Conclusion

My Story Resumes

In the introduction to this book I described the circumstances that launched me on the quest you just finished reading about. My time as a graduate student and postdoc was winding down, and I was about to enter the academic-job market. Succeeding as a professor, I knew, was not an easy task. If you’re not in control of your career, it can chew you up and spit you out. To make matters worse, I was entering the market in a bad economy, so there was a chance I might not find a suitable academic position at all, which would force me to start from scratch in my career thinking. This uncertainty made the following question suddenly seem pressing: How do people end up loving what they do?

In the fall of 2010 I sent out my applications for academic jobs. By early December I had applied to twenty positions. A curious quirk of the academic-job search process is that your colleagues expect it to be demanding, so they keep tasks off your desk. And though the process is in fact demanding, these demands come in bursts, leaving long stretches of downtime in between. Without much work to fill these stretches, you can find yourself uncomfortably idle. So it was that as November gave way to December, and I finished submitting my twenty applications, I had, for the first time since my college summer vacations, not much to do.

With free time on my hands, I could finally begin to tackle my quest in earnest. It was at this point that I began to seek out people’s career stories, both successes and failures, to see what I could learn. It was in November, for example, that I first met Thomas, whose tale opened this book. The stories I encountered that fall cemented an idea that I had long suspected to be true: “Follow your passion” is bad advice. But this validation only brought forward the more difficult task of figuring out what career-happiness strategies do work.

My search for this answer was put on hold in January and February as my job search process picked up steam. I began to prepare my job talk and sift through the interview offers that started to trickle in. In early March I went on an interview trip that included a stop at Georgetown University. Everything about Georgetown felt right. Fortunately, I had another offer at the time with a tight deadline. I told my contacts at Georgetown that I enjoyed my visit and was interested in the position but that I had a fast-approaching deadline. Later that night I received the key e-mail from the head of their search committee. It was terse, just three sentences:

We will have an offer for you on Thursday. We just need to know where to contact you to communicate it in the afternoon. Will your cell phone be the best way to reach you?

I turned down a pair of interviews that had been scheduled for later in the spring and accepted the Georgetown offer. My career die had been cast: I was going to be a professor. It was the second week of March when I formally took myself off the market. My start date would be in August. This left a gap of four months to finalize my answers to my pressing career questions: I now had a job, but I needed to figure out how to transform it into one I loved. During that spring and subsequent summer, I hit the road, conducting the interviews that formed the core of Rules #2–4.

As I’m writing this conclusion, I’m now two weeks away from my first semester as a professor. I have been working hard over the past several months to not only finish the quest I described in this book, but also to write up my experiences in the form in which you just encountered them. (I signed the deal for this book only two weeks after accepting my Georgetown offer.) This conclusion is the last piece of this book to be written, and the timing couldn’t be better. I’ll be handing in this manuscript mere days before turning my attention to my new life as a professor—allowing me to start this new chapter of my career with confidence in what I should do to push it somewhere remarkable.

My quest, of course, uncovered several surprising ideas. If your goal is to love what you do, I discovered, “follow you passion” can be bad advice. It’s more important to become good at something rare and valuable, and then invest the career capital this generates into the type of traits that make a job great. The traits of control and mission are two good places to start. My goal for this final part of the book is to describe how I am applying these ideas in my own working life. That is, I want to take you inside my thought process and highlight the specific ways in which the insights of Rules #1–4 are playing a role in this early stage of my new career. Obviously these applications are tentative—I have not yet been a professor long enough to see how they will all play out—but it’s this tentativeness, I think, that makes them more relevant. They provide a real-world example of the type of concrete actions you can take right now to start applying the lessons of this book in your own working life. Your decisions will differ from mine, but I hope that you’ll encounter in this conclusion a better sense of what it means to re-form a career to match this new way of thinking about creating work you love.