The Quarter-Life Breakthrough: Invent Your Own Path, Find Meaningful Work, and Build a Life That Matters - Softcover

Smiley Poswolsky, Adam

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0143109529 ISBN 13: 9780143109525

Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

An empowering and insightful self-help book for Gen Z young adults to find passion, purpose, and success in their careers

How do you actually find meaning in the workplace? How do you find work that makes your heart sing, creates impact, and pays your rent?
 
After realizing that his well-paying, prestigious job was actually making him miserable, Adam “Smiley” Poswolsky started asking these big questions. The Quarter-Life Breakthrough provides fresh, honest, counterintuitive, and inspiring career advice for anyone stuck in a quarter-life crisis (or third-life crisis), trying to figure out what to do with your life. Smiley shares the stories of many twenty- and thirty-somethings who are discovering how to work with purpose (and still pay the bills).

Brimming with practical exercises and advice, this book is essential reading for millennial career changers and anyone passionate about getting unstuck, pursuing work that matters, and changing the world.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Adam “Smiley” Poswolsky is a millennial career expert who has inspired thousands of young professionals and entrepreneurs to find fulfilling work. An internationally renowned motivational speaker, Smiley speaks at Fortune 500 companies, TEDx events, business conferences, leadership development programs, colleges, and graduate schools. His writing has been published in The Washington Post, Fast Company, and GOOD, among others. He can often be found dancing in San Francisco, California. Learn more at thequarterlifebreakthrough.com and smileyposwolsky.com.

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Chapter 1

Start Jumping Lily Pads

"Not all those who wander are lost."

-J. R. R. TOLKIEN

Taped above my desk is an article from the Onion with the headline "24-Year-Old Receives Sage Counsel from Venerable 27-Year-Old," and a picture of two twentysomethings in plaid shirts in deep existential conversation over pints of beer at a bar.

When I told my dad I was writing a career advice book, he looked at me like I was crazy and asked, "What qualifies you to be writing a book about careers? You've changed what you wanted to do with your life every other year since you were a kid."

My dad is absolutely right. I've never been able to focus on any one thing for very long, and I still have trouble answering the question "What do you want to be when you grow up?" At first, I wanted to be Big Bird, road-tripping around the country in Follow That Bird. Then I wanted to be Mister Rogers. Once, my family was staying at a hotel, and Fred Rogers was there having breakfast. I ran right up to him and exclaimed, "Excuse me, Mister Rogers, Mister Rogers! How did you get out of the TV?!"

When I was in fourth grade, I wanted to be a play-by-play announcer for the Olympics. In eighth grade, I wanted to be Adam Sandler. In high school, I wanted to be a sports writer. Then I went to a liberal arts college, which is to say I majored in film studies, studied abroad in Cuba, and took intro to dance senior year. Making career choices has proved difficult ever since.

After graduation, I could write a fifteen-page shot-by-shot analysis of David Lynch's Mulholland Drive and tell you the difference between cage-free, free-range, and pasture-raised eggs. But I realized that college had not prepared me for the job-finding process in the slightest. Since I had no idea which "career ladder" to climb, I moved to the city where all my friends were moving (Brooklyn), and got a job that matched my college major (film), which is what I thought I was supposed to do at the time.

In the ten years since graduation, I've had ten drastically different jobs, lived in six cities, and gone down four career paths. I've never once seen this elusive "career ladder" everyone talks about. But I do know that whoever invented the ladder has been freaking twentysomethings out for a long time.

Where do you get on the ladder? Is there one in each city in the world? If you hop off for a detour, do you have to start back from the bottom, or do you get to keep your place in line? Is there music along the way? Is it like Pandora-can I choose my station?

