Hey Dan here and this may be the most important video I make this year about
career and career advice for idealist types. This is you if you are an ENFP, an
INFP, an INFJ or an ENFJ personality type and there's a very important reason
that this applies to all four of these types. Myself I am an ENFP. Now if you're
new to the channel my name is Dan and this is Dreams Around The World where my
mission is to help you become the best version of yourself all while creating
the most awesome life possible for you and those you love. Now when we're
thinking about our career and ultimately this even goes back to like college
major or university major because that's what is going to lead into your career,
for many people it is I think there's something that's really, really important
to realize is we have our perception of what the job will be and maybe we have a
list of careers, you know: lawyer, doctor, accountant, like careers
that we think would be a good fit for us and then you have the reality of what
it's actually like and this is extremely extremely important for idealist to get
clear on both sides of the equation here. I remember when I was in high school I
thought about being a lawyer and I loved that show The Practice, right, where it
was - I don't know if you've ever seen it it was a TV show back then where you
have these lawyers and they'd always win the cases through some elaborate, really
intelligent but kind of scheming way of like just presenting their argument or
having a witness turn at the end or whatever it was and to me - I was like:
Yeah I'm really creative, I love problem-solving, that would be great. As
some of you may know, especially if you're lawyers, the reality of being a
lawyer is usually more like a glorified secretary where you're just proofreading
documents all day essentially. Now of course you work your way up and of
course there are lawyers who do a lot more practice in trials but a lot of the
lawyers I know they describe themselves as basically glorified
secretaries and spend most of their days just reading and proofing documents each
and every single day. So if you're an idealist type I can pretty much
guarantee three things are important for you for your career choice. One: You care
about the big picture, right, you don't want to be working in
the details, you want to understand the purpose of what you're doing and the
overall like big picture what's our strategy, what are we working towards,
what is the point of all this and to you that might seem crazy like - yeah, of
course, why do you even need to say that? But the truth is a lot of people don't
care, a lot of people are like - Hey, this is my job I do my job, I don't really
care what the effect is on the world or anything else and that leads me to my
second point. As an idealist you probably care about your jobs effect on the world
right you're not one of those people who can work for some evil company poisoning
the water and say well it's my job if I didn't do it someone else would do it
because you may be smarter than that and you have a soul and so you don't want to
be working an environment where maybe your particular work isn't murdering
babies but down the line of what you're doing some babies are being murdered and
ultimately it's your responsibility as well. And the third thing is you probably
care about harmony you'd rather work in a peaceful environment where you get
along with most people you might be a little bit competitive, you might care
about succeeding, but you're not ultra competitive you don't want to work in
one of those environments where everyone's trying to take down each other and
strive for the top there's, you know, 50 people competing for one job at the top
and you're all tearing each other apart that is appealing to some people, some
people thrive in that competitive environment. That's not me and that's
probably not you as well so keeping those three things in mind you want to
look at the reality of the type of work you'll actually be doing. The truth is
that for many professions what you learn in school is probably going to be the
most fun and the bigger picture stuff compared with the real world. Let me give
you an example. I've heard this from multiple architects - ENFPs in the case of
everyone I've heard this from - where they went to school, they loved design, they
loved the thought of creating a whole building, designing a living space for
people and when they got their architecture degree that's what they did,
right - when you're in school you design entire buildings or projects and you
get to think big picture. The reality once they got into the work world was
little details, more like secretarial or in
type work and just really unfulfilled and unsatisfying work and in all the
cases the people I've spoken to have wanted to change out or have already
quit and changed out of that profession after in some ways wasting many years of
their life studying it. I don't think it's a total waste because they probably
learned a lot about themselves and develop parts of their personality but
nonetheless a big financial and time investment into something they
ultimately didn't want to do. Now why this happens? There's many reasons. One is
of course we tend to assume the best, we tend to glorify things, so we think about
being a lawyer or an architect or a doctor and we think about the best parts
of it and perhaps what we see in movies and TV. The other thing is that the world
in general is moving to bigger and bigger companies and so yes I bet if you
go and work for some little architecture firm with two architects and two
assistants, you're going to be designing entire projects and you're gonna have
more responsibilities but if you want to go work for a firm with a hundred people -
yeah that's what happens is basically the fun stuff moves to the top and the
