I’m reading random back issues of the New Yorker, and I happened to come across a profile of Gil Scott-Heron, who passed away last week. One of the things he said stuck in my mind.

“All the dreams you show up in are not your own.”

He’s commenting on the ways that we sometimes show up as bit players in other people’s dreams, but it got me thinking.

Even as we show up in other people’s dreams, it’s important that the dreams we’re living out are our own.

Other people’s dreams

Sometimes our dreams for ourselves get taken over by other people. I see this sometimes in the people I talk to who are struggling with academia.

Maybe academia started out as your own dream, but somewhere along the way it got taken over by someone else’s dream – your advisor, whose dream for you is an R1, when your dream for yourself was a regional teaching university; your institution, whose dream for you is the tenure-track when yours was just graduate school.

Living out someone else’s dream can lead to focusing on something you don’t much care about, delaying family decisions you desperately want because someone won’t approve, making choices based on someone else’s values instead of your own.

Whose dream are you living right now?

Live your own life

What is your dream for yourself? When you imagine your perfect life, what does it look like?

When you imagine that perfect life, do you experience yourself yearning for it? If not, figure out whose dream it is, then imagine your perfect life again. What does it look like now?

We’ll never be satisfied by living someone else’s dreams. That’s not to say we never compromise or work in partnership with others, especially our partners, because of course we do. But that’s about a larger dream we’re all in, not giving over ours for someone else’s.

All the dreams you show up in are not your own. But make sure the ones you’re aiming for are yours.

Not sure what your dreams are? Join me and Jo VanEvery in a six-week class designed to help you figure out what your possibilities are. Click here to find out more.

The other day at the library, I picked up a book called The Right Words at the Right Time. It’s small essay after small essay by famous people about the words that changed their lives. I found most of them unmoving (sometimes you have to be the person in question for the words to land right), but then I came across Diane Sawyer’s piece.

She’s describing a time when she was young and aimless, and her father asked her three questions: “What is it you love? Where is the most adventurous place you could do it? And are you certain it will serve other people?”

They’re a pretty good framework for thinking about your calling.

What is it you love?

We’ve talked about this one a lot, but it really is central. Doing what you love gives you energy, it doesn’t take it. Doing what you love gives you the impetus to work and grow and learn, because it isn’t a chore.

The biggest misconception I see with “do what you love” is the tendency to associate “what you love” with a job instead of with activities. We love talking to people. We love solving problems. We love organizing things. We love helping people who have been through shit come out the other side. We love teaching. We may love a job that incorporates all the right elements, but while the job may not be transferrable, the elements always are.

Where is the most adventurous place you could do it?

We have a tendency to think small. It’s easier to think about careers in the usual way.

But what if you could join the activities and skills that light you up with a context that blows you away? What feels adventurous to you?

For some people, adventure is about travel. They’ll teach English in a foreign country, sign on to an NGO, or hightail it to Thailand because you can live there for cheap while telecommuting to a company that pays a standard US salary.

But for some people, adventure is going to be rethinking their family arrangement to have each adult work half-time so both people get to spend lots of time with the toddler. For some people, adventure is going to be picking up and moving to the place you always wanted to live, because now you can.

One of the advantages of the mostly-crappy experience of coming to a crossroads is that everything is up for grabs. If you’re going to move anyway, why not move exactly where you’d like to? If you’re going to change careers anyway, why not explore the thing you’ve always secretly wanted to?

Are you certain it will serve other people?

It’s easy to reduce “serve other people” to Doctors Without Borders or the Peace Corps or teaching. But it’s so much more than that.

The person who writes young adult novels that help teens get a grip on their lives? Serving other people.

The person who designs beautiful furniture that doesn’t cost a first-born? Serving other people.

The person who designs surreal puppet shows that expand people’s minds? Serving other people.

The real question is, how is this serving other people? It’s about articulating to yourself how this betters the world, because connection work you love with the world gives it just a little more gravity.

Three questions

So how would you answer these three questions?

One of the challenges I run into with people as we’re talking about what they might want to do next in their professional lives is this: We don’t actually know very much about the kinds of jobs that exist out there in the world.

We’re also facing a lack of familiarity with all the different things a given company or organization will need in order to fulfill their mission.

So, for instance, we’ll think an accounting firm only hires accountants, or chefs only work at restaurants, or fitness people only work at gyms.

But really, that accounting firm needs lawyers and writers and marketers and techies and coders and managers and business strategists and HR professionals and office people to make the day-to-day go.

Chefs work in restaurants, sure, but they also work in hotels, and airlines, and food manufacturers, and big companies, and for high-net-worth individuals. Fitness people work for gyms, and individuals, and companies, and hotels, and hospitals, and rehabilitation centers.

In other words, there are two separate but related pieces to figuring out what you want comes next: the kind of work you want to do, and the kind of organization in which you want to do it.

It’s easy to conflate them

Because many jobs have an industry that goes with them, it’s easy to conflate the two. But what happens then is that I hear people say things like, well, I want to do the work of consulting, but I hate all the consulting firms. Or, I love higher-level math, but I’d shoot myself in the head if I had to do actuarial stuff.

People dismiss the work they would love to do because they have a limited understanding of the contexts in which they could do that work.

The reality is that there are very few jobs that have only one context, one industry, one type of organization in which they exist. In fact, as I’m sitting here trying to think of some, I’m coming up blank.

So if you really don’t think a giant for-profit is for you, then look for something small and quirky. If you don’t think government work is for you, check out non-profits. If you hate suits and cubicles, look for a company that lets you go to work in jeans and flip-flops or that lets you work from home or whatever.

Whatever you want to do, chances are there’s a position out there in an organization you’d love to work for. The trick is figuring out both parts – what you want to do and where you’d like to do it – so that you can go out looking for that position.

Figuring out what you might like to do and where you might like to do it is some of what Jo VanEvery and I cover in our Choosing Your Career Consciously course. We’re starting another round of this 6-week course on June 12 – click here to learn more.