I Want to Change the World!
(But I need to pay rent)
Hi all!
If you’re in the US, I hope you all had a great long weekend (that actually felt like a true long weekend), and that you’re able to start thinking about plans for the summer.
I’m in New York this week, and catching up with friends and old colleagues in person (!) has been a dream.
Last week was the 10th edition of the newsletter, so I thought I’d check in with you all to get feedback on format or content. To date, I’ve jumped around a bit topic to topic, and followed a loose format of categories.
Tell me:
What topics would you like more insight on?
Is the format too long, too short, or just right
This week’s newsletter starts to a big behemoth of a topic: how our careers fit into our complex value system and how we solve for our broader ‘purpose’.
I’ll try to do this justice over a few weeks, but there’s certainly an infinite number of directions this conversation can go. This week I’ll start by evaluating how we balance earning/skills/passions with making an impact on the world.
Musings
Let’s start with this awesome diagram, which I’ve seen used to describe ‘Purpose’ but increasingly has been used to guide career satisfaction conversations:
The concept of all of these four elements feeding our career satisfaction is a relatively recent framework.
If we asked our parents their definition of a career, they’d very likely respond that careers are analogous to ‘professions’, and that 1+2 (what you’re good at + what you can get paid for) should equate to career satisfaction, or at least job security.
Millennials, due to a whole host of improvements in the economy and technology, and perhaps that incumbent mindset from our parents, added 3 to their consideration set: Do I love my job? There’s a chance this is an intrinsic part of 1 - that if you’re good at something you probably love it, but this was certainly never a prerequisite for our parents. “Following your passion” has become an almost trite tagline of our generation, yet it introduces a third consideration set that requires two intersections (I’ve posted about this here, why that tagline isn’t always realistic.)
And finally, in recent years, given the state of the world, and numerous social inequities, the rising workforce has started to consider one more parameter in their career journey: 4, does my job make the world better place? The specifics of what this means (specific causes, measurable outcomes) varies widely, but the vast majority of job seekers now care about their company’s commitment to making an impact.
According to Glassdoor:
79% of job seekers will consider a company’s mission before applying. More than half — 66% — of employees find motivation in a company’s mission, and 64% attribute their company’s mission to the main reason they stay in their current jobs.1
One incredible result of this dynamic is that companies are responding by being more transparent and responsible, and tons of startups are being created by founders and entrepreneurs that aren’t fully satisfied with the status quo of how socially responsible incumbent corporates were acting.
Optimistically, this means that are a lot more company and job choices available that might be more in line with our values. I talked about this dynamic in my newsletter about quitting for the the right reasons, that being misaligned with your company’s values is likely a necessary reason to leave.
However, there are obviously a ton of pragmatic considerations to think about when we look at the Venn diagram as a whole. The diagram is a great schematic for career and life satisfaction, but it (like all diagrams, really), is vastly oversimplified.
Time: While we’d all love to find a dream job square in the middle of the four circles, it’s unlikely we satisfy all of these things at the same time. There are countless examples of the tradeoffs we likely need to make between these circles over time, but more often than not, the earning circle drives our decision making. For example, early on in our careers, it’s unlikely we have the flexibility to solve for what we love and what the world needs as a first consideration when there are student loans to consider. Once we’ve built up experience and hopefully some savings, the other two circles can potentially come into play
Relative Weight: While all of these circles are important, it’s unlikely that they are each equally important to each individual person. The framework, when used to guide life satisfaction, can take into account all sorts of other things (e.g. hobbies, volunteering etc.), but definitionally, career puts an outsized amount of weight on factor 2 (earning). If you are earning something for it, it’s your job, whereas the other the aims of the other three circles can possibly be met by other parts of your life.
Defining ‘world’: As for circle 4 , the meaning of ‘what the world needs’ is infinitely, beautifully ambiguous. It could be contained to your contribution to yourself or your family (the world certainly ‘needs’ more happy, loving people and families), or to your immediate community, or it could be a full shift into a non profit job that tackles global issues
All that to say:
This is a dynamic model, where the circles will shrink and grow over time
Not all four circles need to be considered at all times (though it’s unlikely you can completely ignore 1 and 2 when it comes to jobs)
Even if your job does not encompass all 4 circles, it’s possible to feel fulfilled and purposeful by the other components of your life
For broader perspective - taking it back to the discussion of our parents: neither of my parents graduated university. My mom worked in the back office of a bank at the same job for thirty five years. She was good at her job by function of rote repetition, and it paid her enough to raise a family.
Her career only covered 1 and 2 for her.
3 and 4 (and easily the most fulfilling parts of her life) were and are covered by volunteering and community (she translates for new Chinese immigrants), and a passion for learning every stringed instrument on the planet.
