A Framework for Discovering What Career Fulfilment Looks Like to You

Source: http://www.jefflichronicles.com/
Young, bright-eyed and confused
As a young graduate entering the working world of the City of London, I got a fast and harsh introduction into the inner workings of capitalism and the all-consuming competitive dynamics a free market consists of.
Young, bright-eyed, and confused, I was blown away by stories of the glitz, glam and big bucks that City of London workers were making. Growing up in a distinctly working-class family, the salaries many were making were incomprehensible in my sense of scale. Not surprisingly, it captivated an impressionable younger me. I was quickly indoctrinated with the seemingly unwritten code this world appeared to operate by, being a ruthless competitor, even at the expense of others, was the only road to riches and success.
I was content with this competitive climate and was certainly no stranger to the world of competition. Throughout my studies I was a leading athlete (across rugby, football, and other athletics) as I truly loved the grit, sweat, blood, and tears competitive environments fostered.
I love to win, and perhaps more than this, can’t stand the thought of losing!
This competitive nature was required for us 2010’s and the City of London. Yet despite this, I always had a question at the back of my mind that I couldn’t seem to shake — why focus on success? And what does success even mean?
You might say that human nature is to always be pushing forward, but for me the question was much deeper and subjective i.e. what motivates us over a lifetime to keep pursuing success? I’m sure we have all thought of these questions before.
Look for what people say, and more importantly, look for what they actually do
Seeking answers to these questions, I looked to my older colleagues (brokers, traders, and bankers) to seek wisdom from those who had trodden the path I was so excited to follow. I was told stories of debauchery in the hessian days of the 2,000’s akin to the ‘Hangover’ and splurges of consumption to rival premiership footballers (or NBA for any American reader), as motivation for success. Everyone wanted to do better and succeed. But few could explain why they routinely worked 16-hour days, started at 6 am and committed themselves to always have work on their mind (the market never sleeps) other than the vague concept of success. It seemed as if, although they would never admit it, their definition of success meant simply having more than the person next to them. When I asked my colleagues for a dollar amount or specific title that would make them content or qualify them as successful, most would simply shrug their shoulders and grumble, or say “I don’t know.” Ironically, it was these exact people who seemed to be the most obsessed with achieving success (whatever that means), yet they were also the most unhappy and unsatisfied with their working lives.
This really got me thinking about what motivates us in the long term. It can’t be as simple as consumption or making more money than the person across from us, which we routinely confuse as the definition of success.
The most thoughtful colleagues I spoke with would often explain how they were motivated by the desire to support their children and families. Initially, this reasoning made sense, but the thing is, these colleagues had the resources to support their families many times over, yet they still subjected themselves to mind-boggling hours and a commitment to always be in the office.
Before too long it became clear to me, my colleagues weren’t sure of the answers to these questions (and arguably weren’t concerned with it either).
This insight meant I started to focus on answering these questions by observing not just what my colleagues said, but what actions they took on a regular basis. My reasoning being twofold. One, we are the sum of our everyday decisions, and two, people often say and do things that contradict each other. By noticing not only what people said there going to do, but observing if their actions backed up these words would show what was truly important in their lives.
One observation that came quickly to me, was when looking past the intellectual or professional sides of my colleagues, many of them were not fulfilled by their working lives. Many worked for their families, but never saw them. All wanted to be the best in their field, but seemingly didn’t really care about their work. The saying “actions speak louder than words” rang in my head repeatedly.
This got me thinking, that in a world that has never been more abundant, how is it that finding fulfilment in our working efforts is so difficult?
Ask yourself framing questions
To find an answer to my seemingly ever-growing list of questions, I thought about three framing parameters to help guide me on my quest:
1. What can we learn from other generations in grappling with the question of working fulfilment?
2. Where is working fulfilment highest today?
3. What have some of the most successful entrepreneurs in the world today done to find fulfilment?
My reasoning behind the first question was the past often repeats itself, circumstances are different, but the questions of the human experience recur. The reasoning for the second question was that we can learn from those who have what we seek (learning through emulation). And lastly, the third question came from my passion for understanding how people who have seemingly accomplished everything found their passion and joy in life.