not fun stuff moves down the pyramid and that's the way the world in general is
trending toward with bigger and bigger companies, so something else to keep in
mind. Let me give you a couple other examples and then I have some advice to
share about what you can do to prevent making this kind of mistake. Think about
coaching which is essentially what I do, I mean there's maybe more to what I do
but I consider myself a coach, I work with people to help them create a more
awesome life for themselves. Coaching I would like to think is a noble
profession and is something that is positive for the world, right, and this is
something that would appeal to many idealist types. It's a good career for a
lot of idealist types. The reality, though, let's say you want to become a coach and
you go work for someone that you see on the surface, you idolize them - wow, this is
this great coach, I'm gonna go and we're gonna talk about how much we care about
people and how we can make the world better and then you get to it and you
realize - Oh, this person spends 90% of their time on their internet marketing,
figuring out like how they can run Facebook Ads to pack people into their
seminars and they don't really give a shit about helping
people. That kind of sucks, it could happen, right, you could also find an
amazing coach who really cares about the people, he serves and what he does and
work with that person. The reality is you have different ways of approaching the
same profession and if you pick the wrong place to work you're going to get
a very, very different experience than if you pick the right place to work. Last
example I'll give is therapy. The therapy again is something being a therapist I
should say is something that appeals to a lot of idealist types. We think about
again helping people learning about psychology learning about the brain like
- yeah sign me up, that's awesome! The reality is we can have that really
awesome fulfilling work or you can be a therapist who gets stuck with insurance
claims dealing with government paperwork with roadblocks, dealing with clients who
don't really want to change or make any difference and are constantly
frustrating you or you could end up working in a larger organization that
burdens you with paperwork and bureaucracy and takes away all the fun
out of it and well you want to learn and develop and become better and better,
they really just care about how many patients can you build per day, how much
money can you put through the system. Now it might feel like I'm becoming debbie
downer here but that is not the point of this video. The point of this video is to
encourage and challenge you to dive deeper into an area before you pursue it.
If you're thinking about your university or college major, why not go work or
intern at some office or for someone or at the very least do what are called
informational interviews where you just call up an architect call 10 of them up
or email them - if you're young I'm sure you don't even know what a phone call is,
but you know or what email is for that matter, so I guess tweet them or whatever
and say - Hey, can I come by and bring you a cup of coffee or can we go for lunch,
I'm a young student, I'm thinking about becoming an architect, can I just ask you
some questions about the profession and actually learn what is the day-to-day
like, what do you actually do, like okay you're an architect, you build a building,
but what is involved in that day-to-day? Is it sitting around like doing LSD and
dreaming about this incredible building or is it
like doing little diagrams and filing paperwork with the local government and
getting all this clearance and coordinating with engineers and things
that may be fun for you or may not be fun for you, so figure out how the person
spends 80 to 90 percent of their time. That would be my main focus is how do
you really spend your time and that is going to give you a much better picture.
The other thing is you might meet with three or four and I would encourage you
to do this three or four different people with the same profession and find
out - Hey, this company has a really hostile work environment, people seem to
butt heads, they don't really get along, this company is really fun and people
seem to enjoy themselves and they're a lot more creative and that will give you
again a chance to find the full range of people and also find a place that maybe
once you graduate you want to actually work at and avoid the ones that would
become quite a nightmare. One of the really sad things is that a lot of
professions that people invest heavily in go to schools spend 4 to 7, 8, 9, 10
years in and a lot of money to become once you're in them they also have this
hierarchy that doesn't allow you to bounce around that much, you know, if you
become a lawyer it's fairly well known if you want to work your way up to
becoming a partner, you don't bounce around firms too much, right, you invest
your time at one firm so it doesn't give you nearly as much wiggle room to be
like- Oh I started at this firm, I don't like these people, I'm gonna switch as
would probably be beneficial hence putting in more time early on to find
the right place to work at the right environment for you is going to be
really, really important. In the comments below I want to know: Have you ever made
a mistake picking a career or major where on the outside it looked appealing
and then once you got into it, it wasn't so much? Share your experience in the
comments because you'll help other people perhaps learn from you and avoid
a similar mistake and that's what we're all about here in this community. If you
are new to the channel I would love for you to subscribe. I publish new videos
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and the bell and I will catch you in the next video soon!