4 Keys to Seeking the Work You Want (and not just the job you think will provide it)

After I wrote my last blog “What are you seeking?” a young man reached out with some questions. He liked the blog and was really trying to be thoughtful about his early career but wasn’t sure how to put this idea of “seeking” into practice.

When we met, he started by telling me he wants to be an investor and wondered how he should be thinking about “seeking” given his aspiration.

I simply asked him why. Why do you want to be an investor?

He had answers ready. He talked about the kind of work it is, the pace of it, the way it stretches you, the arc of the career, the people you get to be around, the chance to have impact. He was thoughtful. He had clearly given it real consideration. But as I listened, I heard exactly what I expected to hear. None of the reasons he gave as to why he wanted to be an investor was a unique attribute to a life or work being an investor.

So I asked him the next question: So, do you want to be an investor, or do you want those other things?

He looked at me confused.

I explained: Every reason you just gave me for why you want to be an investor, you could find on a dozen different paths. And, maybe the right path is actually being an investor. But, the problem with defining what you are seeking by a single destination is that you end up focused on the destination - and stop paying attention to the criteria that made you want it in the first place.

I have seen this pattern throughout my entire career. When I worked in the nonprofit sector, I had young people seek my advice all the time and tell me that they wanted to work in nonprofit. It is a strange thing to say when you actually pay attention to those words. No one has ever told me they wanted to work in for-profit. Why do they say they want to work in nonprofit? What those people wanted was work with purpose. They wanted meaning. They wanted to have an impact. And, in their thinking and their declaration, they had simply decided that those things lived in one place and nowhere else: nonprofits. Before they had taken a single step in their careers, they had already narrowed the aperture not just for their work but for their lives.

This aspiring investor had done the exact same thing, just pointed in a different direction.
Here is the trouble with narrowing your aperture on a singular career destination: once you fixate on the one path you believe will give you what you want, you stop watching for what you actually want. You optimize for the destination and lose track of what you were seeking - the why behind that destination.

So, how do you put this thinking into practice early in your career? How do you keep the aperture open without losing focus? How do you focus without losing the breadth of your values and the depth of what you are seeking?

Here are four domains to pay attention to:

The Structure of the Work
I learned early that I didn’t just want unstructured work. I needed it. I needed ambiguity. I needed roles that did not exist yet or needed to be radically transformed. I needed to create. I needed to build. I did not need rules or clear pathways or promotion criteria. The blank canvas is oxygen for me. For someone else, it would be a nightmare. Plenty of people do their best work inside clear boundaries, defined expectations, and a clean picture of what good performance looks like. That is not in any way a lesser way to work. It is merely a different one. Neither is right. The only real mistake is not seeking to understand where you are and what drives and excites you along that broad spectrum of work structures. Not noticing early can mean not noticing when the answer starts to shift as your life priorities and work evolve. The structure that fed you at 25 might suffocate you at 35, or the reverse. Pay attention to whether your needs and your work are still moving in sync. When life happens, this sort of self-awareness is your biggest source of resilience.

The Context of the Work
This is about what you are doing and where you are doing it. Every context has culture and process and people and impact. Some contexts will feed you and some will not. Some may become your true vocation, and some may just be a step along a bigger exploration. Part of the work is learning where context sits on your own ranking of what matters most to you. I figured this out early when I was working with youth. I loved this work. I gave everything I had to it, and it was some of the most creative and meaningful work of my life. But, when I looked at my colleagues who were equally invested and committed to the work, I saw that their commitment was often about a life’s commitment to young people. Mine, candidly, was not. And, I made that clear. I was all in. The context of youth work was deeply engaging. But, at the end of the day, if the work stopped being innovative and creative, I was going to need to find my next thing. Sometimes you learn the most about what feeds you by standing next to people who are fed by something you admire but do not exactly share.

The People You Work With
Early in your career you are told to build your network, and you should. But it’s far more important in your seeking journey to learn from the people around you – and not just what they do or how they do it, but who they are, how they learn and grow (or don’t), how they treat each other, how they see the world, how (and if) they live their values and if those values align with yours. You will never be content in your career surrounded by people you don’t like, trust, respect, or care for. That’s just being human. And, when we think of our career merely as the mechanics of industry, of promotion, or of financial progress, we may find ourselves having achieved all our goals on paper but feeling lonely, unfulfilled, or even a bit sick in our stomachs as we head into work every morning. People matter. They always matter. If you learn early that they do not, that lesson has a way of sticking. It hardens into a way of working, then a way of leading, and it shows up as an unrecognizable version of yourself down the road, long after you have forgotten how you got there.

The Impact of Your Work
Why does your work matter? That question has three parts. Why does it matter to you? Why does it matter to others? Why do you matter to it? When you start a career with ambition but no eye on purpose or impact, you should not be surprised to look up one day and find you’ve built a real career, earn a good paycheck, and feel a deep unsettled feeling you cannot quite name. This is your midlife crisis even if it hits earlier or later in life for you. The absence of purpose and meaning compounds quietly. It sits under or behind the wins, waiting for a slow enough season, a significant enough loss, or a large enough accumulation for you to finally feel it. You do not have to change the world in your first job or any job. But you should be asking, early and often, what your work is for. The habit of asking matters more than any single answer.

None of these four domains are things you find or assess once and check off the list. They are dimensions you keep evaluating, over and over, as you change, life changes, and the work changes. They are the criteria that keep your aperture open so you see when changes must happen before you hit a crisis – or, you are more ready and able to change when crisis hits you. They enable you to keep becoming, to keep seeking, to stay intentional in every step along the pathway rather than simply chasing the destination.