Mark Silver, who is both a long-time Sufi practitioner and an entrepreneur, makes the argument that instead of focusing on jobs or careers, it’s helpful to focus on what he calls your Jewel – that essence of what you bring to the world.

So long as you’re living from your Jewel, he says, there are any number of jobs or careers that you’ll find satisfying.

So what is this Jewel anyway?

In Silver’s definition, our Jewels are essential qualities. (For him, they’re essential qualities of the divine working through us, but we don’t need to go there in this conversation unless you want to.)

More importantly, our Jewel is something that emanates from us, that other people get from their interactions with us. It’s something central to who we are, rather than what we think or believe.

Here are a few qualities that might underlie your Jewel:

So how is this helpful again?

We tend to focus on jobs and careers because they’re obvious – we have job titles, we work for companies or institutions, we have responses when someone asks us at a party what we do.

But those jobs and careers have likely come out of something else, a felt sense of something that was meaningful to you.

One question I often ask people is what drew them to academia in the first place, because in the answer lies something very important: what this person wanted, deep down, from this experience.

Another, related, question I often ask people is how they want to change the world. (Yeah, I’m fun at parties.) Of all the injustices and problems in the world, what are the ones you can’t let go of, the ones that rub against you? (This doesn’t mean they have to be Mother Teresa-level problems.)

The meaning at the center

What you wanted to get from academia and the ways you want to change the world are both central to the ways you are your own unique person, related to but different from your family and your fellow academic travelers.

Understanding both of those will tell you something about where you might want to look next.

If you were drawn to academia because you wanted to explore the edges of our knowledge and you want desperately to cure illness, your next step is likely to be different from the person who was drawn to academia because they wanted to immerse themselves in conversation that they found interesting and who wants the world to be more beautiful.

So ask yourself these two questions to help get at the chewy center of your own life and self.

Why was I drawn to academia in the first place? And how do I want to remake the world?

As much as I believe in the power of a calling, in the idea that for each of us there is work that makes us sing, sometimes the idea of a calling can paralyze us.

How do I know this is really my calling? Maybe it’s just a passing whim. Can it possibly be important enough or meaningful enough or whatever to be a calling? I have no idea what my calling is and so I must stay here in misery until I do.

We humans, we’re so good at using our big, powerful brains to confuse the hell out of ourselves.

Sometimes we have to jump.

You probably don’t know this, but my own process of leaving academia looked something like this.

• Spend two years in a tenure-track job confused and miserable.
• Realize I want out.
• Spend two years miserable and convinced I can’t do anything else.
• Have a series of Big Ideas that go nowhere after teensy-tiny setbacks. (Oh, copyediting, I think I’m glad you and I never got together.)
• Take a deep breath and send out a couple of applications.
• Six weeks later, start a new job in a new city.

Sometimes I talk about that last bullet to make the point that you never know what will happen when you start applying, no matter what the averages or the medians or other people’s experiences are. Serendipity happens. I got crazy lucky.

But today I want to talk about a different aspect of those six weeks.

Six weeks took four years

It’s easy to look at the six weeks between when I sent in my applications and when I started a new job and think, holy hell, that was really short!

And in terms of packing up a household of two adults, two dogs, and two cats, finding new lodgings, putting a house on the market, resigning one job (and career!) and starting another, yes. Yes it was. It was so short as to be just this side of insane. (I really don’t recommend it.)

But that six weeks was a product of years of thinking. And dithering. And doubting. And wandering. And wondering. And hoping.

I brought all of that with me when I took the plunge to send in applications, and I brought all of that with me when I actually accepted that job and walked into my chair’s office to resign.

But if I hadn’t, finally, jumped, those four years would simply have been misery. They were something else because I held my breath and did something terrifying.

It worked

I learned a lot in that first job out of academia. One of the things I learned was that I don’t actually like being a fundraiser, but it was a reasonable hypothesis to start with. I jumped out of academia, and I spent three years learning all kinds of things before needing to jump again.

Only this time it was easier. I already knew I could switch fields and not die. I already knew I brought a whole host of skills and talents to the workplace. I already knew I could make it outside of the ivory tower.

But I didn’t know any of that until I jumped. And I wouldn’t have learned any of it if I hadn’t jumped.

In which I quote Finding Nemo

There’s a scene near the end of the movie Finding Nemo wherein Dory the amnesiac and Martin the panicking parent are in the mouth of a whale. They’re hanging on to some part of its tongue, and it’s telling them to let go. Martin yells to Dory, “How do you know something bad isn’t going to happen?”

She says, simply, “I don’t.” He lets go, and the whale shoots them out of its blowhole into Sydney Harbor – exactly where they wanted to go.

Sometimes, we need to have faith that our lives will unfold in beautiful and interesting and compelling ways, and that we can’t actually control this. Sometimes we need to actually jump into the unfamiliar possibility in order to get the next layer of understanding that gets us closer to our calling.

Sometimes the best way to find our calling is to try things.

So go ahead. Jump.

Take a leap into the unknown and trust that whatever happens next, you will be enough to deal with it and learn from and it and be that much closer to knowing what you actually do want.

And maybe, just maybe, you’ll find out that this new thing you doubted, it really is what you should be doing.

(And I’m really sorry if I put the Pointer Sisters in your head….)

Not sure how to jump? I’m teaching a free class on August 1 that covers common misunderstandings about academics we have to deal with, strategies for translating your skills into non-academic settings, and a 6-part system for finding a job you love. You can learn more and sign up here.