work you love

The Single Biggest Mistake You Can Make With Your Career

Photo Credit: iStockphoto

I was getting ready to head out the door and my son, who was two at the time, said to me, “Daddy, where you going?”

“To work,” I replied.

“Why?”

I stopped and thought about it for a moment, trying to come up with an explanation a two year old could understand.

Trying to think of all the possible responses I could come up with, I said,

Gary was always good at fixing things. He could take a car engine apart and put it back together. If your washing machine had broken he could fix it.

In high school Gary was always in the auto shop classroom and never in the library. He was that guy.

However, when the time came he thought he needed to go to college in order to get a good job.

He went through college hating every minute of it, wishing he could spend more time refurbishing the 1969 Chevy pickup waiting in the garage at home.

After graduating from college with a low GPA and a headache, Gary went looking for a job.

(This post is part of a series. Read Part 1 and Part 2)

Ultimately, choosing a career direction comes down to one thing.

What do you want to do?

That’s it.

You can take all the personality assessments in the world, go through tons of exercises, and work with coaches.

However, when all is said and done you have to make a choice and move toward a goal.

You may say, “but I still don’t know what I want to do”.

You’d think it would be easy to figure out what we love to do for work.

I mean we spend so much time with ourselves you’d think we would have this down right?

Yet, it’s not easy. At least it wasn’t for me.