So What the Heck is a Career Anyway? Part III: "I Seem to Be a Verb"

I asked career expert, Anthony Spadafore, renowned career coach and co-author of  Now What?  A Young Person's Guide to Choosing the Perfect Career**, about how his view of careers has changed over the years.  He has provided an insightful point of view that I want to share with you:

When I was twenty-something I thought of my career as a sexy title.  I thought it would be cool to be an electrical engineer, I wanted prestige and social status.  The driving motive for me was really all about being liked and proving myself to others.  I wanted to get the girl of my dreams and so I figured that a BSEE [Bachelor of Science, Electrical Engineering] would do the trick.  In essence, I thought of my career as a noun . . . it was something to ‘have’ to show off  . . . sort of like peacock feathers. 

Looking back on it, I was just like a zombie in The Walking Dead, but with good Italian clothes.  I had a condo and a nice car and much of my free time in the gym sculpting my abs, so I was a pretty much a well-toned, clueless schmuck.  I was clueless about what I really wanted to do and the girls I dated all dumped me because I was just a shell of a dude with no substance.

Around 28 years old I hit a wall, I was going to this job that I hated and didn’t care enough about it to learn and stay on top of my field.   I was stumped and felt totally trapped.  I got exactly what I thought I wanted, yet I was miserable and could barely drag myself out of bed.  I got physically and psychologically sick and had sort of a meltdown.  I couldn’t fake an interest in my field anymore.

 All this shifted when I began to think of my career as something to ‘be’ versus something to ‘have’.  I came across this great quote by the inventor, R. Buckminster Fuller, that inspired me:

 “I live on Earth at present, and I don't know what I am. I know that I am not a category.

  I am not a thing — a noun.  

I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process — an integral function of Universe.”

Nowadays, I think of a career as a way to express my natural abilities and just be what I am.   I seem to be a verb, and so my sense of a career is to do what I do best.  I love guiding people, popular science writing, and coming up with novel ideas.  Since a verb plays an integral function in service to the sentence it lives in, I had to come up with how my abilities could serve the immediate world around me.  I discovered that I wasn’t the only one stuck on figuring out their career direction.  So, I’m a verb on a career to solve a problem I really care about.  I think that’s a fun way to live, to find where your talents intersect with what other people have a need for and are willing to pay a little something for it.

Thank you, Anthony, for your insight!

**http://www.amazon.com/Now-What-Persons-Choosing-Perfect/dp/0743266307/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1294539793&sr=8-1