Tuesday, October 3, 2017

Three Career Tips for the Purposeless

In which, I vent my frustration with the fetishization of purpose...

LinkedIn Pulse, October 3, 2017

by Theodore Kinni




“I’m not here to give you the standard commencement about finding your purpose. We’re millennials. We’ll try to do that instinctively,” Mark Zuckerberg told Harvard’s Class of 2017. “The challenge for our generation is creating a world where everyone has a sense of purpose.”

Baloney. A sense of purpose is like an appendix. If you’ve got one, good for you. If you don’t, you’re not missing anything important.

I’ve always been purposeless. As a kid, I kinda worried about it. I thought I was missing something essential because all I wanted to be was a New Jersey Lottery winner. (In those days, the grand prize was a cool million. Pretax. Woo-hoo!)

But getting a purpose was never a burning issue for me. Getting a job was far more important. I needed money—mainly because the only thing my parents ever agreed on was that one kid wasn’t enough.

Sans purpose, it did take me a long time—15 years—to find work that worked for me. But I learned some lessons along the way. I offer them here as shortcuts to everyone else who drew a blank ticket in the purpose lottery. Read the rest here.

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