Missing Ingredients

Today's theme, Missing Ingredients, seems to be best summarized by a section heading in an article I read today by Kenji Crosland called, "The Rise of the Generalist Part III: How to Thrive as a Generalist." It relates to my continued search to understand my personality and how I can shape my career to deliver satisfaction for myself, my family and others.

The urgency of my personality search has increased over the last year since my employer announced the closure of our plant. I've been looking for jobs but finding conflict trying to match my personality to a job description. I've also felt stagnated in my personality search, not sure why I haven't made more progress. Finally, my unfinished projects at home still haunt me. Here's how they all relate to missing Ingredients.

Missing Ingredients for Employers

With two months left until the factory shutdown, everyone is in full job-search mode. Only a few people have reported much success; they are the ones looking for jobs in semiconductors or electronics manufacturing. Many of us are looking to change industries. Manufacturing is a difficult industry, and job satisfaction often rates low. This seems counter-intuitive because the products we make improve lives, and the pay and benefits are respectable. My personal experience leads me to believe that the dissatisfaction comes from the extreme pressures that arise from the volatile nature of the business. Companies are run extremely lean, and the most obvious places to reduce costs are areas that are correlated with happiness but not the bottom line. In fact, since the pressure on our site has been reduce people are far happier lately and our performance is at record levels.

So trying to change industries / careers is difficult, and some days feels impossible. Even when I have contacts inside a company, it seems I always have too little of the right experience, and too much of the wrong experience. I can't get an entry-level job because I'm "overqualified", and I can't get a mid-level or senior job because I'm "under-qualified." I foresee this being an ongoing problem throughout my life if I stay in traditional career roles.

I've burned far too many calories just trying to find roles with a potential fit, and it has really limited my options. Companies are looking for specialists. So I've found myself looking through online certification courses for computer hardware, data analysis, Microsoft support, Linux support, networking, programming, etc. I just don't have time right now to do them all. How can I possibly pick just ONE?! It's about this time I start getting depressed and thinking, "Why can't I just be happy being a specialist?!"

Missing Ingredients for My Path

Because when I think about being a specialist it makes me depressed. There's no career path and no head hunters looking for a "generalist." This means I've got to make my own path. I still feel like I don't know where to begin. It's a long way between having some vague ideas and charting a new course. That's why I keep falling into the same rut of browsing existing job listings. But every time I look at a listing I can't help but feel so confined. They all feel wrong.

Today I realized that I still haven't finished my soul-searching quest yet. All the jobs feel wrong because I'm looking at the wrong jobs, and I don't know which jobs are the right jobs. I don't know which jobs are the right jobs because I still don't know what exactly I need to be doing to fulfill my career. I'm missing ingredients to know which direction to go.

So today I vowed to begin again, to delve more deeply than before. I got side-tracked with the practicality of trying to feed my family in a few months. Chances are that I will take yet another partially fulfilling job while I evolve my self-concept into something actionable. I will probably never be happy working for a corporation, maybe only working for myself. But I gotta figure out what it is I will be doing.

Missing Ingredients for Executing Ideas

Finally, it was this line of thinking that brought me back around to this blog. I've collected a few of my ideas, but they just kind of sat there. Barbara Sher said that once I get them onto paper they would stop nagging at me. The burden was lessened by writing them down, but they still nag at me. Maybe I need to actually finish (some) of my projects. But why did I stop?

Many of my projects require skills beyond my current abilities. The idea of getting some of them executed is daunting..."I don't know how to do that." I realized that those skills are missing ingredients necessary for fulfillment. I've been out of school for two years now and realize it's time to get back to the books. The most difficult time is deciding where to start. I get analysis paralysis.

So today I bought another book to help define my passion - my "Genius". Next I'm going to pick one of my ideas and gain the missing skills needed to bring it into fruition. I'm thinking about learning more programming first. So I'm looking for a job that will involve some programming and hopefully open the gateway there even wider. Eventually I'll need to learn some business and entrepreneurship. That's the scariest of all.

Job from Hell, Reversed

Homer in Hell. Fair Use. The Simpsons is Copyright Fox.

Why This Post?

Sometimes our choices don't always turn out the way we predict. Even things we enjoy on the surface might not yield the same satisfaction when taken to more extremes. I've discovered this to be the case with my career choice of Chemical Engineering. I like the school work initially, but as things progressed deeper I enjoyed the coursework less. Work pays well, but I find that a paycheck alone isn't enough. I'm not like Homer Simpson in Treehouse of Horror IV. He was sent to hell and force-fed thousands of donuts as a punishment, but he still enjoyed it. 

This post is an exercise to help me identify a career for which I can be passionate. This is yet another exercise from, "I Could Do Anything: If Only I Knew What It Was," by Barbara Sher. The exercise is to write down the job from heaven, or if you have a hard time with that, the job from hell. I have a very difficult time thinking about the job from heaven and still have the job be a job. I find it much easier to do the job from hell. Does that mean I'm pessimistic?

The Job From Hell

At the job from hell I have to wake up and be to work early every morning. It's in the middle of downtown and I have to fight an hour of heavy traffic every morning just to get there. There is a mandatory morning meeting with the sole purpose of making everyone feel that they are doing a horrible job, but the actual business is ignored. Every day feels exactly the same as the one before because I do the same thing every day, day after day. My managers ask me to do loads of extra work that have no impact on the business' bottom line. I'm never allowed to be creative, or inventive or think outside the box. I have to write reports all day that no one ever reads or uses. All the technology I use is antiquated, the software doesn't work, and support from other departments is non-existent.

