Steve - A Profile of Following Your Passion into a Dream Career

Steve is in the green shirt.  I'm in white.

My family met Steve on our summer vacation in 2013.  We were looking at spending an afternoon sailing on the Sechelt Inlet and the local Visitor Information Office highly recommended BC Sail Tours - Steve's company.  We sailed with him for an afternoon and discovered that he also pilots a float plane part-time with with a local airline called Tofino Air!

Can you imagine - Sailing and flying as a career?  That's what I'm talking about.

It wasn't all 'smooth sailing' (pardon the pun) for Steve, though.  He had to make some sacrifices to get to a point where he had his own boat and had the flight hours to fly commercially.  I don't remember all the details, but he was telling us stories of how he was 'quite busy' working and living extremely frugally to get money so that he could pay for flight hours to get his license.

Steve has a Master Limited 60 Ton Captain's License and has sailed over 20,000 miles in South America, Hawaii, and North America. He fondly remembers surfing waves while sailing to Hawaii.  He's also been flying float planes commercially for the past 12 years.

If you grew up in a land-locked town or city (like me) you wouldn't necessarily think of sailing as a way to 'get paid to see the world'.  I certainly didn't consider it.  Here's some sailing careers I've heard of now that I wouldn't have guessed exists before:

• Like Steve, operate your own sailing tour outfit (or sail for one)
• Sail other people's boats to ports where they want to pick them up.  I had a friend who did this in the summer
• Teach sailing.  My previous manager did this for extra money during his summer holidays.
• Work on a Cruise Ship - you don't even need sailing experience for this.  They are looking for Cooks, Musicians, Event coordinators, Childcare workers,  Life guards, etc.

To read other career profiles check out my Career Path Profiles page here.

The Bigs by Ben Carpenter

The Bigs is a relatively new book - just published this spring (Wiley, 2014).  I found it on the shelf of my local library and read it rather quickly.  'The Bigs' is baseball slang for 'The Big Leagues.'  Ben compares the experience a player goes through moving from the minor league to the major league with the experience graduates deal with leaving school and finding a career - entering 'real life.'

The book is made up of two parts:

How to Survive, Thrive, and Have Fun in the Big Leagues.  Most of the content for this first part of the book comes from Ben's life experiences.  I loved the profusion of real stories, nicknames, and lessons in this section.
A lot of things I believe in (attitude at work, avoiding pitfalls, and thinking big) were affirmed while I read this section.  I also got a new perspective on leadership, and the financial industry.

How to Choose, Get, and Do a Great Job.  The second section didn't have as many anecdotes and was much more practical in nature.  Ben offer's some great examples and advice on how to prepare for your first career opportunity out of school.  He focuses on interviews, networking, and courtesy as means to get your foot in the door of that first job.

While the book does not focus much on the advantages and disadvantages of different types of careers, it does give valuable instruction and advice that is applicable for everyone irrespective of the career one chooses.  I'd highly recommend reading it if you are considering a career in sales, finance, or banking.

Direction for Your Career and Your Life

If you are floundering to find you place in this world, perhaps you aren't putting your heart into what you're doing.  You must be committed to whatever you find yourself doing.  Put some skin in the game - act like you care.

What do I mean by having some 'skin in the game?'  Make a commitment to something and put your heart into it.  Make a decision about that relationship, that education, that trip, or that job and stick to it.  Get decisive.  Be responsible for yourself.  Pay all your own bills.  Stop living at home.  Once you put a stake in the ground, pledge yourself to it, and believe, you'll find that other things start to come into focus.

For me, getting married and having multiple dependents along with a mortgage helped me find a lot of clarity fast.  That's a huge commitment and a lot of lost 'freedom' though.  Several years before making that commitment, I discovered that travelling alone also helped me discover perspective and direction.

Going forward, DO things - don't try them.  Get involved, get engaged, get dirty, put your heart into it, loose some skin, and see what happens.

Bruce Kasanoff has written a couple of interesting articles (part 1 and part 2) about the science behind the most successful careers.  While they offer a somewhat different perspective, I think they substantiate my comments above.  

I Just Graduated... Now What? by Katherine Schwarzenegger

This well researched book is packed with the experiences and thoughts of 32 successful people like Anderson Cooper, Eva Longoria, Sara Blakely, and more.  Most chapters in the book are about one person and have two parts - Katherine's thoughts on her interview with that person, and the interview itself.   Katherine's thoughts are significant because she wrote this book as a recent graduate - essentially living the title while she wrote it.

One could not assimilate all the lessons and advice in this book in a single read.  Fortunately, the format of the book allows the reader to (for the most part) randomly choose chapters and read them individually - a valuable attribute for a reader like me.

