William Damon (Professor at Stanford University and a world’s leading researcher on the development of purpose in life) defines Purpose as a feeling something meaningful and you believe that it is adding something worth to the world. You have a purpose. When you have purpose you become motivated and energised.
Believes that it is a sense of purpose — intrinsic, sustaining and noble — that is missing in the majority of today’s youth, causing many of them to drift.”
“The biggest problem growing up today is not actually stress; it’s meaninglessness.”
Damon emphasizes that too often students focus only on short-term goals and don’t explore the big, long-term picture of what they want to do in life. But in both the cases, short term or long term, selecting the right job for yourself plays a very important role.
People are attracted to occupations that complement their personalities. John Holland (An American Psychologist, creator of the career development model) identified six personality types that affect vocational choice, some of which are – the investigative person, who enjoys working with ideas, is likely to select a scientific occupation (for example, anthropologist, physicist, or engineer) or the conventional person, who likes well-structured tasks and values material possessions and social status, has traits well-suited to certain business fields (accounting, banking, or quality control).
One of the most common ways of deciding which job to take is by looking at whether the product which the industry we’ll be working with produces is something that intrigues us or not. If we enjoy their output, we seek to become a part of their input.
This means that all of us are likely to write off certain areas of the economy. If I like dancing, I’d hate a job that involves sales. If I love studying the mind, then studying the market behaviours= has not much for me, right? We try to understand industries based on their overt output and then make a quick judgement about whether they have something to offer or not.
And yet there can be a huge benefit if we shift our focus from what the industry produces (output) to how it produces it (input); we might consider checking if our interests align with the input process. Instead of looking at a car and deciding whether we are interested in working in an automobile industry, we can try asking what all processes are involved in designing, branding, marketing, mechanically organising a car. Earlier we might not have considered the job because we thought we didn’t have enough love for a car but later as we realised that making a car also involves branding and designing, we might be more interested. Earlier we thought cars are all about putting parts together but now we realise how much more there is to it.
Instead of asking if we enjoy the inputs of an industry, we must ask ourselves if we can find pleasure in the input process. It is a hugely liberating move that’ll expand our opportunities immensely!
