Sokanu: The Blog

I remember walking through those high school doors on my first day of Grade 12. Walking tall, brand new jeans still smelling of the department store, and a bag full of fresh pens and notebooks, I owned that school. It was my final year and I was about to rock it! It’s funny how being a teenager gives you the feeling of knowing it all.  As the semester wore on that little responsible voice in my brain kept asking me “Okay, what’s the plan?”

I wasn’t sure. 

Luckily for me, there was a great University only a twenty-minute drive away. Not wanting to burden myself with student loans, rent, and the general expenses of living in another city, I opted for the school close to home. That left the question of what exactly it was I wanted to do for the rest of my life. So I asked myself the question that everyone ponders.

What do I love to do? This question seems simple enough…but when it comes down to finding the right University, degree, and four years of commitment, that question could not feel more complicated. 

Needing some help, I went to talk to one of the career counselors at the University. We sat in her office while she took me through a quick tutorial of the school website: web registration, program descriptions, scholarships and awards, and tuition fees. “What a lot of people do, “ she tells me, tapping her fingernails on the screen, “is take some general courses to find out what they like.” 

Sounds simple enough. But classes are expensive and I didn’t have the funds to take a bunch of courses that may not have gone towards my final degree.

So I thought about it again. What do I love to do?

When I was a kid I loved to write. I loved the sound of crinkling paper and smell of ink. I had a binder full of scrap paper that I used to write short stories in. My grandmother gave me an electric typewriter for my 12^th birthday. I loved the way the keys tapped on the page and the loud ding! as the paper tray slid back to the beginning. I would write poems and practice cursive letters. Could this be my passion?

It felt like so many of my friends had their lives planned out: four years undergrad degree, then grad school, internships with companies in their field, and then a full-time career. I wanted so badly to be able to see myself five, ten, fifteen years in the future. But I couldn’t. All I could see was myself at a laptop, tapping away at the keys with a smile on my face. Was this enough?

First day of University feels something like that first day of high school…but bigger. Everyone is older and walking around with purpose. Book bags across their shoulders, coffee in their hands, heading to and from class. I suddenly felt very small. But I had learned to rock high school; I could certainly learn to rock University. I signed up for a few English classes in my first semester and one short fiction class…and fell absolutely in love. So this is what I wanted to do. My childhood already knew: a writer.

And it started with one question: What do YOU love to do?

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Renee Masur is a fourth year Creative Writing major working on finishing up her degree. For the past nine months she has been an (amazing) intern at Sokanu, a company focused on helping people find their passion in life. 

Obviously these careers all have attributes related to the cluster that you are in. When you click on one of these careers, you will see a lot more information on it. Absolutely everything we have discovered about that career is packaged into something we call a "career portal". The goal of each career portal is to have the highest quality, best curated content on the internet brought to you in one place. In order for the content to make sense to you the user, you will need to be able to quickly assess whether you are potentially interested in that career or not. In order to do that, the career portals need to present the experience of each career in a beautiful way.

Our theory is that you, the person looking to find your passion in life, already know internally what you resonate with. By virtue of being in one cluster, you have elimated 90% of the careers on the site. Already Sokanu is getting a lot smaller for you. Now, when you see these career portals, you can easily let us know your intent by "following" the careers that interest you most. I won't say much more about the details of the career portals, because that's something we will reveal when we launch.

So how does this help? How does following a few careers help you find your passion in life? Well, this is just one piece of the puzzle. Another piece of the puzzle is your social graph. We all have Facebook accounts, but do we know what all of our friends do? What careers are they interested in? Are all of our contacts really "friends"? Are some of them more job-based? Some distant connections? Some people you don't even know at all?

At first glance, Sokanu is going to look very large. But as you begin to use it, it will become smaller and smaller, eventually only showing you exactly what you need in order to help you make an informed decision about what your passion is. Our goal is to build an experience that is totally customized to your needs and situation at your point in life. This is the only way we can truly adapt to organic, growing people. Will we build the perfect system off the start? Of course not. But what you are going to see in the near future is the first step in a journey to help every single person on the planet find the career they are meant to be in.

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What if you have no idea where to start? How can you identify with a certain "type" of career to know if it is right for you? These are all questions that make Sokanu "tick" and I can't answer them in detail right now. But in our next post I will talk about the problem of having no direction to start in. I will also talk about some strategies that we will be taking to start to shift the current model of thinking about career decisions into a more intelligent, collaborative world. Stay tuned.

