The job market has changed a lot since I landed my first job in television, so has the advice on how to navigate building a career. I came of age professionally when Steve Jobs’s Stanford commencement speech was the gold-standard of career advice: “I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. … the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle.”
Back then, if you weren’t doing what you loved (or what you thought you would love), you were a sell-out. Films and television shows depicted young, heroic professionals living in eyewateringly spacious apartments in big cities. Then, when real-world college graduates like me attempted to live out that gauzy dream, the harsh reality of life in The Big City hit hard and fast. Many of us retreated to live with our parents (if that was possible), and we licked our financial wounds. In fact, more than half (57 percent) of young adults ages 18-24 live with their parents, according to Pew Research Center. That’s up from 53% in 1993.
Where is the love?
Today, career advice has flipped 180-degrees. It’s harsher, transactional, and much more pragmatic. Young people are no longer being told to lean into their emotional intelligence and find what they love to do. Instead, they’re being told to do what they’re good at to make the most money possible. Here’s a selection of today's career advice bumper stickers:
Like most people, I am very clear on what I love to do: I love shipping media – content, technology, companies – that help people make sense of the world and improve the state of their lives. I am not as clear about my talents.
Today, career advice has flipped 180-degrees. It’s harsher, transactional, and much more pragmatic.
Recently, I published a poll to LinkedIn to gather data from people I had worked with. The data I gathered helped me better understand what my talents are. Here’s a list of what respondents shared when I asked them to fill in the blank for the following phrase:
“Emi brings these skills to the table__________.”
- unique solutions to challenging problems
- excellent writer and storyteller
- organization
- unique perspective
- good challenger
- resourceful
- able to translate foreign and disparate concepts into clarity
- strong ability to capture nuance
- great collaborator
- experiments and iterates quickly
- doesn’t shy away from speaking the truth to power
- sharp strategist
- communicates complexity with elegance and simplicity
- networking and trust building
- strategic thinker
- confidence, compassion, creativity, integrity
- introspection articulated as strategy
- self-awareness
- art
- leadership
- persuasive and technical writing
- design
- partnerships
- collaboration
- building from scratch
- relationship building
- diligent
- intellectual
- decisive
- expert facilitation
- excellent writing skills
- ability to convene and spark creativity, to inspire, and motivate those around her
- after seeing Emi speak once, you’d want more
The list is much longer than I thought it would be, and a few of the skills listed here surprised me – skills like “good challenger” and “decisive”. There were also skills I was happy to see made the list, skills like “leadership”, “ability to convene and spark creativity” and “after seeing Emi speak once, you’d want more”. I do love public speaking. These are skills that resonate with me as talents. They reflect work that I like to do that others find valuable.
The great thing about this survey, aside from the generosity of everyone who took the time to fill it out, is that it is a multi-tool. I handed the survey results over to the design team at Retrospect Studios to help me build this site and other collateral to better articulate my presence online. The survey was a bit like an anvil the Retrospect team and I could use to bang hot metal against and shape it into new tools for me to use.
Finding your talents doesn’t mean setting aside what you love to do. It means opening yourself to a career path that might meander more than you planned.
Three tools for discovering your talents
So, if you want to find your talents, here’s what you should do:
- Look outward, not inward. Don’t look inward to find your talents, look outward and ask people who know your work to tell you what they see. This means closing off a valuable source of information: your emotions. Emotions help you make sense of the world around you. They’re like eyes that can see a frequency all of the other parts of you cannot. Sometimes, just like your real eyes, you need to keep them open, and other times you need to keep them closed. Opening your emotional eyes wide helps you see what you love to do and find your passions. Closing your emotional eyes helps you better see your talents and what you do that drives value.
- Use attention manipulation tools to get data that serves you and your network. Social media platforms aggregate attention. Use these tools to transform the value of your network’s attention into value that serves you and them. Ideally, gathering this data and leveraging it helps me work even more effectively with and generate greater value for the people who contributed their answers to the survey.
- Invest in yourself and the talented people you know. Once you learn what your talents are, invest in them. That means doing more than just building out your resume or applying to different jobs. Consider hiring a team to help you gather your talents into a story, a brand identity or another tool or resource that can help you leverage your talents better than a traditional job could. A team – or even a single design partner – can help you find ways to leverage new technologies to build on your talents and pivot you towards your passions.
Finding your talents doesn’t mean setting aside what you love to do. It means opening yourself to a career path that might meander more than you planned to get to what you love to do. It means using tools in creative ways so that they end up serving you more than you serve them, and it means investing in yourself by bringing other people and their talents around you to help.
Copyright notice: No part of this content may be used to train any model of any kind in any way without the author's express permission.
