"I want a fulfilling job!"
This week, the first installment of The New Happy advice column!
One of our lovely community members recently reached out to me with a very interesting question, asking for my advice. It was such a rich topic that I asked if I could share it here with all of you, in hopes it’s helpful for others. If you have a question you’d like some help with in the next installment, send me an email at stephanie@thenewhappy.com!
“Dear Stephanie,
I’ve read many editions of your newsletter, and something that has really resonated with me has been the idea of finding meaningful work. I’ve been trying to align myself with work that I find fulfilling compared to just solely being financially focused, but as a young professional, it can be really hard to do. I want to grow as a professional and to feel like I’m making a difference at the same time.
How did you navigate your way into a role that you found both meaningful and professionally challenging at the same time? I don't want to necessarily think of it as a rare "unicorn" role but I'm trying to find something similar for my future career. I'm really looking at both the perfect balance of the company and the role to be meaningful but provides opportunity to grow/expand my skills or either learn new ones within the same company. Do you have any guidance for me?
Thanks!
Not everyone wants meaningful work. But in my personal experience, and from what I see in my coaching conversations, the people who want it really, really want it. They long for it, they think about it constantly, they even sometimes get a bit obsessive over it. That’s how it was for me, too, back when I didn’t feel like I had it.
I think that there is a segment of us who really need meaty things for our brains to chew on, and setting ourselves a herculean task like a life’s purpose - which by definition, is something we’ll never achieve - is a great way to do that.
This brain chewing is a productive tendency in some cases - it can lead to world-changing innovations and major impact - but it can also hurt us sometimes, when if we think there’s a gap, our brains turn around and start to chomp on ourselves, which is certainly not productive. If you, like me, frequently find yourself in this place, I feel you.
I’ll share the advice I wish I had heard when I was your age, earlier in my career: take your brilliant yet chomping brain and gently move it away from the topic of ‘I need meaningful work’, where it’s very easy to spiral and become a victim of circumstance (“I’m at the wrong company” or “I hate this place” or “I’m stuck”). Instead, move it towards a different focus, one that will bring you the outcomes you are looking for - meaning and happiness - but in a way where you’re the actor in charge (“I’m extracting everything I can from this experience” or “I’m growing a lot”).
When I read your letter, what comes through clear as day is that you want to grow and you want to give. The reason I can see it so quickly is because this is so common - we all want these two things, even if we don’t know how to ask for them.
It’s not a unicorn role and it’s not too much to ask! Remember, though, that it’s not ever going to be perfect. There will be times when you’re at your dream company and you hate your working life, and there will be times when you’re in your dream role and you’re frustrated and unhappy. I want you to both claim the right to demand the opportunity to grow & give, and to make space for the fact that it won’t ever be perfectly matched in the moment, that it will always be changing and in flux, but that it will even out over the long term.
Instead of looking for or longing for meaningful work, I’d like to guide you to focus instead on a long-term objective of growing so that you can give the way you want to, in the place that you want to be; and in the short term, that you just start giving.
You grow by cultivating skills, figuring out your strengths, and learning how to manage yourself. If you do these three things, you will put yourself in a position where you can demand what you want from your career. This is exactly how I got my dream job(s) at LinkedIn, my dream job at Penn, and my dream job at Thrive Global.
Developing The Skills
I spent five years helping the best companies in the world to attract and recruit people to their organizations. These companies want one thing first and foremost from their prospective hires: they want someone who can deliver on a gap of skills, competencies, or experience within their organization.
Companies that offer compelling work experiences know it and use it to their advantage. There’s far more demand for any job at a top company than there are roles, which means that they can use that power to demand what they want. They want to see what you can do for them, which means you need to have the skills that the company, team, and role call for.
In my experience, it’s common to leak a bunch of energy in wishing for meaningful work as a big goal, mostly because it’s easier to dream and to hope than it is to grind. And building really strong skills can be a grind sometimes, but it is a productive target for your energy in that it pays off: by showing up every day and putting your head down, a little bit at a time, you will start to master compelling skills. Every day, ask yourself, “How can I grow today?”
And here’s the secret: having strong skills makes you able to demand more from your company. If you have compelling skills, you can take those skills on the market and demand more in return for them: more from a company, more from your job title, more compensation, more interesting work, whatever it is that you want. Strong skills give you power.
Your first task, then, is to figure out what skills you want to develop. If you have a ‘dream company’ in mind, it helps to do research at this stage and figure out what roles you’d be most interested in and how you fit in. Figure out what skills you have that are missing and make a plan for how to become amazing at them.
If there’s a gap between where you are and where you want to be, it’s time to take charge of upskilling yourself. As work evolved, our career growth has become our responsibility. We have to take charge of our own evolution now. I’ve had a ton of different jobs, and throughout each of them, I consistently invested time in upskilling myself for what I wanted in the next role. There are so many ways to learn for free or for relatively little investment: online learning courses, reading books, interviewing people, finding mentors, and networking will all help.
The beautiful thing about this approach of investing is skills is addresses the part of your question about wanting to always be challenged.
This diagram shows how flow works. Flow is that magical state of being completely in the moment, forgetting yourself and becoming one with whatever it is you are doing. On the X-axis is the difficulty of your task and on the Y-axis is the amount of skill you bring to it. Flow happens when we are challenged just enough to exceed the level of our skills.
