Daily Endeavor Blog

How many times have you heard the question “What do you want to do?” More often than not the person asking wants to help. It seems a friendly enough question: it’s an expression of interest in the other person, it’s asking vs. assuming, it’s forward looking, it’s an invitation to talk more.

So why do so many people fill with dread when they’re asked? My opinion: it’s nearly impossible to answer. It’s not as impossible as the utopian “What do you see yourself doing in 20 years?” but it’s well on its way.

For many, the question they hear is: “What’s the one thing you want to do?” or “What do you want to do with your life?” You mean, the rest of my life? It’s an awkward position to be put in. You either need to skirt around the truth by stating there’s only one conceivable thing you want to do for the next 70 years which may put a big dent in your credibility, or if you don’t know, then you look shallow, unprepared, or even weak by not having a genuine answer to such an important personal question.

Awkward. It’s possible the person is trying to test you, but most often it’s someone trying to be friendly, someone who really wants to see you find it, whatever it is. In fact that someone may be you, asking yourself for the umpteenth time.

Ask a different question. The direction is right, but the framing is wrong. Instead of going for certainty, lower the bar a bit.

What do you think you want to do?

This seemingly small change acknowledges you’re a warm-blooded person with multiple (if not disparate and conflicting) interests, and gives you space to be intrigued by something, but not wed to it.

Then put the drop on the forever thing. Move the horizon to something much closer that you can actually picture and act on. Two years out is about as far as I can picture, and truthfully it’s already pretty blurry by that point. Continuing to re-frame, it looks like:

Over the next two years, what do you think you want to do?

For getting stuff done, two weeks is a much better period to have a clear line-of-sight. The problem with two weeks though is it’s hard to do anything that really stretches you; it’s a tactical block of time. If you’re thinking about a full-time role as the next step in your work life, a two year horizon gives you enough room to start to think big and has the benefit of being a period of time that hiring firms know how to speak.

Sometimes though, even this question is still too open-ended to be able to answer. The canvas can feel too blank. The implied question can still often be “What job do you want to do?” You and I both know life is so much bigger than a job. I find It’s easier to answer a question about an idea, an interest, a way of doing things, or a result. In other words, think about what else you’d like to include in your growing reputation.

Over the next two years, what do you want to be better known for?

Now that’s a question you can sink your teeth into. For example:

• I’d like to be better known for my real estate deal analysis prowess
• I’d like to be better known for my open source code
• I’d like to be better known for my growing microfinance expertise
• I’d like to be better known for closing big sales
• I’d like to be better known for describing our cleantech future
• I’d like to be better known for enabling local eyewitness reporting to flourish

This form of the question is not a 100% solution; it’s simply one step along the way. Nonetheless, I’ve found working with folks that it’s a good way to break the logjam of beginning to think about what next. What do you think?

Amidst the upheaval and real economic uncertainty, some people are asking the big questions that often get swept under the rug in go-go times. Questions like: what’s important to me?

Today Mark Hurst’s Good Experience newsletter arrived with a great pull-quote from David Byrne on this very topic. From Mark’s column:

Finally, for more listening: throughout the month of March, David Byrne streams old school gospel. He writes (and I agree):

Byrne…

With the economy and people’s finances in free fall, this is a time when many of us pause to reassess our values — what is important to us, what really matters and how we might restructure our lives to reflect those values. …

Whether you believe in the geezer upstairs or not, you might enjoy these tunes. They’re also the structural foundation upon which a lot of popular music was built — a strong foundation, I might add.

http://www.davidbyrne.com/radio/index.php

It’s the line in the middle that I hear people asking more and more:

what is important to us, what really matters and how we might restructure our lives to reflect those values….

The opportunity cost has never been lower to explore what might be right for you. It’s great to see people doing it.

Robert Safian, the editor over at Fast Company, led off his March issue with a message that’s timely and worth repeating. Amidst the gloom and the real pain, there are many reasons to celebrate. In profiling the 50 Most Innovative Companies (and 159 overall), he provides evidence to support his case.

While hope is the over-arching theme, his message is more than that. He outlines how we’ll build our way out of the cratering economy

Only creativity and aggressive innovation — in the face of hardship and layoffs and seriously tough choices — will fuel a turnaround…In the midst of our troubles, remarkable things have happened, and they will continue to happen — if we prune the unproductive and broken, and nurture those enterprises that point to a more positive future.

On a macro basis, the market (and increasingly the government) guide our choices about what’s not working and where to prune. What about on a personal basis? When you are thinking about what career move to make next, are you looking to where growth is? Have you assessed what’s been working for you and what hasn’t in the contributions you’ve made over the last 2 years? What will you prune? Where will you invest?

