When you are assessing your next move – whether this be business, career, or life – you want to ask yourself this question:
“Am I running away from where I am, or am I running toward where I want to be?”
Many people do not think about the difference between the two. Even more people make decisions to run away from where they presently are. I know I did.
When I was in graduate school, I wanted to run away from a career in research. I did not have a target I wanted to aim toward, I only knew I wanted to aim away from the life of a research scientist. When I became a pharmaceutical professional, I followed the same pattern. Many of my career moves were made because I wanted to leave where I was. When this happened, I would feel an initial excitement of a new job or profession, followed by a gradual waning of enthusiasm and the eventual realization that I was still not where I felt I wanted to be. Sure, I made some good moves, and I had luck (and excellent network contacts) on my side. However, I also wasted many years of my life figuring things out this way.
Running away is a reactive mechanism, just as we would remove our hands immediately from a hot stove. Sometimes we run away more often than we run toward, because we don’t know what we want to run toward. If we don’t know where we want to go, we could only use where we are as a reference point and wander semi-randomly toward any open door that seems to promise light at the end of a tunnel.
According to Karl Fisch, 1 out of 4 workers today have worked for their company for less an 1 year, and former secretary of education Richard Riley said that the top 10 jobs for year 2010 did not exist in 2004 (slides 20-23). Is this rapid job movement a testament to the short attention span of today’s employees, or suggestive of people shuffling from job to job, trying to figure out what they really want to do with their lives? What about those previously non-existent top 10 jobs? Could they have been created by those individuals who got tired of running away from where they were, and who decided to design the place where they truly wanted to be, and in the process, helped create career options for countless individuals who followed their paths?
I’m speculating about the statistics, but for myself, one of the most important questions you can ask yourself about any career, business, or life decision is whether you are running away from where you are, or running toward where you truly want to be.
And if you don’t know where you truly want to be, now is the time to find out.
Experience.com provides data on entry level jobs and internships.
