Career Advice for Kevin

Dear Kevin,

I’m currently flying East across the country at 37,000 feet with nothing better to do than to write you a letter. I imagine you haven’t even gotten this far before you’ve seen how long this note is and saved this to read another day. I get it; you’re a busy guy. 

I asked about the status of your lease and was surprised to hear that you are considering making a career move. I have much to say on the topic and suggested we schedule a call. I didn’t get the expected reply of, “Thanks so much for volunteering, my dear father, I would like nothing more than to glean every bit of advice that you would kindly send my way.”  Nevertheless, I’m undaunted and am ready to share.

Let’s start with the secret of life. You heard me. Before we can discuss careers, we need to discuss why you are here on this planet. While some may suggest that this question is unknowable and others have turned to religion for the answers to this question, I actually think that it’s quite an easy question.

The secret of life is that you are here to be happy. Pleasure, entertainment and happiness are what life’s all about. Figuring out how to make yourself happy can take some a lifetime to truly figure out and happiness is not a static state. Instead, happiness is an ever-evolving state. Many times, in your life you’ll find more happiness than you can possibly absorb and other times you may not be quite sure what happened to happiness because it was here a second ago but doesn’t seem to be here right now.

Learning what makes you happy and anticipating what might make you happy in the future are not necessarily obvious. If some day you get a partner in life, it can get even more difficult to find the balance that allows both people to be happy even as happiness evolves over the course of one’s life.

Happiness is what the game of life is all about. Pay careful attention to what it takes to make you happy and do your best to anticipate what it will take to continue being happy years from now. You only play this life game once so it’s worth lots of thought.

I know in my life happiness has largely been an easy thing but it isn’t always obvious what it takes to be happy. You know that I like to take photos. Taking photos, capturing the moment for eternity, editing those photos to bring out more than we might see with the naked eye and then looking at those photos makes me happy. And while my love of photography started in the 8th grade when I got my first camera and stepped into the dark room, I wouldn’t say that it’s been a constant.

I thought I wanted to be a photographer. I was willing to put classes and grades second behind my work on the campus newspaper. I thought it would be a great career and I was really excited about the life I had chosen. As I progressed in my career, however, I realized that there was much about being a photographer that I didn’t like. I wasn’t thrilled by how I was forced to put my name on a photo that I thought was boring just because the article was newsworthy. I wasn’t thrilled with the competitive nature of photography that made it so hard to get what I considered to be a good job. When I finally landed my first full time professional photography job at a daily paper in Turlock, CA (where I had never been before), it paid only $900 a month. No, 1983 wasn’t so long ago that $900 was a lot of money back then. It was then that I started to realize that my dream job was not really what it looked like when I set out on that course. I made a career change in my mind and headed toward “business” not even being aware at the time that there was this thing called Marketing.

After turning down the job in Turlock, I would go on to work for the Associated Press for a couple of weeks during the summer of 1984 but when the Olympics ended, I realized that I would never be a professional photographer. I was sad. I was not sure what I would be. I put my camera down and essentially didn’t touch it for 10 years until you were born and I reintroduced myself to photography. Somehow picking up the camera hurt a little bit after I realized it wouldn’t be my career. Something that made me happy now made me sad. Again, happiness can be elusive, it can be transitory and it’s something you should always be paying attention to.

So, my life and my career went on. I learned more about happiness and how elusive it can be. I would do something like wash my car after a long time and really enjoy the benefits of a clean car. This was happiness. But it was also obvious that that same happiness had evaporated after a day. Or there might be the cool gadget at Christmas time that created lots of happiness, only to fade within a week or two. The hunt for happiness is a daily exercise.

We see entire industries emerge that sell happiness to us. Movies, theater and sports are all forms of entertainment and ultimately happiness. Even something as mundane as watching the news or eating dinner are forms of happiness. I think by now you get the point and you might be asking yourself, what’s the point of this letter?

