Well, you have a vision right?
Yes.
I do have a vision but I also can
see my life taking a lot of different paths,
that's the vision that I have today,
that's the vision that I feel very comfortable with,
that I feel like I've nursed a lot.
But I don't know if I'm really committed to it
or if I'm just saying I need to have something to do.
Yeah but, Dr. Markman,
it's not so much a specific job as it is
finding a vocation that allows you to do
the things that she's saying are important to her, right?
Yeah that's right.
You know, you can learn to love any specific task
you're doing as long as it feels like it's part
of something bigger.
We talk about this idea of work as a calling.
You know, do you see yourself helping other people,
engaging with the world around you
and it almost doesn't matter,
the specific things you're doing
as long as you can feel a sense of purpose in it.
You took some tests before
that you think are very important.
Let's take a look at these and Dr. Markman,
tell us what you honed in on here
and what we learned.
So we gave you two different
kinds of tests to do.
One was a basic test of personality characteristics
and then the other was a test of your values
and in personality characteristics,
the way that we could score these,
we could give you a score from say zero to 100
and see sort of how high or low you come out
on what are called the big five characteristics,
which are the basic characteristics that personality
psychologists care about and I want to point out
a couple of them here that I think are important.
So a really nice one is you're very high
in a characteristic called openness,
which means you do find a lot of new things interesting,
which is great but it can also mean that you see
lots of shiny things out there.
So you start to commit to one thing
and then there's something else you think,
but that might be cool too.
So accurate, so accurate.
And so you want to use that, not just for your work
but also to say, you know, let me find some things
I'm gonna do for my work and some things
I'm just gonna do as my hobby.
So I'm a college professor but I play in a band
on the side, right?
And so, you can do that.
You can feed that part of yourself,
not always just part of your work.
Now I want to point out another one
that's gonna be really important here
which is in the middle there, you see conscientiousness.
And you come out kinda in the middle of the scale
and it turns out, a lot of times people tend to
over-represent their conscientiousness,
how much they actually get stuff done
and show up to do things and so when you're in the middle,
you're often sort of lower on the middle.
This one's really important early in the career
because if you want to catch the attention
of a supervisor or a boss, you gotta be there
every single day, ready to work with the T's crossed
and the I's dotted and when you're in the middle
on conscientiousness and I will admit,
I'm sorta there too,
you gotta be extra careful to make sure you're there,
present and ready all the time.
So she's open minded but she might need to be
a little more disciplined.
Exactly right.
Okay, well let's take a look at her values.
The top and the bottom are both important.
I want to touch really quickly on the bottom there.
Your lowest values are things like achievement
and power and security and so,
this is what allows you to say you know what,
I'm not sure I want to settle down yet,
that I'm willing to try a bunch of things
and I don't care if I'm successful according
to other people's guidelines.
But I noticed in some of the materials that we got early,
that you feel a little guilty about this
cause people are putting pressure on you
and you can see that because one of your top values
is what's called conformity,
which is, I want to show respect to the people
who came before me, I want to respect my traditions,
I want to do the right thing
and there's a tension between that
and some of your other core values.
In particular, one of them you see up there is hedonism,
which is you want to enjoy life
and you know, to get those crazies out
at the same time that you're trying to hold down a job
can be hard but it isn't impossible
and I want to direct you to some of these other things,
which is you care a lot about benevolence,
being good to other people.
Universalism, treating people equally
and you also have a strong desire for creativity
so as you begin to look at jobs,
you want to find one where five to 10 years out,
you're really gonna have a chance to express those,
even if in the short term, you're gonna have to
do some things that aren't as exciting.
His book, Bring Your Brain To Work is available
and everyone in the audience will be getting a copy.
(audience cheers and applauds)