There are several meetings a day, but most of the time is spent arguing. People don't listen to each other and never work out solutions that will help everyone accomplish their work. As a result there's always too much to get done. Because daily work is so inefficient, my boss stays late every night and expects everyone else to do the same thing. Even when you leave you're always on-call. Vacation, sick days and anything outside of work is treated with contempt.

Because the company is trying so hard to save money, I don't even have a dedicated computer. Instead they are rotating pods, so you can never setup your workspace individually or efficiently. Everyone in the entire company sits in the same huge room, and everyone can see everyone. It's terribly distracting.

I'm sure I could add in more details, but I've written enough that I have a fairly good understanding of what really bugs me in a job. I hate when people waste time and energy on each other instead of on the problem at hand. I also hate limitations, especially the ones that are arbitrary. I hate monotony.

Double-Negative

This would be the Job Not from Hell:

I get to live wherever I want, because I get to fly a helicopter or airplane to work. And sometimes I can work from home, or just check-in while traveling with the family. The software systems at work are brilliant. All of the metrics necessary to track success as an individual, group and company are effortlessly generated and communicated by computers, so there's no need for mandatory morning meetings. When metrics predict any course deviations then people just get together to make early corrections. They do this because they are intrinsically motivated. They like making things run smoothly and minimizing problems.

There's basically no need for bosses. Conflict isn't eliminated, but my co-workers are able to resolve conflict without it becoming personal. They address problems objectively, then execute when a compromise has been reached.

I get to do a variety of things. And when I get bored of one thing or feel I have mastered my work, I get to learn something else. My work is technically challenging, but I'm surrounded by talented and experienced people and we help each-other improve our abilities. My work provides products or services that make people happy in a way that I get to see and sometimes experience with them. The company has a vision that is intrinsically understood by it's employees. Because we work on the same level with our customers we don't have to worry much about money, it naturally comes a result of our desire to create value.

Because we are innovative, creative, and do things before anyone else, I can afford to take time off, be sick, go to my kids' activities, and go home at a decent hour. But work is so engaging, that sometimes I like to stay a few extra hours when I'm making a breakthrough on something new.

It's funny, while I was coming up with this flipped version of a job, I thought to myself, "I want to be Kevin Flynn at the end of Tron (1982)."

Meaningful Work

Why This Post?

When I discovered Barbara Sher, and that I am a scanner, I bought two of her books: "Refuse to Choose" and "I Could Do Anything: If Only I knew What It Was." Even though she wrote "I Could Do Anything" first I finished reading and doing the exercises in "Refuse to Choose" because I had to learn about and activate the true scanner inside of me.
But now I started on "I Could Do Anything" and I'm working through the activities she suggests in that book. The first one I'm doing here is to define what "Meaningful Work" means to me. The premise of the book so far is that inside we really know what we want to do but have built a wall of reasons that keep us from actually doing anything. The purpose of the book is to identify and address the bricks in the wall, or the hurdles in the race or whatever mind blocks and barriers we have devised for ourselves.

My Nebulous Concept of Meaningful Work

So what is meaningful work? Right now I work in manufacturing making low power computer chips that mostly get used in consumer electronics like cell phones and laptops. My job is to help improve the yield from our manufacturing line. I frequently feel like my work is not meaningful, that it doesn't improve anyone's like for the better. I mean, whoop-dee-doo I helped make your battery last 5 minutes longer (indirectly). So I apparently think that meaningful work improves the quality of people's lives.
You could argue that making cheaper and faster cell phones and laptops makes them more accessible, and that technology and information improve people's lives. But somehow I feel like it's not making an impact in an area that really matters or to people who really need it. So nested in those feelings are two more concepts. First, meaningful work involves improvements that are considered more than just convenient. Second, meaningful work serves people who have greater than average need for improved life.
Somewhere in my brain is the idea that meaningful work is also something that could be universally recognized as "Good." Somehow, if others can't recognize the immediate value of a labor then to me it doesn't seem to merit the label of Truly Meaningful Work. This would be opposed to the concept of immoral or amoral endeavors, so I think there is an implied morality in my concept of meaningful work. There should be some underlying principle, motivation or cause that underpins and gives a foundation upon which the work is based.
That's really nebulous, I know, but that is what's in my brain. Sorry for being simple-minded?

Examples of What I Would Call Worthy Work

The following list is not perfect, not complete, and not necessarily things I want to do as a career. But it is a list of things that I tend to think of as being meaningful.

• Researching Cures for Physical Ailments and Disease
• e.g. Cancer, Malaria, Ebola, Infant Mortality, HIV/AIDS, Polio, etc.
• Work involving disabilities
• Education
• Counseling, Social Work, Community Improvement
• Energy Research, Improvement, Innovation
• Community Services, Fire Department, Police, Military, etc.

The Gist of this Exercise

The interesting thing is that practically none of the occupations that interest me fall under this classification. I'm more interested in technology, making things, video games. But when I think about those jobs I get a nag in my mind that says, "Those are just fanciful pastimes. They don't actually make people's lives better, and they have plenty of negatives associated with them."
In her book, Barbara basically says that this self-made picture of worthy work may be working as another impediment to doing the work that really makes us happy. Should be interesting to see if such an important seeming concept can really be altered.