The point is that you are at a fragile time in your career. You’ve had massive success and will soon have three years of real-world experience working for a top-shelf company in a top-shelf role. In that respect you are doing much better than I was at your age. You’ve achieved a level of success and future success looks highly accomplishable and achievable. You should consider yourself lucky because most people are not so lucky. Sure, you work hard, but never forget that even hard workers need at least some luck to succeed in life.

At this point you’ve come way down the learning curve in the world of consulting. What used to be a challenge for you is today likely more boring. You are likely wrestling with your current state of happiness at work and that’s a good thing. Finding happiness in work is one of the hardest and yet most important things, I think, to managing your career. If work is fun, life is happy 24/7. Instead, if work is simply a means to be able to afford happiness, that’s fine but certainly not the ideal. So, figuring out what makes you happy within your career is as important as figuring out what makes you happy in life.

Career Lesson #1: What makes you happy in your career will evolve and change throughout your career.

I remember when Scott wanted to be a pilot before he started learning to fly and thinking to myself what a horrible profession. On the one hand Scott clearly had a passion for flying and yet I have to imagine that at some point it gets “old” and that the pilots feel more like bus drivers and that can make for a long career.

Career Lesson #2: Your career goal should be for work to never feel like work but to feel like play instead.

I know that when I graduated with my MBA, I was left with two job offers (HP and Well Fargo) and I struggled with which job to take. As I’ve probably already told you, I couldn’t decide and ultimately decided I would take the job that paid more. While HP only paid $1,000 a year more, it seemed like as good of a reason as any.

Career Lesson #3: Don’t make career decisions because of money if you don’t have to.

As my career went on I stopped focusing on money and increasingly focused on title. After being CEO I stopped focusing on title and started focusing on fun. I had learned a lot about what makes me happy. I like to fix things. I like to create things. I like to move quickly. I don’t like a ton of bureaucracy and seemed happier in smaller organizations. I didn’t care what we sold, I cared more about the business model and what I could do to put my fingerprint on the business model. It’s that finger print thing that would turn out to be one of the most important things to me. At times I’ve worried that it’s an ego thing and it may be, but in my own way it’s as if I’m an explorer discovering new lands never before seen by human beings. It’s not. My fingerprint is usually barely visible to anyone but me, but it’s pretty clear at this point that any fingerprint at all makes me happy.

Career Lesson #4: What makes others happy (including your father) may not make you happy.

So, let’s transition into your career. I haven’t had a chance to grill you with my third-degree questions, but I suspect that the commute is killing you (it would me) and the job is less challenging than it once was (no surprise) and that maneuvering the company infrastructure is not as easy as you would like. I also hope (not suspect) that you are tired of living anywhere other than near your family (sorry, that last sentence slipped in but was not part of the story).

My best advice is for you to spend some time thinking about what makes you happy at work and where you want to go in your career and then start building a plan to get there. The next step is to try to figure out if what makes you happy today is likely to stick around for a while, or if you can anticipate that changing as your career progresses.  Sure, these are hard and maybe even unknowable questions, but they are still worth asking yourself.

Creating a Career Happiness Plan is a good idea. I would venture to guess that over 80% of people think of work as work. They may not hate it but it doesn’t make them happy either. Some take jobs because of the money and they expect that money to allow them to get the happiness they need. Despite the song titles to the contrary, I do think that money can buy you a certain level of happiness, but it probably can’t buy you the ultimate in happiness.

As you may have gathered by now, my goal up to this point was to offer words of wisdom and give you a framework to think about your own career. Now, I would like to quickly transition to what you thought you would be getting much earlier in this document: my unsolicited advice.

I recommend the following:

Think about what you want to be doing 5 to 10 years from now.