The three chapters that resonated most with me (for what it's worth as I'm over 40) were Andy Cohen, Darren Hardy, and Gayle King.  I doubt that I would have chosen those chapters 20 years ago.  :-)

Reading this book made me again consider the question 'What does success mean to me?'  Every graduate must find their own definition for success and then continue scrutinizing and evolving that definition as life goes on.

I got a digest sized copy of this book from the Library.  It had about 280 pages and I found it to be a medium length read.

Holland Code Career/Personality Quiz

I took the Holland Code Quiz today.  On the site I used it was free and took about 5-10 minutes.

The Holland Codes is a system to classify jobs into job categories, interests , or work/personality environments. In the Holland Model, these categories represent work personalities.  John Holland (the fellow who came up with the matrix) categorized jobs into 6 different work personality categories:

1. Realistic - These people like to work with their hands.  They are practical and would rather get something done than talk about it or learn about the theory behind it.  I'd categorize the jobs aligned with this category as trade/journeyman related.
2. Investigative - People in this category enjoy working with data.  They prefer to think, organize, and observe rather than act and persuade.  Jobs associated with this category seem to be related to engineering and sciences
3. Artistic - These creative and inventive people tend to be emotionally driven and abstract.  They avoid structure and rules and follow their heart.  Writers, visual communicators and designers populate this category.  
4. Social - This work personality likes to talk thinks out, teach, and work with people.  Careers in this category seemed inclined to teaching, administration, and therapy.
5. Enterprising - Effective communicators land in this category, along with entrepreneurs and leaders.  This group likes to work with people and data.  Jobs related to this category appear to be directors and mangers.
6. Conventional - Precision and attention to detail are key motivators in this group.  They value order and status.  Data entry related positions fill out the majority of the jobs in this category.

My results came out like this:

1. Realistic (12)  - Considering I worked as a printing pressman on a number of different presses for almost a decade, this makes sense.
2. Social (9) - I enjoy teaching.  Currently I'm involved in three related activities: teach part-time at SAIT, lead a student band in a local high school, and work on this Blog
3. Investigative (8) - My current full-time work is as a computer consultant (software) so I can't argue with this result either.
4.  Tie - Artistic and Conventional - Since I play several music instruments, I thought I might score higher in Artistic....
5. Enterprising (4) - not much argument here.

I wonder based on my results if a person's results can change over time...   Can there is an evolution or migration from one category to another?  I guess I'll have to read 'Making Vocational Choices' by John Holland (2005) to find out.  I remember taking a similar, more extensive 'quiz' in high school and a couple of the jobs that were a 'good fit' for me back then were plumbing and firefighting.  Its interesting that those results line up pretty close to my high 'Realistic' score today.  

In conclusion, there definitely seems to be some value here.  Don't discount the results of career or personality tests you take (I did, long ago).  Mind you, I wouldn't take them as 'the Bible' either.  I'm not really comfortable with being labelled or put in a box so easily.  My Advice?  Seriously consider your results and get creative in seeing how you can fit them into career possibilities.

Fierce Conversations - Susan Scott

This was a fantastic book.  I bought a medium sized soft cover (around 280 pages) based on a recommendation from my pastor.  Staying true to her definition of 'fierce', the author doesn't mince words or hesitate in getting to the heart of the matter when it comes to conversations.  And since Susan Scott believes 'the conversation is a relationship' and 'conversations aren't just with others, they are also with yourself', the book is a superb resource for young adults trying to figure out who they are and where they are going.

Most of the chapters have brilliant, real life anecdotes as well as exercises to try.  The book is so full of great suggestions to implement in conversations that I was almost overwhelmed with where to begin when I finished it.  The author thoughtfully provided a user guide at the back to help with this.  The only drawback I found for a young graduate would be that the book was originally targeted to a business audience.  Don't let that deter you, though.  The stories and lessons are still applicable.

I will be reading this book multiple times in the next few years.  It was the best $17.50 CAD I've spent on a book in a while.

What Career Will Give Me Good Wages?

Want to know a job to look for that will give you a good salary?  Check out this chart.  This is data from 2013 of national average annual earnings for careers in the USA from the Bureau of Labour Statistics.  Its interesting to note how much medical related jobs figure in the top part of this list (earning more than $175,000 per year).

Click the image above to see the entire list of jobs and wages.  There are 820 of them - it's pretty exhaustive.

Here's some interesting highlights:

I couldn't help but notice the Judges (the blue line at $105,400 in the image above) showed up where they did.  Not only that, but notice the different between the 90th percentile for them (~170K)  versus the 25 percentile (~58K)  One quarter of judges in America make less than $60,000 per year?  Look at all the Manager Positions above them....