These questions are not only relevant to industries and companies, they’re important for each us as individuals. It reminds me of Reid Hoffman’s message that everyone is an entrepreneur and everyone is managing risk, even if you’re working in a job for a company.

With incomes stalling, and some even removed for now, the opportunity cost has never been lower to explore what you need and what you want to do next. So, what do you want to do?

From a danah boyd tweet I ran across the work of Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar. It’s smart and visually mesmerizing. The bread crumb trail led me to a talk (”Beyond Flash“, slides) that Harris gave in October where he poses a powerful question:

Once you have learned how to speak, what will you say? This is really the central question. If I can leave you with one idea from my talk, this would be it.

It’s this question I have to believe Mary Oliver had in mind when she was writing a Summer Day. It’s also the central question we’re pursuing with Endeavor Prep. Jonathan’s is a potent question because it has two assumptions embedded in it that are significant for every person alive.

Good to Know

The first is a recognition that we’re all learning how to speak — that is, becoming individuals who can participate in the world, do things, partner, contribute, and, sure also in a literal sense, say things so as to engage and involve others. When people realize this about themselves, if I’m lucky enough to be around, it’s a great moment to be a part of. Their face (or voice) says, “I’ve actually learned all this stuff, and when I go out into the world, you know what, people respond to me.” It’s an a-ha moment that sometimes happens in college, sometimes after. The world at once gets much smaller because now each other person is accessible and just a few hops away, and also much bigger because of the staggering variation of interests and action happening out there.

Don’t be Daunted

Second, once people realize they have a voice and can cut their own path, the real question becomes What do you want to do with it? On one hand, the pure freedom and potential is exhilarating. On the other, it’s also a big hairy weighty question.

For some people it feels monolithic, as if it needs be answered all at once. So choosing, no wait, supposedly optimizing among every option is overwhelming. It’s like there’s one shot to pick from the menu and that’s what I’ll be eating, and known for eating, for the rest of my life.

Fortunately, picking “one time” is a false choice. Discovering what you will say is an iterative process. Even when you make a choice to try something out, you can still make another choice at another time to try something else.

If you want to be an gold medalist in gymnastics and you’re just starting 25, then yes, you may have missed the window. But for 99.9999% of the options out there, you can prototype your way towards it.

Learn by Doing

I’m glad I ran across the Jonathan Harris talk (there’s more here at TED). His projects and tips are really worth looking into. Here are few more:

You will become known for doing what you do. This may sound obvious, but it is a useful thing to realize. Many people seem to think they must endure a “rite of passage” which, once passed, will allow them to do the kind of work they want to do. Then they end up disappointed that this day never comes. Find a way to do the work you want to do, even if it means working nights and weekends. Once you’ve done a handful of excellent things in a given way, you will become known as the person who does excellent things in that given way. And that’s the person you want to be, because then people will hire you to be that person.

The personal is powerful. Trust your own experience. It’s the only thing that’s really yours, and that’s really unique. Putting yourself in your work can be powerful.

Do your own thing. If you imitate, you’ll only ever be a bad example of the thing you’re trying to imitate. An artist I like very much, Donald Judd, said that what you have to do is to find the same level of inventiveness as the person you’re trying to imitate. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t incorporate elements of other people’s work. As Picasso said: “Bad artists copy; great artists steal.” What he meant is that it can be OK to steal an idea from somewhere else, as long as you steal the idea and do something new with it, make it your own, and move on. If you copy it outright you’ll only get stuck in the past.

Experience is the only way to learn. Pain, joy, fear, risk, love, firsthand experience. You can learn so much from these things, and the experience will end up affecting your work in ways you don’t even realize. But it’ll be based on a real thing.

Right on.

It’s more than a Pepsi pitch jingle. It’s true in countless ways. Young folks try more new stuff than anyone else. And the world is better off because of it. If only we could increase the percentage of people trying out something new at every age.

There’s been a lot of ink spilled about what Generation Y is and is not, who it is, how it’s different from Gen X and The Boomers, and so on. Dealing at the generational level is always risky business because of the inherent generalizations at work.

Even so, I’d like to make a generalization that’s particularly of interest to me — not about the differences between periods in which we grew up in (& how they shape our world view), but about the similarities of age cohorts.

Simply put, people who pass through their twenties share a lot in common with all of the other 20-somethings of years past. They have a higher appetite for learning, or said in the language of older folks, a higher appetite for risk.

