|
The End
of Your Career
By Peter Nguyen -
Apr 14, 2008
In a previous article
Your Ideal Career is About Your True
Self, we proposed a revolutionary doctrine according to which an ideal career must have four essential elements: a clear passion, a clear talent, a clear client and clear values.
In this article, we are making an equally bold statement: the end of your career is near.
In other words, your career -- as you know it -- is not sustainable and will be terminated soon.
But please don't panic. You're not losing much. Indeed, the concept of a "career" is so ill-defined, vague and ambiguous that it is no longer a good nor useful concept. So by abandoning the concept of a "career," you are only leaving behind much confusion.
Indeed, if you're going to spend 40+ years of your life doing something, you definitely deserve a better word to accurately capture the activity you engage in during the most productive hours of your week days.
I propose the following acronym to replace "career": C.L.E.A.N. It stands for Creative Lifetime
Endeavor to Achieve Nirvana.
However, since "career" is such a familiar word in our culture, let's use "neo-career" to refer to a person's ideal career.
CREATIVE
Your neo-career will be creative because human needs are infinitely expanding, and also because machines and computers will be taking care of repetitive tasks. Artificial intelligence and expert systems are already replacing many knowledge workers in many industries such as accounting, financial analysis and engineering.
LIFETIME
Your neo-career will last your entire lifetime since it's something you love to do. In other words, you will not have to retire at age 65 nor would you want to retire. You enjoy your work too much.
ENDEAVOR
Your neo-career is about work that you enjoy doing, so you would naturally engage in sincere and serious effort to continually become better at what you do.
ACHIEVE
Your neo-career is a path of personal progress and self-improvement, and you decide what performance indicators to monitor. In other words, your neo-work is not about doing what you have to do, but what you want to do in order to feel that you are moving forward.
NIRVANA
Finally, your neo-career is about seeking and striving for Nirvana, which is defined as "an ideal condition of rest, harmony, stability, or joy."
"CLEAN" is a good acronym to describe the ideal career because it hints at the idea of starting with a clean slate.
This doesn't mean you can't reuse the skills and competencies that you've acquired in a previous career. It simply means that you start designing an ideal career on a blank sheet of paper and are giving free reign to your imagination.
In a future article, we'll explain how you can design your ideal career by using the four axes representing your talent, your passion, your client and your
values.
Related
articles & useful links
Post
your comment
|