Kozak Financial Group
January 15, 2025
Money Wellness Education Financial literacy Lifestyle Entrepreneurs Women & wealth Professionals Monthly commentaryVocations: Guidance for Success
One of the questions we get most often from young people entering their careers is “What should I do to become wealthy?” On the surface, this is a pretty easy question to answer. One should either get on a career track with high earning potential and work hard over a lengthy period, or they should start building a wealth generating business of their own to pave their own way towards success. Easy right? Typically, the young people asking these types of questions already know these basics; what they are really asking is “What specific job or business should I pursue?” This is a much harder question to answer.
Conventional inspirational advice would be to “Follow your passion!” *collective groans*. This is not just one size fits all, blanket style advice, it is also bad advice. Recent studies have found that only 20% of people under the age of 26 can articulate a specific passion. It isn’t much help to be told to pursue something you aren’t even sure you actually have. Not to mention that early in life, passions can be highly malleable and susceptible to influence, just think of a young child who depending on the week might switch their career aspirations from firefighter to veterinarian based on the most recent movie they saw. Later in life it gets easier, hindsight is 20/20 as they say, and most people can look back on their careers and tell you they did in fact have a passion for structural engineering, IT support, family medicine, etc. When one gets good at something they will become passionate about it in tandem.
So, what is one to do? Pursing something that is more akin to a vocation is a good first step. A vocation is an occupation which someone is drawn to or suited for. Taking a step back and analyzing one’s skillset and interests can help to indicate where one’s internal compass is pointing. It can help to talk to trusted mentors, family, friends, or colleagues and get their perspective on your greatest strengths. Sometimes it takes an outside perspective to see unique gifts and talents that you excel at and sets you apart from others. It is also useful to take a close look at what one values in their own life, perhaps a deep interest in the cutting edge of technology, or working on a team or independently or making improvements on environmental or social issues. No matter what one values, there is probably a job out there that can provide some link to those deeper meanings and strengths.
At this point one might find their search stalls out. It is easier said than done finding a role that suits your desires because often the job requirements that come along with it are extensive. After all, most of us don’t dream of pursuing an entry level position and staying there forever. This is where long term incentives come into play. Often if we are looking for a vocation or “reason for being” we need to build those incentives in ourselves.
The easiest way to build in incentives is to break down the larger longer-term goal into smaller shorter-term goals that can be achieved on your way to success. Working backwards and thinking about the steps that would need to be taken from the top down can be helpful. Perhaps the ultimate goal is to become the CEO of a fortune 500 company. In all likelihood that job isn’t being posted online for open applications, so to get there, one would need to be a lower-level executive or an executive in a smaller business. To become a lower level executive, one would probably need to be a manager of people and products, to be a manager of people and products they would probably need to have been a successful employee with a large skill set, to become that successful employee a person would need on the job experience and a desire to grow and learn along the way.
This is of course an oversimplification, but the fact remains that if you want to be high up in an organization, you probably need to start on the ground floor. This can be disheartening at first, but if we break the final goal into smaller and smaller pieces it becomes easier, and we can motivate ourselves to just complete the next step in the process. The first step is getting hired as a junior sales rep, then getting your first big sale, then becoming the top salesperson in your department, and so on. These granular small wins push us towards succeeding.
It is highly likely the ultimate goal might change along the way. One might realize the CEO job isn’t what they thought it was and so they pivot to being a consultant to the CEO, or perhaps priorities change, and family becomes a bigger part of one’s life. All of this is ok. In the pursuit of success and eventually (hopefully) wealth, we need to be open to alternate opportunities as they come. Remaining laser focused on something that one is no longer invested in doesn’t bode well for long term motivation.
The cliché advice to follow one’s passion can be overly daunting. Instead, young people should look for a vocation they can imagine themselves pursuing. By tying this to the values and interests that already exist, we are intrinsically motivated to work hard and endure, the smaller goals and wins along the way provide the extrinsic motivation.. Hopefully by the end, one can look back on their career and say they were passionate about what they did, not because they knew this passion existed from the start but because they built themselves a passion by tying their motivations to their long-term success.