It may take time to find your way in the world

Among the recent themes of forgiveness on Yom Kippur, the heartfelt and recently reexamined Stanford commencement address by Steve Jobs in 2005 and the New York Times article on education and teaching young people how to succeed through failure, I can’t help but look back on a specific life lesson that I have tried to convey to my own children.

As the great ones have said, even the best of us fail. It’s only a matter of degrees, and more importantly, it’s what you do once you fail that counts.

How do you explain to a youngster that it’s perfectly fine to try different courses, hobbies and consider different options before finding the perfect profession? The economic and sociological reality is, after you start your career, you may end in a very different occupation upon retirement. 

Second, third and fourth careers are not unusual in a lifetime --complimenting the people we’ve become along the way.  And critical career beginnings often start with dissatisfaction, a layoff or worse, a firing.

More than 25 years ago I started my career in direct marketing working in an industry as hot as digital advertising and web 2.0 are today. Entry level was a secretary’s position for an account team, although I didn’t want account management – I thought I was going to be a copywriter as hot as David Oglivy.  I dressed better than my job required and learned everything about the business given the generosity of a kind boss and my mentor. So when a new office was established to service a California-based client, they offered me a west coast job.

That afternoon, I went to see my Dad at his job. As we rode his assigned freight elevator and picked up bags of garbage from the offices in his building where he was a maintenance man, we argued over this “opportunity”. He struggled to understand the importance of the move, much less the career path I was taking. I learned that day that there was no money saved to make the promotion affordable. Not exactly failure, but devastatingly close. It was one of many disappointments and failures I experience to this day and I can feel a dull pain for each one. But all these moments lead to a natural conclusion.

I stayed in the advertising capital of the world where I would eventually telecommute before they ever coined the phrase. I won a few. I lost a few.  Bottom line?  

Once you discover what it is you’re meant to do, all you need is time and energy to find the place where you can do it. You may think you don’t belong, but it might simply be that you don’t belong in the specific company, university, course or moment in life you are in at that moment.

So take the time to learn. Find some things you love. Remember that some jobs will be helpful, stepping-stones to the next level of your career; others will stall your plans. Some jobs will be amazing and some awful. You will succeed and fail. But staying flexible and making the best of the situation with you wherever you go, that’s the most critical job skill of all.