As insufferable as this ladder mind-set can be, twentysomethings are still unfailingly being told to maintain a linear career trajectory. Even my father, who was born in the 1950s, hasn't followed any sort of career path. He has worked in stage management and lighting design for off-off-Broadway shows, then for a rock 'n' roll theater start-up in London, dropped out of NYU's theater school, sailed across the Atlantic, joined Pink Floyd as a roadie doing lighting on their international tours, became disenchanted with life on the road and enrolled in architecture school, worked as an architect, raised kids, spent time in corporate real estate, got his MBA at the age of fifty-three, built dialysis clinics, and managed projects and workplace innovation for a large electronics company. Yet even he was skeptical when I told him I wasn't pursuing a "traditional" career path after college, and instead was headed to New York to freelance on film sets.

If you've struggled with picking a career path, or focusing on one interest or calling, then you're not alone. Only 27 percent of college graduates have a job related to their college major.

In high school and during college, I scooped ice cream at Ben & Jerry's, had a few stints as a barista, and among other things, worked at a garden shop, helping customers pick out shade perennials (pretending that I actually knew what a shade perennial was). To list all of my high school and college jobs would be overwhelming. Here's the eclectic array of jobs I've held since graduating from college.

My Wandering Journey

Age Job + Motivation

18 Student at Wesleyan University (Middletown, CT)

Make friends, protest George W. Bush, gain liberal arts education

22 Move back home with parents (Cambridge, MA)

Unemployed and broke

22 Freelance film location scout (Brooklyn, NY)

Live with best friends in Brooklyn, major in film, love movies

25 Film festival assistant (Buenos Aires, Argentina)

Live in Argentina, learn Spanish, travel

26 Obama 2008 campaign field organizer (Anderson, IN)

Join change movement, support gay marriage, keep John McCain from destroying the world

26 Waiter at Eatonville restaurant (Washington, DC)

Make money to pay rent, love food and people

27 Move back home with parents (Cambridge, MA)

Unemployed and broke

27 Special assistant at US Peace Corps (Washington, DC)

Believe in Peace Corps' mission to promote world peace and friendship

30 Freelance writer & Bold Academy director (San Francisco, CA)

Live in San Francisco, love to write, support social entrepreneurs

32 Author, speaker, and Hive Global Leaders Program facilitator (San Francisco, CA)

Empower millennials to have breakthroughs and find meaningful work

There are two mind-sets through which one could analyze my "career" up to this point. The first is what I'll call the career ladder mind-set, the one we've been taught to follow most of our lives. This mind-set tells us that the more AP classes we take, the better we do on our SATs, the better college we go to, the more money we make, the higher on the ladder we rise, the more successful we are.

Someone with this mind-set would look at my career and say, "This kid Smiley is a hot mess; he lived at his parents' house at the age of twenty-seven! He can't make up his mind. He won't stay in a job for more than two years. He'll never be successful because he's not on a specific career ladder. Think of where he could have been if he had spent the last eight years in film."

Although recent college graduates are often encouraged to adopt a career ladder mind-set, these career ladders have several essential flaws:

Career ladders limit new opportunities, experimentation, and risk taking. What happens if an amazing opportunity presents itself-say, to join the 2008 Obama campaign-and I want to get off the ladder, but I've already spent two years on a different career? Ladders encourage people to avoid new challenges in exchange for safety and "moving up." Avoiding these risks may mean avoiding the very opportunities that provide us the greatest satisfaction in life. If there isn't only one answer, there probably isn't one "top of the ladder," either.

Career ladders define success on someone else's terms. Career ladders lead to promotion potential and higher salary. The theory is, "Pay your dues early, and you'll reap the benefits later." I'm not a huge fan of delayed gratification in general-not many millennials are-but it's especially annoying when I don't even get to define what my gratification is or what success means to me. What happens if I'm not in it for a fancy job title or a big salary? What happens if success for me is not my retirement package at sixty-five, but one person realizing their life potential from a book I write?

Career ladders make me stress about the future, which inhibits me from taking action now. When I was thinking about leaving my job at the Peace Corps, one of the things I was interested in pursuing next was writing. Whenever I brought up the possibility of becoming a freelance writer, all I heard from people was, "Well, it's a hard career ladder to climb. You can't get a staff writing position at a major...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0143109529
• ISBN 13: 9780143109525
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 224
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar