Winning - Jack Welch [92]
Suddenly, the senior was filled with energy. “I did—I’m always drawing cars,” he said. “My dorm room is covered with posters and paintings of cars—I subscribe to every car magazine! I’ve been obsessed with cars since I was five years old. My whole life, I’ve wanted to be a car designer. That’s why I’m always going to car shows and NASCAR races. I went to Indianapolis last year—I drove there!”
The manager shook her head in disbelief.
“You’ve got to go work in Detroit,” she said. “Why in the world are you thinking about consulting or banking?”
The senior deflated as quickly as he had come to life. “My dad says the car business is not what I went to Harvard for.”
For the next few minutes, the manager tried to change the student’s mind, but she quickly realized she was getting drawn into family dynamics that were none of her business. She was not surprised a few months later when she bumped into the young man’s father and he proudly told her that his son was working eighty-hour weeks at a Wall Street firm.
Look, over the course of our careers, we all take jobs to meet the needs or dreams of other people—parents, spouses, teachers, or classmates.
That’s not necessarily wrong, unless you don’t realize you’re doing it. Because working to fulfill someone else’s needs or dreams almost always catches up with you. I know someone who literally became a doctor because his entire childhood his mother—a Polish immigrant who loved the American Dream—introduced him by saying, “And here’s my doctor!” He didn’t hate the profession, but you’ve never met anyone more eager to retire.
Similarly, there are countless stories of people who take jobs because their spouses want them to travel less. Then what invariably happens is that the compromising partner loses out on a promotion because of curtailed mobility. Sometimes, blame gets flung everywhere. Other times, it just sits there and simmers.
The hard reality is that there is no foolproof way out of the ownership bind. Especially as you get older, life and relationships can be complicated. Very few people have the total freedom and independence to take a job just for themselves. There are tuitions to pay, spouses with their own careers, and yes, inner voices saying what you should do with your life, even when you’re long past being a college senior.*
That is why the only real defense against job ownership back-firing is to be explicit with yourself about the person (or people) for whom you are taking your job.
Over the course of your career, your Detroit will surely call you at one point or another. If you can go, that’s great. If you can’t, make peace with the reasons why.
WORK CONTENT
This signal comes last in our chart, but it could just as easily come first.
Every job has bad days or rough periods, and yes, there will be times when you work mainly to make ends meet. But in the very best job scenario, you love the work—at least something about it. It just excites you. The customers, the travel, the camaraderie at the Tuesday morning sales meeting, whatever—something about the job makes you want to come back day after day. Sometimes it is the sheer challenge of the job that turns your crank.
Take the case of Joel Klein, the chancellor of the New York City Department of Education. (I’ve gotten to know Joel through my work with the school system’s Leadership Academy for new principals.) It is no exaggeration to say that Joel could have any number of prestigious, high-paying jobs as a corporate general counsel or CEO. As the assistant attorney general in charge of the U.S. Department of Justice Antitrust Division in the 1990s, he took on Microsoft in a highly publicized battle, and later was chairman and CEO of the U.S. division of Bertelsmann, the global media company.*
There is no glamour and very limited glory in the school reform job Joel accepted in 2002. It goes without saying he took a massive pay cut to become chancellor, but in taking the job, Joel also agreed to deconstruct an insanely bureaucratic system with about a million students in more