Career Choices are Tough

Laura Berman Fortgang is a nationally renowned speaker, life coach, and career strategist. She is also the author of various books with her most popular being Now What? 90 Days to a New Life Direction. Her book shares the processes she has used to aid hundreds of clients on their journeys to making major changes in their lives. She has even been featured on The Oprah Winfrey show and Good Morning America.

Fortgang titled her TED talk “Find your dream job without ever looking at your resume.” She opens her talk by addressing the shared experience of many Americans hating their jobs. It is typical for people to work jobs they dislike because of the pay and benefits. There is also the fear of leaving a secure position.

However, she wants to help us find passion in our careers. Fortgang acknowledges that people want to be engaged in their job and have mastery over the subject matter. The problem is, people are too quick to reference their personal resume and credentials. It’s in our nature to base our entire identity from these credentials which makes it difficult to try a new career.

Fortgang believes there is solution in career satisfaction not coming from the job directly, but instead in who you get to be while doing your job. This approach rebrands our typical perception of identity. We tend to base our worth off the work we do and not our humanity.

The biggest takeaway from her TED talk is from her closing statement. Fortgang says, “I want to live in a world where people stop competing at work, because they realize they are so unique that there’s nobody to compete with.” This is indefinitely our greatest downfall in work environments. People are always competing with one another when we should be helping each other along. If we were able to lead selflessly and put other people’s wellbeing on the same level as ours, the world would be a much healthier place.

I am guilty of this and compare myself to other people often, but this action is fundamentally flawed. Just like Fortgang says, we are all so different that we simply cannot compare ourselves to one another. We need to embrace these personal idiosyncrasies and come together. Adopting this viewpoint will undoubtedly improve levels of wellbeing. It’s not easy at all, especially not in college surrounded by thousands of people, but we must do our best.