What I Wish I Knew…

This post is part of a blog series on Brazen Careerist being sponsored by JobSTART101.  They asked Brazen members to answer the question:  What do I wish I knew before I started working?  Here’s my response …

As sparkly-eyed graduates, we all hoped for the same post-college fates. The differences in our B.A. or B.S. degrees made no difference in this matter, nor did our thesis topics. Four years devoted to the study of either phylogeny or philosophy evidently yielded the same cumulative wish for a job that would be fulfilling, inherently inspiring, and most importantly, supportive of our professional growth and of our quote-unquote ‘creativity’.  We hadn’t all grown up as mini-Mozarts or Matisse’s, yet this word was everywhere and we all wanted the chance to revel in it. To be sure, the term creativity meant different things to the micro-bio major than it did the 15th Century Chinese philosophy major; but the idea was the same. We all truly believed, as products of our ‘helicopter’ parents and primary education’s focus on raising self-esteem, that our hard-won (sometimes not so hard-won) degrees would beget careers in which our opinions and ideas would be solicited and weighted. Where our bosses would appreciate the dozens of mindless minutiae we devoted ourselves to each day, and in return for our diligence, we’d be rewarded by piles of progressively exciting projects, ones that required the exercise of our professional judgment and creativity to come up with solutions that were ‘outside-of-the-box”, innovative, unique.

It wasn’t a bad goal by any measure, but rarely in our mock interviews or classrooms or personal journal did we have the opportunity or wherewithal to make explicit what this exercise of ‘creativity’ would actually look like in the workplace. Some of us simply could not know, with limited or very particular types of work experience under our belts. Others of us were blinded by our generation’s unique brand of arrogance, believing our degrees and use of catchy buzzwords would be enough to win over the hiring managers and recruitment staff. Often, gague conceptions of the word leaned on the expecation that the job itself, or the employer, would offer ample opportunities for creativity to be applied.

It’s not so surprising that after a lifetime of traditional schooling, of receiving assignments and prompts for paper topics and reports on my progress, I never had to think that the charge of creativity – or of sustaining it - would fall entirely on me, that it wasn’t just built in to a job like a 401K plan or valued by all employers like promptness. I never realized that my employer would not be concerned with my professional advancement, and sometimes, would want me to stay exactly where I was, doing the same rote tasks; no matter how high my performance or lofty my ambitions. I never knew how the process of getting out of bed each day to face the same tasks and petty headaches as the day before, for weeks and months on end, could rob me of my motiviation and my creativity. I never realized how crucial my mental fortitude would become to this whole process, that my own survival, let alone success, at work depended not on the intelligence my degree had helped shape or the communication talents I’d cultivated, but almost entirely on my ability to plainly persist in going to work each day with my basic motivation and spirit in tact, if not altogether shattered. Success was a whole different monster to face, a combination of sustained intrinsic motivation and an incessantly sharp keenness for opportunities where creativity could be injected – in a tired, ineffective process; into a drudging routine project; or in an untapped area where a new process would be welcome.

But even after months in my regular 9-5 job, I clung to the empty idea of creativity as though it were my ticket to the job of my dreams. It wasn’t until I was sitting in the conference room of a tech start-up, interviewing for a job I truly imagined could save me, that I realized I’d been dropping C-bombs left and right. They’d fallen weightlessly, painfully flat at the interviewer’s feet. Whatever vague suspicions I had of what creativity meant at work, they served no purpose to this recruiter or, as it turned out, to me either. And if my current job was not offering the opportunity to explore creativity and my own capacity for it, I’d need to look for it elsewhere. In volunteering activities, an unpaid internship for a small events company, or my first foray into the freelancing world, I’ve learned the art of channeling my creativity into as many avenues as possible, even if it means I must pave those roads on my own. Even if it means inevitable failures and setbacks along the way.

This may be the thing above all which college classrooms and traditional education structures fail to cultivate in their students, the thing I wish I had been able to pick up on sooner. Yes, the Real World of Work can be cruel, unforgiving, brutal in its judgments, along with mind-numbingly complex, rigid, and monotonous. It’s all these things we heard about as kids and more. But those realities have a remarkable way of fading into the background the second we decide to turn our attention, instead, to honestly appraise our own capabilities and motivations. Once we acknowledge that no one will ever have even a quarter of the amount of interest that we have in our own career paths, we can more decidedly take steps to create the path of our choosing.

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Tagged: Brazen Careerist, finding creativity, myth-busting, starting a job

Posted in: Career Pursuits, Entry-level Employment, Generation Y, New Work Order