Imagine a studio soundboard — that big deck of knobs and sliders that sound technicians use to mix each track into the best sounding music.
What if you could do that to your job — tune aspects of it until the harmony it created was an exact match for your soul?
Of course, I’m not giving you a free ticket into whatever CEO chair you want, but I am going to help you dig deep in yourself to determine if a CEO chair is what you even want.
I want you to start by forgetting specific jobs, specific companies, or specific people you sit next to on the bus whose lives and outfits you think you want to steal. We need to operate from a clean slate.
Now, we’re going to brainstorm a bunch of job attributes that will become your own personal career-sound. For example, an easy one is Pay. It becomes one of your sliders, and you can move it from high to low. Let’s go ahead and put that all the way up to maximum. Great, this is easy.
Next let’s pick some more. Commute. Easy again — set that one to zero. But let’s get more interesting. What about Peer-dependence — how much your work requires teams or others — with a slider from lone wolf to constant peer interaction. That’s more interesting. Let’s add internal vs. external-facing, technical vs business, individual contributor vs manager, and creative vs logical. Ah, now we’re starting to get some unique sound!
