This Is a Hard Time to Start a Career. These Two Words Can Help. — a gifted article from nytimes.com by Jodi Kantor
Advice on building a rewarding work life, even amid employment gloom.
If you’re sweating about what field to enter, here are a few things you can do now. Buy a cheap, thin notebook. Keep it on you. Every week, make a practice of writing down which actions you enjoy and which ones you hate, whom you like being around and whom you can’t stand. Keep running lists of what you’re good at and what ideas move you. Notice yourself.
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Look to your friends instead. Think about what roles you take on with them: math tutor, party planner, psychologist, workout coach. These answers often reveal truths that our résumés do not. In social relationships, we aren’t bound by suffocating expectations about our future. Our friends have needs, and by noticing how we respond to them, we can learn who we are.
There is a wiser way to seize the future, which is to think about need. What is your own assessment of what society will need most during your working years, the next four or five decades? What kind of care; what kind of products; what kind of information?
The people I see thriving at work are the ones who chased some bigger need — not imposed by hollow conventional wisdom, but articulated through independent observation. Craft gives their work authority. Need gives it propulsion.