It’s worth taking stock in each of these circles and their intersections for you personally:
Where do you feel most fulfilled right now?
What are the relative sizes of the circles?
Is it possible to have a career in the intersection of the circles? Where else do you derive identity and satisfaction?
Is how you are actually spending your time aligned with your ideal framework of these circles?
Conversations
This week’s “conversations” are a collection of thoughts from numerous people in my network that all evaluated making the move from a corporate job to a more altruistic job.
We’ll deep dive into the first category next week (people who actually made the full transition and what they learned), but for this week, I wanted to share the breadth of ways that people explored expanding their social impact.
Some were able to completely switch their jobs, some explored the impact path and chose to stay in their existing careers. Some found opportunities to make impact in the gray area in the lines between for-profit and philanthropy (which are increasingly blurring).
Those who changed their jobs wholesale (more on this next week)
A previous boss who moved from running a structured finance desk to running a division of corporate philanthropy at the same company
A previous mentor who ran a division of an investment bank for most of his career before joining a thinktank while also teaching classes at a local college
Those who found ways to have more impact by adjusting their job/focus
A successful investment manager, who was trained as a physician and worked as a consultant before ultimately choosing to invest in healthcare companies
“It’s a bit of a tradeoff between the proximity to the cause and scope of the cause. As a practicing physician I could help thousands of patients, and know them all by name. Investing in a number of companies means that I don’t personally know all the end patients, but I can ultimately impact more people.”
A professional contact who worked in portfolio operations at an investment firm and took on the ESG (environmental, social and governance) oversight at her firm
“I thought about going to an impact investment fund that focused more squarely on making social impact investments, but I realized that there was a lot I could do with the companies in my existing portfolio.
I was uniquely suited to take this one because I knew the companies well and as investors, we have the ability to really influence policies and how these companies do business. ”
A product manager I used to work with kept her day job, but chaired the steering committee for diversity and inclusion initiatives at her company on the side
“It’s a cause that’s incredibly important to me, and I’m happy to spend extra time on it. I don’t have human resources experience, but women in product management and engineering are underrepresented, and I uniquely understood some of their pain points when it came to recruiting.
It’s really rewarding to witness improvements in hiring and retention outcomes and know that I helped change our practices.”
Those who explored options and opted to stay fully in a corporate job and found ways to have impact outside their jobs
A friend is a highly successful Wall Street trader and obtained a Masters degree in Public Policy while working in order to explore different jobs in nonprofit and public policy leadership. He ultimately ended up staying in traditional finance
“I (maybe naively) thought that being senior in financial services would translate more easily to a senior role in public policy, but that isn’t necessarily the case.
Going through the process of looking at other roles made me realize that perhaps where I could be most impactful was through giving and philanthropy (both my own, and influencing those in my professional network), not necessarily operating in the non-profit world.”
A former colleague of mine was approached by a number of companies and organizations in the education space since we had worked in a student lending business.
“I liked the mission of a lot of these organizations, but I was really looking for an opportunity that would use my skills as a former banker to help grow a company via acquisitions, which (for now), is much more common in traditional, for-profit companies.
I can still advise these organizations, formally or informally, but it wasn’t a fit for what I was looking to do, skill wise in the day-to-day of my career.”
And for me personally, I looked at a number of impact investing funds before choosing to join a traditional fund with a healthcare focus. The fund improves value in the healthcare system and improves patient outcomes, so there is a tangible positive social impact, which is aligned with my values
These examples are some of many… there’s obviously an infinite number of ways to find the right mix of earning and impact in our careers, but everyone I talked to agreed on a few things:
Cast a wide net of what social impact could mean to you, and be open-minded along the whole spectrum of jobs.
Even if you don’t end up in a non-profit role, the experience of exploring and meeting people who are doing the things you are interested in can be incredibly informative, though how others define their balance between the four circles might look very different from how you do.
It’s ok to want to want to maximize earning potential, especially early on in your career and finally,
Your job doesn’t necessarily have to directly make the impact you want on the world. But it should certainly enable you to make the impact you want on the world.
By that I mean:
It gives you the time to volunteer or be involved in external causes
It provides you the financial security to donate in the way that you want, to the causes you care about
You work with people who have similar values, who support the causes you are interested in, have causes they themselves are interested in, and/or simply give you space to talk about yours
Resources/Links
The original source of the Venn Diagram - tons of great insights here (HumanBusiness.EU)
Hobby vs Job vs Career vs Calling by Matthew Trinetti, Writer, facilitator, consultant, TEDx speaker on purposeful work (Medium)
Cool Ladies Doing Cool Things: 18 year old Vietnamese-American Alexandra Huynh is named the National Youth Poet Laureate (Stanford.edu)
Glassdoor Culture Survey (2019)