how much my attitude toward money had changed.
i have to agree that doing something you have a knack and skill for is a good start. you can keep the passion stuff as a hobby if you do life correctly. that’s how i landed in chemistry. it came pretty easily to me and was hard for a lot of others. i figured (correctly) i would always have a paycheck and it worked out that way for the past 25 years.
i am presently training a 22 year old recent chemistry graduate and hope to tell her all i’ve learned about navigating a career in this huge company, including reference to my many mis-steps. the hard part in this type of work now is that if you love chemistry and developing/analyzing you might be capped moneywise unless you’re willing to take a less technical role. good stuff, steve.
That’s true as well in engineering, if you stay with the technical part instead of management, you usually sacrifice some pay. But if you go the management route then you sacrifice the technical/scientific part that you loved to begin with. I was able to go into management but also keep my hand in the technical parts which was only possible because we were a family owned company for a long time and did not have a lot of corporate control from the top. Thanks Freddy!
You are ever so fortunate to have been at a company that celebrates your style of leadership. I had one of those for twenty years. Those places are rare, and they rarely stay in tact.
I’ve had many positions that I truly loved with high quality managers and teams focused on “The Why” component of serving customers and building an exciting business.Then the acquisition train pulled into the station. On board that train were a bunch of people, as you say “mean spirited co-workers, self-centered managers and disengaged senior leadership” “It became an existence in which you are merely a tool to be mis-used to the breaking point and then discarded.”
Learning how to become FI when the days of my career were sunny, helped me when the career weather shifted to squeezing the bottom line and everybody between.
I learned to interview the management teams so that I do not work for “Takers”. I’m coming out of my semi-retirement to try it again as I found a mid-size company that matches my values, solid product line and a bunch of folks that I loved working with in the past. It will be fun ride now that I am well into FAT FIRE.
I’ll have another chance for making this a dream job in my 3rd act of Retire Early and often.
Good for you! I’m in much the same position but am enjoying my one day or two of consulting and a couple of days of volunteer work too much to go back to a full time gig. Sounds like you and I have the main benefit of being FAT FIRE, we have the power of choice!