How The Most Successful People Find The Perfect Job: A Case Study

This could be a very helpful article for those of you searching for a new career.  Fortune contributor Paul Brown, co-author of Just Start: Take Action; Embrace Uncertainty and Create the Future put a very good process together about finding out what you don't want to do which can be just as important as discovering what you do want to do.

In some ways it is a process of elimination and in the example he gives, one has to take a look not only at the actual costs of doing something different but also the time commitment involved.  For example, if the job of your dreams requires additional education going back to school will likely be both a time and money consumer, can you afford that?  Again it is a balancing act of finding what you can make work with what you are wanting to do

Full article here

• Let’s say you were an assistant store manager at Blockbuster who was planning on being a regional manager in five years. When the industry was stable you would carve out a path that probably looked like this: you would become an associate store manager in year one; store manager in year three and regional manager (in charge of a bunch of stores) in year five. But all that planning goes for naught, if your video chain—and all others—go under. In an environment where that is likely to happen, traditional career planning is useless.
• As we have seen, when confronted with the unknown, the most successful people figure out what is it they want. Then they:
• Take a small step toward that goal.
• Pause to see what they learned from taking that small step.
• Build that learning into the next small step they take toward their goal.
• Pause again to see what they learned and so on.
• We call this the Act. Learn. Build. Repeat model.