Many of us are frustrated with our work and careers. This is evidenced by the recent flurry of excitement over ‘Quiet Quitting’ that is driving boomers into a lather. At its core, quiet quitting is the desperate cry of an uninspired and exploited workforce. For too long, employers have failed to provide their workers with a compelling value proposition over and above monetary compensation. Most of the time this is a factor of incompetence rather than malice on the part of an underskilled and under resourced management. But this isn’t about leadership, this is about how you can take matters into your own hands and take ownership of your career to use your skills and talent to make a meaningful impact in the world.
Over my career I have developed a framework to help me construct an impactful career for myself.
Passion
Step 1 in building a better career for yourself is to find your passion. This is more easily said than done, but it is an important grounding for the rest of your life. Finding a true passion is a large, complex topic, but fundamentally for me it is about 4 key pillars.
- Introspection
- Abstraction
- Articulation
- Testing
Finding your passion is a topic all its own and you can find my thoughts on it in this article.
Problem
Once you find your passion, you need to find your problem. Having a passion is great, but for a lot of people, a passion isn’t enough. If you are reading this, it is likley that you are striving to achieve something, to do more with your life, to make your dent in the universe. This is where a good problem comes in. Finding a big, broad, problems gives your passion a framework to work off. It gives your passion direction and focus and allows you to truly impact the world in a positive way. Finding a big problem is fairly easy once you know what your passion is. The best place to start looking is the UN’s sustainable development goals (SDGs). This is a big list of the 17 biggest issues facing humanity today and covers everything from world hunger to cyber security. If nothing else, this research will help to narrow down the type of problem you may tackle. Of course, choose a problem that is meaningful to you, be they local community issues, or global systemic issues. This is your passion problem and you get to decide where you place your focus. In my experience, the bigger the problem the better.
Write it down and get familiar with your problem, this will be your guiding light for your next step.
Profit
Now we get to the fun bit. You now have a clear understanding of your passion and why it is meaningful to you. You also have the clear framework of a big problem to tackle. Now it time to find a way to get paid to work on this problem. Most likely, there is an industry around your problem, be it climate change or local food issues. Your job is to find a way to build a career around it.
To be clear, you don’t have to monetise your passion if you don’t want to, but its not a career at that point, and that’s fine. But if you do want to get paid to follow your passion, the work starts here.
Find the non-for-profit and apply for jobs, build a side hustle around your issue and grow that business, find a large corporate that can influence your problem in some way and work your way to the goal. The only thing stopping you in this mission is yourself. Take your time and work towards the outcome. This isn’t about getting rich, it’s about playing the long game to change the world.
Follow your passion, change the world.