1. Try to imagine the path you’ll need to take to get there.
2. Don’t worry about thinking too much beyond that because the further out you go the harder it is to predict.
3. Build the plan, write it down, let it sit, read it and see if it’s a good plan

I won’t be so bold as to tell you what I think you should do but I will offer a couple of perspectives that may differ from yours

1. Some people work their entire lives to get a job as good as the job you have right now.

2. Some people work their entire lives to get a job with a company as good as your company is right now.
3. Getting a new job gets both easier and harder as you progress in your career. It’s easier because you have more experience and its harder because as you gain experience and become more expensive there are fewer jobs to choose from (finding VP level jobs, for instance, is really hard just because there aren’t that many of them.
4. When you are trying to get a job you present risk to your future employer. They want to only hire people that have done exactly what they need done. My approach was always “breadth” so that I had some experience in everything relevant to my career, but often the hiring manager sees “breadth” as a lack of “depth” in any one thing.

Thus, it’s important to look at yourself through the eyes of a future hiring manager.  And at the same time this next job is going to play a critical role in what job you might be hired to do after that. Every move on this career game board leads you down a path and I’m encouraging you to pick the path wisely because you may find yourself trapped in a career that stops bringing you happiness.

Overall, my career advice is to move slower and take less risk than many. That’s in part my personality and in part a function of my relationship with your mother. I think if I had been single at the beginning of my career, I would have taken a very different direction. I actually like taking some risks, but your mom is significantly less risk averse than I am and marriage is often a compromise.  I would encourage you to take risks but to think a few moves ahead on the chess board. What will this next career choice look like to a future hiring manager? Do the jobs you’ve held lead you to the next great thing? Do you see a path and what do you think will be at the end of this path?

Ok, I think I’m out of things to say. Maybe more importantly I’ve had too much to drink and have to get my aisle mate to get up for at least the second time so far on this trip. Yeah, yeah, I’m not thrilled about that either.

Life is short. Make sure you are happy. Don’t solve the equation for short-term happiness if that will hurt your chances of long-term career happiness. Figure out what it will take not to get the next job but the job after that. Put yourself in the shoes of your future hiring manager and figure out what they want to see on a resume. Don’t assume that just because you got a great job the first time out that it will always be this easy. Try to visualize what life will be like in the future. Imagine the new job and the new life and then fast forward a few years and figure out if it’s fun. Pay attention to yourself and try to figure out what makes you happy and what doesn’t. Pay attention to the micro-happiness and the macro-happiness. You know what the macro is, but the micro is often the tasks you do at the office. For example, when I get to creat a new spreadsheet I still get a small tingle of happiness shooting through my body. Don’t know why, but I think it’s fun. There are lots of these micro-happiness things in my life...I hope you’ll discover yours and that might help you piece together what it takes to be happy.

Despite the length of this letter, I have more to say. But I’m winding down and worried that your happiness may be waning just by the length of this letter!

As a parent, looking after your children when they are young is relatively easy (with the benefit of hindsight). Helping your children navigate life is something that requires more “hope” than “action.” You don’t need my help but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to help and that I continue to look out for you.

In closing, as you think out into your distant future you may see your career very differently than you today. Work initially is something you do to get money to live. Your mom and I could retire if we wanted to (I don’t like to tell her that). We have plenty of money to support our lifestyle (with a few changes) so as not to be burden to our children (although I think Scott is counting on a sizable inheritance which would require more work). So, if we don’t need the money why are we working? I won’t answer for her, but I can answer for me. I work because it makes me happy. I like being on a team. I like having puzzles to solve (work puzzles). I like the feeling of accomplishment. And I’m least happy when I don’t have enough work to do. Many might think of that as crazy, but part of me is scared of retiring someday. What will I do? How will I find happiness? There’s only so much photography, chocolate and heckling that one can do!

A career is a special thing. If you have my genes, it could be the difference between a happy life and a less than happy life. Choose wisely.

Love,

Dad

P.S. Consider moving near your parents and delivering lots of grandchildren to your parents because that would make your parents happy. Consider that a brief advertisement that is completely contrary to my advice which is not to figure out what makes your parents happy, but take charge of your life and figure out what it takes to make you happy (that said, we need more girls in the family).