What's real vs what's true

I think the success secret, when it comes to one's work life, is to follow a process comprising four distinct phases:

1. Explore
2. Decide
3. Commit
4. Perform

Most young people, upon graduation, don't get the opportunity to explore career options. Even with cyber-mentoring services like Academos.qc.ca (which is excellent, by the way, and I'm a mentor there to a couple of kids), young people don't get a chance to fully explore career options.

Rather, what happens is that a new college or university graduate would jump on the first job opportunity whose requirements match his/her qualifications and skills.

In other words, for the overwhelming majority of people, we start our career at Step 4 (Perform). We skipped Steps 1 to 3.

We never really explored our career options, therefore we were never really in a position to decide truly. Because we never truly decided, we never really committed to any career decision.

As a result, even after a few years of job experience, we end up floating from one job to another (in the U.S., 2.6 million people quit their job every month). We can't really blame Monster.com for all that job hopping. It's just the reflection of a modern plight: lack of clarity about one's true purpose and authentic vocation.

Einstein put it this way: "We have profusion of means, but confusion of ends."

In other words, there are jobs everywhere. It's not that hard to find a job. What IS hard is finding one's true purpose in life.

You might ask, "What's the difference between a job and a career?"

A job has more to do with reality, whereas a career (an authentic career) has to do with truth.

Reality is what is out there. It's, well, real. You can touch it, feel it, kick it.

Truth is quite different. It's about your purpose, your passion and your talent.

Let me illustrate. You can have a REAL career yet your career can be quite UNTRUE. For example, you can be a highly paid executive who owns two houses, three cars and has a lot of money stashed somewhere in Cayman Islands. Yet, all your material possessions and your daily work may have little to do with who you truly are. In that sense, your career is NOT TRUE, although it may be very real (at least to other people who look at you from outside).

What's real is easy to measure, what's true can only be felt.

The thing that is most real for people, when it comes to a job, is the salary they get.

However, as we stress in our Career Brainstorming workshops, there are three other critical elements: your talent, your passion and your sense of purpose.

Without these three dimensions, a career is "flat." It has no excitement, it is merely an economic tool, and one's life becomes a financially motivated routine without heart or soul. We are dead before we die. We go through life like a drifting piece of wood.

But why, you might ask, are people so lost today when it comes to their career?

The answer, I think, is because the industrial revolution forced us to pay attention to what is real, not what is true.

More coming up.