If you focus on developing skills, you can ensure you are always challenged by pushing yourself just a little bit each day to find your new state of flow. Flow isn’t about ease, despite what many people think - it comes from the right level of challenge! Another thing that happens a lot to me is finding myself in the boredom part of the diagram because I haven’t challenged myself enough, which then sends my brain into chomp-mode over the big meaning question all over again. If you find yourself there, set yourself a huge challenge, well above what you think you can do, which should help correct you into more of the Flow zone. (If you move yourself too far into anxiety, dial it back a bit.)
Figure Out Your Strengths
There’s a school of thought that says that you should always focus on fixing your weaknesses to ensure you’re as well-rounded as possible. I think this is particularly loud if you’re recently arriving from a school or college environment, where they generally take this approach: scrape by in everything rather than excel at one thing.
They’re wrong. It’s far more valuable to invest in developing a few powerful strengths, bringing them from great to amazing, than it is to round yourself up in your areas of weakness. Of course, if there is something that is holding you back, you’ll have to address it. But by leaning on what you are great at, you will make it far easier for you to excel.
Strengths are different than skills. Skills are learned and mastered; strengths are innate and maximized. Strengths are the attributes of character that in exercising, fill you with energy and do good for other people around you. I use the (free!) VIA Strengths assessment to help people to learn their strengths: if you haven’t taken it yet, this is a fantastic moment to try it. Research shows that those people who become aware of what makes them at their best as a human being, and seek to craft the circumstances that enable those best human selves are far likelier to be both happy at work and in life.
In a study of nearly 10,000 New Zealand workers, workers who reported a high awareness of their strengths were 9.5 times more likely to be flourishing than those with low strengths awareness. However, workers who reported high strengths use were 18 times more likely to be flourishing than those with low strengths use.
Once I started to craft my life and my work around my signature strengths, I was able to rapidly accelerate my career trajectory. I started pretty much refusing to spend time on stuff that wasn’t aligned to my top strengths, and if I absolutely had to do it, I would craft a way to use one anyways. For example, my top strength is love of learning. I remember once having to dig into a very complex spreadsheet of data and make sense of it, a task that I detest and don’t have the skills for. Instead of just jumping in, I started by reading about the history of the data I was analyzing so that it would be of some intellectual interest to me, and that helped me to complete the task.
Figure out your top 3-5 strengths - the ones that make you feel alive when you’re using them - and start using them every day in every way possible.
Learn To Manage Yourself
In the early stages of your career, you will have an immediate advantage if you learn how to manage yourself. Managing yourself is about learning about where you to prefer to invest your energy, your time, your attention; what environments are most supportive to you, and which are not; what habits support you, and which do not; the conditions under which you can produce the best work; and what you need to be engaged. You are the only one who can do this, and to be successful in your career, you must.
As a young professional, you probably feel like you are at the whim of your boss and your company, and that there’s no room to manage yourself. This is false: it’s what they want you to think! Most companies and bosses rule from a position of insecurity and egotism, because it gives them a false sense of control. Don’t buy into this: any evolved manager or company wants you to know exactly how to get the best out of yourself and what you need from them to do it, because it’s absolutely in their best interests to have you at your best!
Learning how to manage yourself and then following through on it is a powerful way to make huge strides in your career. While I was at LinkedIn, I learned that my best results came from working alone and cranking out big pieces of work, then getting feedback from stakeholders, then repeating. I also learned that I could produce more than anyone else with just a few hours of focused work. That helped me to see that I should turn off my email and IM when I was focused; even if people couldn’t reach me, it wasn’t the end of the world, because I was producing value during that period of time. Learn what works best for you and execute against it. Do it in secret if you need to. If you can get your boss on board with your strategy, even better.
Turn from growing to giving
These strategies will help you to grow. And as you grow, you must, in parallel, no matter where you are, start to give.
There’s so many ways to find meaning in life, and sometimes we become myopic and focus on only one path, the one we hear the most about - find a great company doing meaningful work and get a job there. If you follow the above strategies, you can easily take that path: you will become happier and more engaged at work, which will lead you to be more successful; once you’re successful, you can demand more in the marketplace, like a job at a meaning-oriented company.
But I also want you to invite you open up your perspective and see that any work can be meaningful if you decide to make it that way.
Meaning is about giving or serving other people. Every place of work serves others in some way. It might not be the exact source of meaning that you specifically want to have, but if you dig into it, you will find that you can absolutely craft meaning in whatever it is you do. Here’s a great guide for how to turn the job you have into the job you want. If hospital janitors can find meaning in their tasks, then you can, too.
You can start having a meaningful work experience right now, wherever you are, by simply focusing on how you can support, serve, or contribute to others. I’ve spent 99% of my life not having my ‘true purpose’ be the focus of my day job, and yet, I have found my work to be incredibly meaningful and fulfilling, because I constantly focused on how I could give more and more to my colleagues and clients.
If we go even deeper to the heart of your question, I’m guessing what you really want, and what you’re asking for, is a way to meaningfully impact the world. It’s so amazing that people want this; it gives me so much faith in the world!
Here’s what I want you to know, as you consider your long-term goals: the best way to impact the world is to start, wherever you are, by bringing more peace, love, and wisdom to it. You can do that in any environment, at any time. You don’t have to have a meaningful job to do it. Start with the people you see tomorrow morning, at your imperfect workplace: help them with what they need, see the best in them, be kind to them, coach them, empower them, learn from them, and help them feel that they belong. You will change the world in such a profound way just by doing that. In parallel, you can take steps towards your longer-term vision of meaningful work - but never forget what’s possible right now.
Keep growing and giving, you wonderful human; and keep asking the world to create more ways for us to grow and give! I can’t wait to see what you do.