It turned out the answer to the first question was to research the 20th-century world. Why the 20th-century world? The wealthiest in the 20th-century world are a proxy for today’s level of first world abundance (running water, toilets, heating, education, access to capital etc). Those born in this era had overcome many of the lower order needs of existence i.e. food, shelter etc (think Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs) and therefore the question of how to seek working fulfilment could be asked. I appreciate and caveat that in the 20th century only a few were able to ask themselves this question (and in many parts of today’s world this is still true).
To understand more about the 20th-century proxies, I studied many of the cultural beliefs at the time (i.e. religious and academic) and the leading figures. I immersed myself in the likes of Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Cadbury etc. And what I discovered, was a repeated pattern as they progressed in their lives. A career initially founded on competitiveness to succeed in business, later switched focus to how could they find creative ways to help others less fortunate? How could they contribute to a bigger picture beyond themselves?
The answer to the second question came from two different directions. Firstly, in creative careers; entrepreneurship, art, engineering etc. Those who brought creativity and unlimited possibilities seemed to be infinitely happier than those stuck in mundane repetitive jobs. This also made sense intuitively because if you ask anybody what they find fulfilling about their working life they will more often than not explain their creative tasks (and their hate of drudgery). The more creative their roles the more fulfilment.
And secondly, the place where fulfilment was the highest today came from closed communities like Hutterite villages. These individuals had no access to technology (or any modern object for that matter), yet they were some of the nicest and happiest people in the world. Their jobs consisted of farming and hard manual labour, yet they bore a smile on their face as they broke a sweat. These people felt fulfilled because of their strong connection to their community and the fact that their hard work was benefitting their loved ones. Their happiness was not contingent on financial success or the consumption of material goods. It came directly from the satisfaction of being with loved ones and helping their neighbours. These people seemed to have a strong sense of purpose that was greater than themselves.
Lastly, the answer to my third question happened to be all around me. Some of the biggest and most well-known companies in the world today (I’m looking at you Nike, Amazon, and Apple) started with an idea and a dream from a single person. The company and entrepreneur who intrigued me the most was Phil Knight, founder of Nike. When asked what life should be, Phil Knight told a precarious story. Before ever starting Nike, Knight was travelling the world after graduating from university and was contemplating the same questions in this post. What was the purpose of life? What did happiness actually mean? Sitting on a beach in Hawaii was great, but what did I actually want to do with my life? His answer to these questions came down to one word. Play. Life should be play. The feeling as a kid when jumping into a pile of leaves or chasing your best friends on the playground. These are the most carefree and happiest moments of most people’s lives, yet as we get older we seem to lose the ability to play. With this premise in mind, Phil Knight grew Nike to become a multi-billion-dollar corporation on the underlying principle that every day should involve play.
That’s right, a lifetime focused on creativity + helping others + play = fulfilment.
My findings led me to challenge my current way of thinking, why can’t you focus on success while creatively helping others? Many of you might think, well this is obvious duh! But I think many of us get consumed in the notion that in order for us to succeed someone else must fail (which I realize now could not be further from the truth). But this dynamic must be possible, and surely there must be others who believe in the construct that one can gain financial success through helping others. And that’s when I came across the story of George Peabody.
George Peabody, for those of you who don’t know, was a 20th-century entrepreneur who achieved significant business success through various financial ventures. Known as the “father of modern philanthropy” he was most famous for bringing affordable housing solutions to the masses, as well as leaving a trust legacy (The Peabody Trust) that over the last 150 years has improved the lives of hundreds of thousands of people in the UK.
To say I was blown away and inspired by this approach of capitalism was an understatement. Men and women like Peabody, Cadbury and others had managed to combine competitiveness, business success and creativity in the pursuit of helping others. I was sold on this philosophy! And little did I know, this philosophy was much more popular than I originally thought. A new world seemingly appeared out of thin air. I found initiatives like the Effective Altruism Movement (and many others like it) which focused on taking the philosophies of capitalism and leveraging them to improve the lives of everyone. What’s more, further investigation showed me these movements have been backed by some of the brightest minds of the century and was ground zero for some of the most altruistic successes in human history.
Where there’s a framework, there’s a way
The next step for me was to figure out what to do about what I had learned. By a stroke of fortune, I was well-versed as an entrepreneur from a young age, so the first step for me was to start on the entrepreneurial journey and build my first business. This ticked the box of creativity. Anyone who runs their own business will know that survival and success are often the outcomes of creative solutions to challenging problems. There are not many career choices more creative than entrepreneurship (perhaps artists, engineers etc).
