1. In your own words, I would like you to define what success means to you. Based on our in-class discussion, please articulate the three main ingredients you believe will contribute to the feeling that your career is fueling professional and personal success. For example, making a positive difference in the lives of others, making a lot of money, being respected by your family and colleagues, being known as a leader in your field, etc. Then, discuss how you could use these definitions of success in assessing potential career paths.
For example, a professional role where you would be asked to represent the company at meetings and conferences would contribute to feeling like you are a leader in your field. There are many different types of success and an infinite amount of ways to achieve those successes. For me success comes down to obtaining happiness in all aspects of my life. To fully to do this I need to find a career that engages and challenges me but that doesn’t come home from work with me everyday.
Furthermore, it would be ideal if this career provided enough pay for me to feel financially secure, as well as, enabling me to own a nice home in a nice area, travel, put my kids through college, and everything along those lines. So success doesn’t necessarily have to make me a millionaire just make it so money is never something that me or my family have to worry about. Another huge aspect of success for me is my health. As someone who has been an athlete my whole life, one of my greatest fears would be becoming unathletic or unable to play soccer which is my greatest passion in life.
For me to be able to have enough free time to go to the gym, run, and play soccer is definitely a must for me as I know I would be miserable if I were ever to go out of shape because I am too busy with work. Additionally to just being able to still be active, staying healthy is significant to me because I would not like to have to face all the hardships that being unhealthy provides you with. The various types of diseases and ailments of people who lead an unhealthy life would definitely prevent me from achieving my definition of success.
The last and most important ingredient to success for me is being happy with all the personal relationships in my life. This includes me eventually becoming happy married to the women of my dreams and having kids that I can always be there for and play with everyday. I have always placed the most value in having good personal relationships with people and always being someone who someone else is better off just because they knew me. Being successful in a career for me then means having plenty of time to nurture these relationships.
To use this definition of success that I have to find a career path that is right for me would mean that I would have to research into different jobs where there is plenty of time away from work and challenging work at work. To do this research the most beneficial resource would most likely be informational interviews of people in different careers that I am interested in to hear about their personal experiences in their careers. 2. Articulate the difference between your definition of success and your work values. How are they different?
Please refer to the PPT on “Defining Success” for specific details. Remember, in class we talked about Meaningful Work, Leisure Time, Money, Security, Autonomy, etc. , as work values. Because work values speak to the right fit, discuss how you might use this knowledge to find the “right fit. ” For example, if having a lot of leisure time is your number one work value, a job where technology offers you greater freedom for how you plan your work day would likely represent a good fit for that specific value.
The difference between my definition of success and my work alues are the specific parts of my job or career that help me achieve success. For example, having to do engaging, challenging work at my office but getting to leave all of my work in the office and not having to take it home with me is an extremely important work value to me. This attributes to me feeling as though I am successful because it means that even though I love my work, I have plenty of time and energy outside of it to focus on the things that are much more important to me, such as my family and friends.
Another example is, being well paid which allows me to enjoy financial security and all the benefits that having money has. This leads to my success by making it so I never have to lose sleep over not being able to pay the bills or struggling to provide enough food for my family. It also allows me to appreciate such benefits such as a nice home in a good area with great schools for my kids, the ability to travel, being able to go to concerts on a semi regular basis, and much more. These work values make sure that which ever job or career I end up having is a right fit for me.
Meaning that the career path I do take is not in conflict with the path to my own success that I taking. So even if not every work value holds true to every value of success I have, at least it helps contribute to making my career the right fit, which leads to me achieving success. 5. Based on the exercise I asked you to do outside of class, where you chronicled your daily life, identify three talents that you can connect to this experience. For example, you completed a homework assignment as you answered emails and made a dinner reservation on the phone.
This would indicate that you are someone with a talent for multi-tasking. Think about the list of words that I associated with this exercise on Blackboard. The key here is to connect the dots between how you live your life and talents that you can utilize as abilities in the world of work. Based on me chronicling my life outside of class to come up with talents that I have that could be used as skills in a career, 1 concluded that my talents for being kind, driven and charismatic would be able to help me shape my career.
One of the aspects of my personality and talents that I have that I am most proud of and is most important to me is my talent for kindness. Though I did not think that this would really be able to contribute to my professional life at all, after doing the activity in class I have realized how many benefits kindness could have in a work place. For example, if I were to ever become a manager of a group of people, large or small, being kind and approachable, as well as, someone who people want to actually work for is hugely beneficial.
Just from my own personal experience I know I would much rather work for someone who was nice to me rather than mean. The fact that I am driven will definitely be something that helps my career in a significant way because I know I will not be satisfied until I am achieving what I know I can achieve. What I mean by this is that I know I will not be happy working under someone who I feel I could do a better job than so I will not stop working as hard as possible until I get promoted into a more suitable role for me. This is how I have always lived my life especially with things I am passionate about such as soccer.
During my freshman year I did not end up making my school JV team so I continued to work as hard as possible until I helped lead my school’s varsity team to an undefeated season my senior year, earning the honor of being named to the league’s first team all-league team. If working a job I am passionate about I know I can bring the same mentality because my talent for being driven. Thirdly, my talent for being charismatic and someone who people enjoy and want to talk to will be valuable to my career for many reasons.
One such reason is that because I will be choosing a career path which know that interacting with people is a key part of the job, my natural charisma will help me be one of the best at whatever job Tam doing. Another reason is, if I do end up managing a group of people like how I was talking about earlier, charisma is one of the most important talents that a leader can have. People will always be more responsive to the instructions of a charismatic leader than one who isn’t charismatic. Even though there are many more talents that will help me along my career path, kindness, being driven and my charisma are three of the most important ones.
