I made a worksheet loosely based on a 6 sigma decision tree that my last boss from ERD shared with me before she moved back to Florida. Basically, one lists every single job you've had, big or small, even if it was a temp assignment, graduate school gig or internship. You qualitatively review how you felt about it based on any number of insights (feel free to add your own, but I just did the major job-satisfaction questions that were relevant for me.) I didn't quite know what to expect from such a simple exercise, but it revealed some surprising results and insights into what made me happy. Knowing what were deal-breakers should really help narrow the path moving forward, which is helpful for personalities like mine who like to try everything and have lots of different interests, making it hard to stay focused when given a brand new slate.
An additional incentive for me is that I've had quite a few jobs and consultancies over the last 10 years of my life. I think this is a great way for people to identify clues that will help them maximize satisfaction and create stability. A small sampling below from my earlier years..
I learned 2 things from my extensive spreadsheet that I didn't know before. One is that, no matter what the positives on my checklist, if I don't have Emotional Support and to a lesser degree Social Aspect and Intellectual Challenge, it just doesn't work out. By emotional support, I just mean someone in my corner who cares about my success. There are very few places that provide this, as this lies in the realm of the mythical "good manager." The second thing I learned is that my most satisfying job was actually the Excel consultancy, which was entirely technical!! I didn't realize this because it was at a very unstable juncture where I was moving from LA to NY so I just did this as a way to support myself, it wasn't an actual career move. But in the end, every checkmark and comment was in the positive section and the stress levels were way low while the pay was very good! I felt like I got a lot out of using my Excel and VBA skills for the sector I am most passionate about - nonprofit/humanitarian!
This segues nicely into my next topic:
I decided recently that I want to learn programming! I'm a bit annoyed at myself that I didn't do this when I was younger. At Stuyvesant, I had all the resources for learning programming in hand - genius classmates, a super cool CS teacher, everything! So after sharing this with a couple of my old HS friends, Kieran gives me Python to install and makes up some tutorial for me on the fly, and Alex gives a lot of advice on how to best get started.
On a day where I went out to use an about-to-expire Groupon, I met up with Alex and Ann at this gorgeous little dessert place in the LES. We were talking about programming and Alex said I should just pick any language and try to do a project, as it's the best way to learn. He then suggested I create a Groupon program so that I know when they are expiring (anyone who buys groupons has this issue), and I buy from 5 different deal sites, so I use a spreadsheet that I only occasionally update. What a fantastic idea!! I'll create a program that reads, organizes and alerts me. Lots of bells and whistles can be added like proximity via a geolocator, type of activity, etc. This exists for each deal of the day site, but there is currently no aggregator out there. I'm very psyched, and I just need some instruction to get started.
Now, what do I name the program? =) Expire-me-not? Flashdeal? =) hehee! The possibilities are endless, and I think I may actually be good at this.
But at the bottom of all this I am well aware of one of the characteristics that makes me unique and valuable. It's my ability to communicate something fairly technical to a non-technical audience, and vice versa. It came from years of being around technical geniuses and having to explain things to my non-technical friends.
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