The other day I was reading a business book that, while terribly written and full of wrongheaded analogies, nevertheless had a compelling central idea: that if we find our own personal WHY, the goal/dream/philosophy/mission that motivates us and lights us up, the HOW and the WHAT flow from it and create goodness. Starting from the WHAT, on the other hand, is how people end up with that tenure-track position or tenure or a corner office or whatever and then look around and think, oh shit, what have I done.

It made me think about the calling vs. career vs. job thing that always comes into the question about what to do after you leave academia.

People have, quite rightly, criticized the discourse around calling because, especially in its too-facile versions, it acts as if practical, material, logistical concerns shouldn’t be an issue. “Do what you love and the money will follow” is incredibly irresponsible unless you have a trust fund or a supportive partner whose job can cover the bills and then some.

My clients will tell you I’m the first person to support their getting a job, any job, because the rent needs to be paid and the groceries need to be bought. All work is dignified by virtue of its supporting your life.

Some people also just need a period of time when they’re clocking in and out, paying the bills, and not worrying too much about their career. That’s totally fair. I needed a good many years to recover from academia before I could think about what I really wanted to do and how that might happen.

But I do believe that many of us have a calling. The problem (one of them, anyway) is that we confuse a calling with a career.

If you’re passionate about, for example, bringing beauty into the world, there are so many ways that can happen. You could be an artist, you could sell craft supplies, you could teach painting on cruises, you could own a gallery, you could learn to make clothes.

If you’re passionate about the power of literature to illuminate the world, you could teach literature, you could write books, you could sell books, you could be a literary agent, you could review books, you could write a blog about books.

Any given calling is going to have so many ways it might be expressed. But in academia, calling and career get conflated. The monastic roots of the modern university still show up in the idea that academia is so valuable, so venerated, so precious, that you should put up with anything to keep it.

And for people who are able to forge successful academic careers, and whose callings align with those careers, well, power to them.

But not all of us are that lucky. I got a tenure track job and realized I hated the career, that it didn’t actually express my calling at all. Some people get shut out of the career in various ways at various times. Some people get worn down over time by the increasing demands of higher ed. Some people encounter structural barriers to either the career or success in the career by virtue of who they are.

If you conflate calling and career, this is devastating. If they’re the same thing, then a career not working out calls everything you are into question.

But if you can tease your calling out of this conflation, if you can connect with the values or passion or inspiration or motivation that led you to academia in the first place, then you can think creatively about how to both live your calling and support your life financially.

Maybe you find a way to make your calling pay the bills. Maybe you have a job that pays the bills and gives you the freedom – temporal, financial, energetic – to pursue your calling in other domains.

And the form it takes will probably change over time. But so long as you’re making ends meet and you’re getting to live the things that are important to you – which is what your calling actually is – then you’re living a great life.

So despite all of the ways it gets used badly, I still think calling is important, because calling is all about you: who you are in the world and what makes your heart sing. But just because it’s important, that doesn’t mean you need to deal with it right now if what you need is a job or time to heal or both. It’ll still be there when you’re interested in it again.

Have you ever sat down to write something – a letter, an email, an article, a dissertation – and stared blankly at the empty screen, only to end up playing endless games of Solitaire?

No? Just me, then.

Back when I taught writing – and frankly, now when I teach writing – the problem of the blank page was always key to helping people move forward into fluency.

That blank page, it comes with a lot of expectation. When it’s blank, we can imagine the perfectly chosen words we’ll fill it with, the perfect effect it’ll have on the reader. Since nothing we write will stack up against that perfection, we freeze.

But perfectionism wasn’t the only problem. No, the other problem was the panic that came out of not knowing the subject well enough to begin to talk about it. Where do you start? What do you want to say, other than aaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrgh?

Both of these things are solvable. The first requires us to start somewhere other than the beginning. The second requires us to learn more and thus define our goals a little better.

As you might have guessed, though, I’m not really talking about writing here. If you’re considering leaving academia, you’re probably facing the career equivalent of the blank page.

The perfectionism of the dream job

As you all know, I’m a big fan of the idea of a calling, of finding a job and a career that aligns with your personal mission, your personality, your needs.

But sometimes the idea of alignment gets lost and the aforementioned perfectionism takes over. If we can’t find a job with the perfect company doing the perfect set of things in the perfect location for the perfect salary, well, let’s not even bother. Since this lovely world of ours is not perfect, nor made in our deal forms, finding a job that is perfect in every particular is probably asking a bit much.

Sometimes, the perfectionism takes the form of not wanting to move forward until we are absolutely, 100%, completely sure that whatever we’re stepping in to will be the perfect career for us and one we’ll find fulfillment in for the rest of our lives. Since change is a fundamental quality of the world, we can never be 100% certain, and asking for it stops us in our tracks.

