Dan Pink Live on Smart Career Moves

I've written about Dan Pink so often on this blog, I might as well start a whole new category just for him.  His "A Whole New Mind" is on my list of recommended reading, and "Adventures of Johnny Bunko" - "the last career guide you'll ever need" - offers fun and strategic career advice for generation Y.

Given how much I adore what Dan has to say just about anything, I couldn't, of course, miss the opportunity to see him in person tonight, when he spoke at the Washington, DC's YesCircle.

Dan is an entertaining writer, but he's an even better speaker.  And career geek that I am, there were moments when I felt like I just wanted to take every word he said and channel it right into this blog. 

I felt this way especially when Dan was talking about two ways in which people make decisions about their careers: instrumental reasoning and fundamental reasoning. (I know it sounds heavy, but read on - it's worth it.) 

An instrumental approach, according to Dan, is when you make your career decisions based on a plan you've devised that's supposed to lead you somewhere.  When you think that way, you may choose a major that you don't actually like but that you believe will help you get a well-paying, even if dull and unfulfilling, job after college.  That job, you believe, would then set you up for a graduate school, which, once you've paid your dues, would help you get the job that you really want.

I can see some people saying - "And?.. What's wrong with that?"  In our society this approach to career decision-making is actually so normal that some of us may not see the flaw in that reasoning. 

And the flaw, according to Dan, is that, based on his extensive research and interviews, the people who say that they are happiest and most fufilled in their work - people who are successful, whether in terms of achievement or in terms of personal satisfaction - are ones who actually didn't follow a plan.  They simply made their decision each step of the way based on what they wanted and enjoyed doing at that particular time. 

Why did they end up being more successful as well as happy and fulfilled?  Put simply (and this is now me riffing on Dan's point), life intervenes with even the best-devised plans.  The job you think you'll be happy in once you've executed on your plan 10 years down the road may turn out dull and unfulfilling.  In the meantime, you've wasted 10 years of your life in pursuit of a goal that turned out to be ephemeral.

People who chose to follow their gut followed what Dan calls fundamental reasoning.  They may not have known why they were doing what they were doing at the time, nor where it was going to lead them.  And this was creating a lot of ambiguity in their lives.  But they were willing to live with this ambiguity for the sake of doing something that they liked. Here's Dan (paraphrased, but pretty close):

"Find somebody who is in their 40s doing work that is fun, that is meaningful, that is making an impact and ask them how they got there.  99 percent of the time they'll say "It's a long story. How much time you've got?""

That's because they followed the twists and turns that were coming their way in following their career paths.  In many cases, they ended up where they did seemingly unexpectedly - and yet, in the end, it was so logical, as if the many pieces of their life's puzzle had finally came together.

This, of course, was music to my ears, because this is so close to my own personal and career coaching philosophy.  And I especially loved hearing it from someone like Dan, for whom this is not a matter of belief but a matter of empirical evidence.  Dan calls himself an "empiricist," who "likes stuff that works" and who "would never recommend anything that doesn't work to anybody."  He's simply found that fundamental reasoning is what works, and that's why he's telling people, as Johnny Bunko's career Lesson #3, that they should forget about the plan - that there is no plan and that they should just follow their gut.

Sure, says Dan, the ambiguity that comes with that kind of an approach can be hard to take, and people will go to great lengths to avoid it.  But the cost of trying so hard to avoid the ambiguous is that they end up making career choices that end up being wrong for them.

I walked out of the room inspired all over again and carrying the freebies - the famous chopsticks with the six lessons that guided Johnny Bunko toward a life of career fulfillment, as well as cards that are based on the right-brain exercises Dan recommends in "A Whole New Mind." 

Ok, Dan, when's your next book coming out?  I'm going to need to be filling up that Dan Pink category with new stuff :)

Comments

[Mark McClure]

Izabella,

Perhaps Serendipity is going mainstream as far as career and life paths are concerned?

I always liked this alternative definition of LUCK:
Laboring Under Common Knowledge

regards

[Izabella Tabarovsky]

Love your definition... Thanks for stopping by!