What can you do to ensure the next part of your career will be significant and productive?
So many times, I have found that simply writing about what I am thinking, dreaming of, or stuck on gives me clarity of purpose. Start a journal to clearly articulate what “significant and productive” would look like for you and answer these questions:
- What would you be doing? What achievements would you list?
- With whom?
- What would be significant?
- How would your work and life be different?
- Why would you choose this work?
- How would you feel if your work was “significant and productive”?
- What would it sound like if someone described the results of your productivity?
- What would this mean for you personally? For your business? For the people you serve? For those you love?
- How will you measure your significance or productivity?
- What do others value most about you? What are you doing about it?
I am reminded of my favorite passage in all of literature, from W. Somerset Maugham’s introduction to The Razor’s Edge:
“The man I am writing about is not famous. It may be that he never will be. It may be that when his life at last comes to an end he will leave no more trace of his sojourn on earth than a stone thrown into a river leaves on the surface of the water. But it may be that the way of life that he has chosen for himself and the peculiar strength and sweetness of his character may have an ever-growing influence over his fellow men so that, long after his death perhaps, it may be realized that there lived in this age a very remarkable creature.”
As you continue to consider the next phase of your career, I encourage you to consider how and in what way your character is “strong and sweet” and how these characteristics affect your choices – how you apply yourself and the affect this has on others. When you begin to see your career as a series of days filled with passion and focused action toward a meaningful purpose that serves other people…well, you will most assuredly have begun the next phase of your life with significance and productivity by any standard.
Intersection of Purpose and Now 