But the thing is, entrepreneurship in real life isn’t at all how it looks in the movies. It will challenge you in ways you could never imagine. It takes time. And simply put, it is hard, hard, hard. I was acutely aware that business creation is a long-term endeavour. A long-term time horizon with a long-term payback period. I was ever too aware that 80% of businesses fail within the first 5 years and that real value creation is something that can’t be rushed or half-assed.
What then could I do? How could I intersect my working life with value creation and helping others? That’s when I considered that the best approach was to create a framework, starting firstly with the areas I’d most like to create value and help others. To put it plainly, I asked myself over many weeks what do I care about? For me, this was entrepreneurship (tech in particular), housing, education, health & disease, and human relationships.
(I would love to go into detail about these areas, but I think that would more appropriately fit into a separate blog post).
Accelerating returns
Once I had the framework, I set specific goals for each focus area, trying to think multi-generationally as the biggest goals always take significant time. Thinking to myself that as I progress, I’d seek to integrate my family, friends, and community into compounding these projects and efforts that would serve these multi-generational goals to help others all while creating value.
I realized there are many ways to do this, but capitalism (i.e., making people money or providing a service), is proven to be the best way in history to align interests through incentives and successfully bring varying groups together for long term goals (think shareholders, investors etc). And much like a sports team winning a championship or a business seeing success as they expand across countries, the ability of large groups or teams to achieve amazing things boils down to a unity of purpose.
I then plotted my focus areas and goals across a time horizon. Considering my goals had varying timelines needed to achieve the success I wanted for each, I set about prioritising my efforts. What I observed was that housing and entrepreneurship had the longest time horizon (due to capital and the time it takes to build a company from the ground up) so I decided to focus on these first. It also helped that success in providing housing to others and success in entrepreneurship, reinforces and accelerates my other focus areas.
A long road to go, but I found my compass
While I’m still very much on the journey of creating value and helping others, thinking through these questions in my 20’s helped me answer the question of why do I get out of bed every day?
Adopting the above framework as a mental model has served to make me happier, more energetic, optimistic, and dare I say excited about what life holds. You might say it helped me find a purpose I could focus my life on.
Now, I might look back years from today and read this article as self-grandiosity and a creative way to stroke my ego, or what would be my worst nightmare, unhelpful. But one thing I certainly am sure of is that the approach at least will be directionally correct. That we should all seek to focus our lives on what makes us fulfilled. For me this was a blend of creativity, helping others, and play.
By no means have I accomplished everything I have set out for, or found the secret sauce to happiness (news flash this secret sauce doesn’t exist), but having the above mental model that I can use as a lens to consider my choices (even when I get things wrong, which is far too often) helps immensely. This model allows me to ground myself in stressful times and acts as a metaphorical compass guiding me through times of uncertainty.
My intent in writing this post is that it helps you as well.
Bringing it all together
To recap, when you’re trying to figure out how to find more fulfilment in your working life, ask yourself framing questions. For me this was:
1. What does the past tell us (I’m a history geek, but I would encourage you to dive deeper into an area you are passionate about)?
2. Where are others finding fulfilment (analogical reasoning although it has many flaws, is often a good starting point for thought experiments)?
3. What have some of the most successful people in the world done to find fulfilment (for Nike founder Phil Knight it was ensuring every day felt like play)?
4. What goals are important to you in this world? For me, it was entrepreneurship, housing, health & disease, education, and human relationships.
5. What can you do right now to bring yourself closer to accomplishing these goals? I found aligning work, my time + modest capital in these goals = myself, to be the answer I was looking for.
6. What is the mental model you can deduct from your directional focus? Map these focus areas across a time horizon. Realizing how long some of my goals would take helped me focus on entrepreneurship and housing first, and then laterally on health & disease, education, and human relationships. Use this mental model as a lens to question how you spend your time and efforts. Do this, and I guarantee you will see your working and personal life become more fulfilled.
Finally, if you found this helpful, feel free to share it with those who might be seeking a way to find more fulfilment in their working lives. At the very least, this article is a nod to my educational goal of sharing insights that I observe in the hopes I might help others on similar journey’s.
Go well on your journey!
And p.s if you want to contribute ideas that might expand and improve the above, please do share. I am always happy to listen.