Purpose and What to Do If You Aren't Pursuing Your's Professionally

For context, I currently work as a Sales Operations Manager at Klarna, which is a Buy Now Pay Later financial technology company based out of Sweden. I work remotely, doing mostly Excel Data Manipulation, Salesforce Reporting, Deck Building, and a hodgepodge of other tasks. No this is not my calling as a human being, but I am paid well for my time and legitimately like most of my coworkers and most of the work that I do. Please keep in mind while reading this post that I feel extremely lucky to be in the place that I'm in and in no way feel that I have deserved every good break that I've received.

Anyway, on with the post.

My Path Through College and Into the "Real" World

I imagine my path through college and into the "real" world was similar to many college kids. I took a major in Industrial and Systems Engineering because I was decent at Math in High School and I thought that having "Engineer" on my diploma would preserve post-grad optionality. While thinking about jobs after school, I was most concerned with finding something that paid well and didn't limit what I could do once I finally figured out what that was. Once again, seeking optionality.

Through what I can only imagine being copious amounts of good luck, I got an internship and then a job at PwC in New York which I readily accepted without seeking other offers as it meant that I got to skip recruiting during my last year of relative freedom.

In so many words I'm saying that I was not prescriptive about where I started my career and I imagine that many of my graduating class were similarly unmindful. I was seeking a "Good job" that "Paid well" and "Kept my options open.” When I was planning on figuring out what I wanted to do with my professional career I'm not sure, but I was on the path to be able to jump to my perfect job at any given moment… assuming that I ever found it.

The Trouble with Optionality

The Trouble with Optionality is a fantastic piece in the Harvard Crimson Newspaper that illustrates the downsides of the "Option Preserving Path" that many of us take upon graduating college. The reality being, that in choosing optionality we aren't actually getting any closer to doing something meaningful to us, only taking the safe path at every available opportunity.

This individual [the option seeking] has merely acquired stamps of approval and has acquired safety net upon safety net. These safety nets don’t end up enabling big risk-taking—individuals just become habitual acquirers of safety nets.

I have yet to take an actual risk in my professional life. PwC as a first place to work was unanimously celebrated as a "smart" decision. Joining Wework when I did may seem like a risky (stupid?) move in hindsight, but at the time it was making news for all the right reasons and seemed like a Rocketship destined for glory. Even now, Klarna has all the makings of a massive success from everything that anyone can tell. All the while I have stayed in an Operations role with the option to move into something else if it comes my way by virtue of being "wide" enough to lateral into a new role if it appears enticing.

All of this is to say that I'm a perfect example of the optionality-seeking, motivated-yet-passionless white-collar millennial found in many large corporations in 2021. This is fine, but also brings me to discuss an idea that was misdefined as a Japanese term, but one that I find useful as a guiding framework for life satisfaction all the same. That term (improperly labeled "Ikigai") is Purpose.

What is a Purpose in life?

This purpose diagram above is an excellent framework to apply to seek true meaning in the work that you do. In an ideal world, we would each be following our dreams and chasing our individual callings and because everyone is a unique snowflake, our collective multitude of diverse interests would somehow meet all of the world's needs. I find that idea incredibly hard to believe. As quoted once in Caddyshack and then a million times by my dad, "The world needs ditch diggers too."

As you may have guessed by the title of this post, I am not about to outline how to find your purpose in life and fulfill yourself with your professional career. I agree that would make for a great post, but since I haven't done that myself, I would feel like a phony telling you all how to make it happen. So instead of that, I'm going to use my own personal experience to detail how to make the most of a professional life that is resoundingly not your purpose.

A Quick Caveat

Let's start by recognizing that neither do I have everything figured out nor do I pretend to have everything figured out. However, my personal life enjoyment is high and I've spent a good amount of time talking to people about how they are approaching this "Adulthood" thing, so I feel that I have a reasonably informed opinion on the matter. If you feel that I don't, please, blast me in the comments.

Anyway, the below framework is the one that I've used to maximize my earnings and chance at an early retirement while also balancing a life that I have and will continue to enjoy thoroughly during my relative youth (read: mid-twenties).

Steps to Enjoying Your Life and Working Toward Your Purpose

1. Don't work somewhere you hate with people you hate. Just don't do it. "Work" is going to be a large part of your life and if you're miserable there, it's going to be a lot harder to be happy. So skip out on anything that actively makes you miserable.

2. Reduce your hours to the minimum viable number. Keep yourself off of the "I just need to get to the next promotion and then I'll slow down" treadmill. Once in it, that thought pattern is particularly difficult to get off of so nip it in the bud before it even gets going. Work enough to do well but don't sink so much of your life into work that it eats into the rest of the time you have.

3. Keep yourself off of the monetary hedonic treadmill. In other words, spend what you need to spend and strive to keep that number constant despite an increasing income. It's tempting to buy that shiny new toy when you get a promotion, but on the whole, you will be better off the more financially free you are. The less you spend as your income goes up, the closer you are to becoming financially free.

4. If you're doing all of the above you should be in good shape. At this point, the next step would be to find a job that pays well with responsibilities that feel like solving a crossword puzzle. Crossword puzzles are engaging, fun, stimulating, and require some thought, but once they are solved the solver moves on with their life without further thought. This is the level of engagement I have sought with work and feel that I mostly have found it in my current role. I truly enjoy solving the problems I get to work on at Klarna while at the same time, I don't lose sleep over them and I certainly don't have stress dreams about them. This puts me in the headspace more apt for enjoying the hours I am working and those that I am off doing other things. Go find that, if you can.

5. The final step, and arguably the most important one, is to spend your free time and free cash figuring out what you really like to do. Steps #1-4 set you up well to have a nice life and retire with a big bank account but that’s not everything. Without spending the time and effort to figure out the stuff you truly enjoy, like many from generations above us, you'll hit retirement and have no identity and no idea what to do with yourself. If you follow step 2 and have reduced your hours to a reasonable amount, you should have sufficient time (and energy) to sink into trying as many activities as you can to find something that engages you on a deeper level. This would be something that you would be happy to do if all of a sudden you no longer had 40+ hours a week of paid obligations.

Whether intentionally or unintentionally I have been organizing my life around the above five points and it's been going pretty well so far. By going pretty well I mean that I have a reasonably well-paying job that doesn't require more than 50 hours a week and isn't unnecessarily stressful. It’s also a job that I find interesting and I have sufficient work to keep me busy and learning but not so much that I find it eating away at the rest of my life. I have the freedom to travel when I want to and can take time off as I like. I've got some hobbies (writing, surfing, cooking/eating, live music, etc..) through which I have met some of my favorite people on the planet and that I enjoy enough such that if money were no issue, I would have a decently full life no longer working. I am not changing the world by any stretch and there are certainly people who would cite me for a lack of ambition, but I'm overwhelmingly happy so far in my 27 years, and I don't plan on changing anything major quite yet.

Is that it?

Out of the scope of this post is a response to the question "Dude, that is so lame, don't you want to be doing more with your life?" Which, don't you worry, is something that I have thought quite a lot about. My short answer is because I’ve structured my life in the above manner, I have time to try out some more ambitious, purpose-like activities and have the means to jump to one of those if a full-time well-paying opportunity presents itself. The long answer is that yes, it would be cool to do something more meaningful with my professional life, I just haven’t found something that would scratch that itch and let me live the life I’ve come to enjoy. Not yet at least.