This is not news. The bullet points are rattled off all the time:

• They have fewer responsibilities so they have much more time
• They have less wealth, and less to lose, and fewer responsibilities that would be impacted by loss
• They have less opportunity cost for trying something new because the thing they’re doing now isn’t providing tremendous material returns
• They have more time to adjust course, re-start, learn anew

Ok, that’s the conventional wisdom. Feels really rational and economic, doesn’t it? It’s missing the I-don’t-live-in-a-box human aspects to it.

Social, Momentum

In my experience, people are much more social (part of and impacted by the folks around them, for better or worse) and also more prone to momentum (or lack thereof). I think it’s important to add in a few more likely reasons

• They learn more because they’re recently practiced at learning, the fulfillment and sometimes rush it brings isn’t a memory out of reach, it’s a feeling that’s on hand
• They’re more willing to ask for help; there are fewer hang-ups with “should have it all together by now” which leads to more iterations, and more learning from each one
• They remember explicitly to have fun; instead of fun being a luxury now and again, it’s a must-have that’s top of mind (this one my friend Katie reminded me of recently, something she’s been doing while writing her book; she’s having fun in her job and it’s making a real impact on her life)

People in school, and people coming out of school and in their 20s, are at such a phenomenal moment. They’re steeped in learning (having just completed a hard core two decade primer), the joy of it is still coarsing through their veins, as is the craving of it, and now for the first time they have a 10x step up in freedom to explore whatever they so choose. It’s no surprise they unleash a blast of new on the world.

Some Old Dogs Love New Tricks, But Too Few

To be sure there are individuals at every age for whom the three social aspects of learning mentioned above are true (and I’d argue they’re the happier ones, or the “high performers”). However, as people turn the calendar, they on average grow less and less. Sometimes precipitously less.

Again, the common responses have become refrains:

• They’d love to have more fun and grow more if taking responsibility seriously didn’t crowd out every minute of the day
• That the same things that were fun just aren’t so fun after you’ve done them 1000 times

There’s more than a kernel of truth on both counts. But still I wonder, Really? I suspect one of the main reasons people quit growing is because they view it as optional, and once they slow doing it, they atrophy at it, then it becomes hard or even scary. Both the social and the momentum bits showing themselves again.

The Pepsi Stimulus Package

If the people who are learning and growing, led each year by young folks, weren’t refreshing the world, who would be? How would the world, or to get local, your neighbors and office mates, be different if more people at all ages kept growing like they were in their 20s?

I think it just might be a better place.

So yes, it’s a commercial for a drink with Bob Dylan and Wil.I.Am. But it adds another twist on the phrase “may you stay forever young.”

Some people crave routine, others feel suffocated by it. Different periods in life demand different routines. I can remember the feeling in college when I finally nailed the routine that allowed me to get everything done I wanted to and at the same time enjoy life. Once in stride, it feels great. Foraging however during a transition to a new schedule can be frustrating. I’m still in one of those transition periods now.

Christine Huang over at PSFK pointed me to Daily Routines, an archeological dig of how artists and others construct their days. While these are anecdotal for but one period of life for some of these folks, they’re an interesting read nonetheless. At the time, Toni Morrison preferred early mornings for prime thinking time because she wasn’t on Mom duty yet. Franz Kafka was all about the night.

A few to check out:

• Thomas Friedman

• George W. Bush

• Joseph Campbell

• Charles Darwin

• Toni Morrison

• Franz Kafka

• John Grisham

• Ernest Hemingway

Andrew Zuckerman released a book and short film called Wisdom not too long ago. It’s a sincere achievement that captures the intellect and emotion, not to mention the lessons, of some truly remarkable individuals like Nadine Gordimer and Jane Goodall. He introduces it:

Inspired by the idea that one of the greatest gifts one generation can pass to another is the wisdom it has gained from experience, the Wisdom project, produced with cooperation from Archbishop Desmond Tutu, seeks to create a record of a multicultural group of people who have all made their mark on the world.

In his portraits, Zuckerman highlights, among other things, that learning is what makes people come alive. His subjects are testament to it.

To say it even more bluntly: at any given moment, you’re either learning, or your decaying. Each moment may be small, but they accrue over time and to great effect. Why not seek out work that turns you on?

Here are a few of my favorites.

Your best work is your expression of yourself – Frank Gehry

You don’t stop doing things because you get old. You get old because you stop doing things. – Rosamunde Pilcher

Who I am and what I need are things I need to find out myself – Chinua Achebe

One of the reasons I haven’t slipped into some kind of retirement is that I feel I’m learning something new all of the time – Clint Eastwood

You can’t get to wonderful without passing through alright – Bill Withers

I think you’ve got to learn to love something deeply…it sounds sentimental as hell, but I really think it is – Andrew Wyeth

Pick up the book for someone you’d like to see keep growing. Thanks to Mac for the pointer.