Not knowing enough

The other, related, problem is not knowing enough about a job or a career to have confidence moving towards it.

The truth is that we often don’t know much about what any given job entails unless we’ve done it ourselves.

Think about it. You’ve probably got parents and siblings and partners and friends who have jobs outside of academia. If you had to sit down and explain what each of them does every day at the office – what tasks, what meetings, with whom, to accomplish what, etc. – could you do it?

Probably not. And that’s not because you’re not paying attention. It’s because most of the time, we don’t share the minutia of our workdays with people who aren’t working alongside us. (That being said, you can probably think of plenty of people who are working alongside you for whom you couldn’t explain what they do all day.)

Instead of real knowledge, we have assumptions. Projections. Expectations. And some of them might even be true. But we’re in the position of not even knowing what we don’t know, and that’s not a good space from which to move towards a new career.

These are solvable

Just like in writing, the problem of the blank page is solvable.

Instead of looking for perfection, we articulate our actual needs, preferences, and desires. We figure out what’s really, absolutely necessary for us to do good work. We figure out what fits the category of nice but not essential.

Instead of assuming what happens in a given job, we find people who are doing that job, and we ask. We get curious. We find out.

When we know what we really need, and we know what jobs really entail, it’s a lot easier to see where things slot together and where things get a little uncomfortable.

And when we know what our real options look like, we can make informed, confident choices, choices that are based on real knowledge while understanding that things – including we – change.

Helping you articulate your needs and investigate your options is exactly what we do in Choosing Your Career Consciously, a course designed to help you figure out what else you could – or would want to – do. A new round begins next week. Click here to learn more.

For a while I was spending quite a lot of time watching Friday Night Lights on Netflix. Since I basically hate football (much to the chagrin of my out-laws and my Big Ten classmates/colleagues), this was surprising even to me.

It’s a great show in a number of ways, but the thing I kept coming back to was this. There’s so much more that goes in to coaching football than I had even considered.

Watching past games. Analyzing player performance in practice. Conferring with other coaches. Negotiating for funding and schedules and what have you. Counseling and disciplining and hollering. Not to mention the actual breaking down of skills and forming coherent and effective regimens to improve players’ skills.

And plenty more that wasn’t dramatic enough to make it on to the show.

This would be why people think academics only work 6 hours a week

That annoying conversation you have with people who think academia is a dream job because, you know, it doesn’t actually involve much working? That’s because they don’t know what goes in to an academic job.

They only see the classroom time of teaching. They don’t see the prep. They don’t see the grading. They don’t see the advising.

They most certainly don’t see the research, or the writing, or the conference attendance. They don’t see the committee meetings, or the paperwork, or the myriad other things that are part and parcel of being an academic.

Oh, and that other annoying conversation you have, where someone says something like, oh, you live right down the street from Big Prestigious University, you should get a job there? And you’re trying not to laugh in their face or smack them, because if it were that easy do you think I’d still be looking and eating ramen? That’s also because they don’t know how this career works.

How many other careers don’t you understand?

When we think about what else we could do, we’re not making those judgments based on the actual facts of what that career involves. We’re usually making those judgments based on the same level of information I had (okay, probably still have) about coaching football or your annoying relative has about academic careers.

In other words, we have no idea what that job really looks like. In order to figure out what we might want to do, then, we have to figure out what those jobs really entail. What does an average day look like? What kinds of tasks would you be doing? What does it look like in different organizations? What do qualifications for that job look like?

There’s a lot to find out. But until you recognize just how much you don’t know about something, you’re apt to dismiss it based on Hollywood or assumption or rumor or your cousin’s best friends boyfriend’s sister.

It goes both ways

Just like you don’t know what a project management career looks like, or a training and development job, or a grant writing job, the people you’d want to hire you for the Next Right Thing also don’t know what you’ve actually done in academia.

They don’t know about the ways you’ve developed project management skills. Or event planning skills. Or communication skills. Or public speaking skills. Or whatever.

The harder part is this: Many academics don’t know that they have these skills either. And until you really understand what you bring to the table, it’s hard to argue that someone should give you a chance doing something new, something your research suggests you might like.

In other words, it’s in your best interests to both actually ask some questions about careers you might want to pursue, and explore your own history and experience to figure out what you bring to the table. Putting them together will give you a much better chance of landing something you’d actually like.

Want some help figuring out what careers to research and how to do it? Not sure what you bring to the table? Check out Choosing Your Career Consciously, a course designed to help you figure out what else you could – or would want to – do. The next session starts March 7, and there’s an early-bird discount through February 29.