Simon Terry's Blog

A number of friends have asked me lately for career advice. I love to help others to find the kinds of jobs and careers that will make them happy. My latest approach is to ask these friends to write out the answer to these three questions:

(1) What are you most passionate about in life? - there is no fun and no success without passion
(2) What would you do if time, money or qualification was no object? - usual the barriers we see can be unmade with effort or they lead to other paths around the barrier
(3) What lifestyle do you want in 5 years time? - work is only one part of life. No point having the right job and the wrong lifestyle.

The answer to the "right" role or career choice usually lies somewhere in the reasons for these answers. It is amazing how often the intersection of these three questions leads to a direct choice that can be implemented straight away. I usualy ask that people try to start the changes in the next 30 days to consolidate the change when they have clarity.

I recently have watched a few independent movies about purpose and meaning in life. It reminded me that those three things as preoccupations of our culture are recent creations in human history. People struggling to eat and live don't engage in long philosophical discussions about whether their life is meaningful. It tends to get in the way of survival. For example, it was reading Moby Dick that I realised for the first time that people became whalers on multi-year dangerous voyages, because it meant you did not have to worry about food and board for the journey (better than the alternative of starvation and death however horrible or dangerous the journey may be).

The long boom prosperity brought many a great life of plenty and with that abundance the problem of choice. Everyday I have a bleak day I try to ask myself whether it would be so bleak if I did not have choices. Most of the time that helps me to see the glass as more than half full instead of yearning for the emptiness. Perhaps this is some kind of neo-buddhism. I can't go to the buddhist view that all our problems stem from desire. Certainly we need to temper greed and its excesses, but we need desire and passion and all the other energies that come from wanting (another, another thing, another life). Where Buddhism has a point is that we can't regret or despair at the choices that we do or do not make. Our lives are shaped by what we choose. (OK from Buddhism the view is probably closer to existentialism)

People with a great deal of confidence, often to the point of bravado, are often able to succeed where those with greater training, skills, ability or merit are not.

Willingness to take risks clearly plays a part. Too many people choose not to make an attempt in an effort to avoid running the risk of failure and hence deny themselves any chance of success. Confidence in oneself and one's goal reinforces the need to "have a go" and once underway anything is often possible.

Confidence too can often cause people to underestimate the risks of failure. Even where a better assessment of the risks would have prevented a start, confidence can give people hope to keep fighting for their "inevitable" success. In this category would clear fall all those mad entrepreneurs who went ahead to realise their dream where others said it was impossible or at least improbable.

If you can temper confidence with realism, to assess and mitigate risks effectively, then as they say you might just "make your own luck."

I received an email newsletter this morning (one of those sales management tips ones) that had 3 tips for maintaining energy. They were:

1 improve your diet (check: can do that one easily. probably there already, if I trim a little...)
2 use exercise (check: knew this would be good. can go for a walk..)

and then the big killer

3 find a deeply inspiring purpose for your life (what? how? have these people not read that lists should be of vaguely similar things. " a deeply inspiring purpose" is not something one picks up in the supermarket. "Excuse me. Could I have a deeply inspiring purpose with extra commitment please? Is there a low carb version?")

One can't argue that goals or even a deeply inspiring purpose are a great source of energy. Perhaps a little more time by the authors of the email could have been spent on how to set some goals, or even better inspiring ones.

My favourite is to do the visualisation exercise from the end of the year back ie "if I was sitting at 31 December of this year reviewing the achievements of the year what would I want to see." You can extend this to "deeply inspiring purposes" but asking questions like "what would I want the world/my life/my career/family to be like?" or "what difference would I want to have made?" You may not get the right answer first time, but it is a start towards that deeply inspiring purpose (with or without carbs).

A list from physicsweb.org of the top 20 equations. A few on the list a beautiful reminders of the power of simplicity and the challenge to capture it from the complexity of life.

This article in the guardian is a great overview of Chekhov but also contains an intriguing catalogue of the types of short story. Great reading.