The problem with most career advice, it seems to me, is twofold: First, we are told that we can do whatever we want, and then when we try to do whatever we want, we are told that we can’t do whatever we want. It is rare to see a week that goes by where there isn’t a story or an article about the feeble job market or the middling opportunities for university graduates who just spent thousands of dollars investing in an education that was meant to return to them their ideal career. But instead of their ideal career, new graduates are given a heavy dose of reality – which often means moving back in with their parents.
However, our ideals and our reality don’t have to be in conflict. The idealist and the realist can both be right, for both tell you something true about work: that it can be fulfilling and practical at the same time. The trick, of course, is finding the balance – something that I, like many, have not yet found.
I have long been a career idealist. I think the reason for this is that I have never had a career. I have had a number of jobs, some that I have enjoyed more than others, but on the whole I have not yet been forced to sacrifice my ideals at the altar of necessity. Most of the world does not have this luxury though. The majority of people in the world are forced to choose careers (or at least jobs) that support families well before their 20th birthday. Choice is a luxury, not a necessity, but for those of us who grew up hearing that we can do whatever we want, choice became a necessity without which a fulfilling career was not possible.
At times I have felt that my stubbornness or indecision about settling on a career has been in defense of the possibility of having a fulfilling career. But now I see (kind of) that I was defending my ability to choose my career, thinking that I could only have a fulfilling career if I chose it. I still very much defend the possibility of having a fulfilling career, but I no longer think it is necessary to choose this career – at least in the beginning. Some people are blessed with an unrelenting passion that leads them fairly straightforwardly into a career – and to those people I say be thankful for that gift – but for the rest of us, for those of us who do not have clarity of purpose or the talent that affords clarity of purpose, I say that our careers must embody a three-fold pattern:
1. Do what you should
Before we learn to how to do what we want, we should learn how to do what we should. This notion of duty is fundamental to the Christian life. Every Christian, for example, should love their neighbour. Loving our neighbour can look very different in different contexts, but it never lacks one thing: humility. Humility is the glue that connects God’s will with our will. We need to be willing to humble our wants and desires in the service of doing what we should (or what God wants) before we are able to do what we want. Ultimately, learning how to do what you should means learning how to be responsible with little things, which is necessary if we want to be responsible with big things.
2. Do what you can
The difference between doing what you should and doing what you can is that the first is concerned with responsibility and the second is concerned with ability. In this stage we learn, we grow, and we explore the ways in which we were made. We were all created differently, with different desires, abilities, and opportunities. There is much to be said for creating your opportunities, but there is also much to be said for waiting for your opportunities. As we have already noted, not everyone can do what they want when they want. As Leonardo da Vinci said, “As you cannot do what you want, / Want what you can do.” Most of us at one point or another will have to wait for the right opportunity to present itself. In the meantime, we do what we can with the opportunities we are given.
3. Do what you want
St. Augustine is quoted as saying: Dilige et quod vis fac. Love, and do as you will. This should be the goal of our careers: to be free to do what we want so that we may love our neighbours in the way we were made to love. When we love others, we are doing what God wants. The problem is that this is usually not what we want. We see the command to love our neighbours as a command that undermines the things we want, which is usually some combination of significance, authority, money, influence, or freedom. Make no mistake, loving our neighbour undermines all of these things more than we know, but it only undermines them in order to build them up. For we do not learn to love our neighbours by doing what we want, we learn to love our neighbours by doing what we should and what we can. Only then will we have the humility to do what we want, and only then will we have the character to carry the burden of significance, authority, money, influence, or freedom.
Flickr photo (cc) by geinography