*Note: This is the second in a series of posts leading up to the launch of Sokanu. In this series we will be discussing the core purpose behind the Sokanu vision as well as outline what our product does. For a full list of posts in this series see the left hand column of the blog.

Simply put, it means that you have found a driving force that guides your decisions, actions and overall life direction. This is a very general oversimplification of the term, but it can be incredibly complex. Why? Human beings are not linear creatures. We all don't progress at the same rate, interpret the world in the same way, and like the same things. We are instead organic, growing at incredibly different rates. This is what makes the world so brilliant. And as we progress in our lives, we change shape. We morph according to what people tell us, what we read, what we watch. We change, positively or negatively, based on our relationships - both personally and professionally. 

Throughout all of this change, amidst all of this opportunity, we are supposed to choose "a passion" that we are meant to follow for the rest of our lives. What a daunting task. The key, I believe, is to spend a lot of time thinking about optimizing the things that you love right now versus where you want to go in the future. There are a couple of different methods that we use to try and co-ordinate these thoughts. One is called the hedgehog concept, and we have written about it before here: http://blog.sokanu.com/finding-your-personal-hedgehog-concept-with-s. The second way to finding your passion is actually synonymous with finding a purpose in life. There is a wonderful article on this topic here: http://hbr.org/2010/07/how-will-you-measure-your-life/ar/1. We will speak about this more in the next section.

These are the people who express no purpose or passion at all for anything in their lives. They are currently not active in any endeavour that may lead into a passionate pursuit, nor do they show any signs that they are looking to find such pursuits. Some people in this group are detached from the world, while others are completely ego-driven and don't care at all about the world outside the self. However, this group is not "the worst" class of people. They have just been raised and nurtured in a very poor environment relative to what we need to be happy. Hopefully the power of the internet and mentors who have been in their shoes can help lift them out of this group.

Wofford College president Ben Dunlap tells the story of Sandor Teszler, a Hungarian Holocaust survivor who taught him about passionate living and lifelong learning.

Our parents may well be the last generation ever to have a single, stable job for 30 years or more. Many of our parents got their degree, being the first in their family, and used this to land a safe, well-paying job. With the recent financial turmoil, and the rise of technology and globalization, there is a very likely chance that most of us won't have just one job throughout our working life.

If we are trying to find our passion and translate this into a career - should we be worried? Today's post is going to take a look at people who seem to have multiple interests - which allows them to bounce in and out of certain careers. Is this still considered finding your passion? Then we will take a look at people who never really vary from their original career path - having truly found what they love to do. I believe there is a large difference between the two and only one of them leads to world-class success.

Liking What You Do

A common scenario for individuals that have been through college or university and landed a fairly stable job is to eventually move up the career "ladder". This means more responsibility and increased pay. But this does not necessarily mean more intrinsic value. After the initial burst of excitement of having a "real" job - you may begin to have a small twinge of something in your gut. This little feeling is something telling you that you are not really following your path. This usually happens when you settle into a job that does not align with your passion - what you prefer to be doing. This scenario is extremely common and usually not in your best interest. You can even enter into a job trap called "golden handcuffs" where you are getting paid well enough to live a very decent lifestyle, but not paid enough to quit and start over again, without having major financial issues.

But this post is about when you are in a job that you get value from. You like the task at hand, you see how you are contributing and you believe that you have passion for it. Great! But with most people, when they have been in a career that they "like" for years, it may become stale. This is perfectly natural. They then go and look for another career in something else they like to do. If they are talented and skilled enough, they will make a transition into another career. By living your life doing things you are passionate about, you will generally be very happy. After all, most people don't ever get the chance to do work that they like!

So what is the problem? Why did I mention above that this doesn't really count as finding your passion in life? For a couple of reasons, but the main one being that I believe people have one true passion that they should be doing. Is this the same thing as having one career your whole life? No - not at all. I still believe that we are in a world where one must have multiple careers. However, I believe the major factor comes from where those careers happen to be in.

Loving What You Do

Let's take a couple of case scenarios. The first person is someone I know. He is talented in quite a few things, but very talented at skiing. Even though this is really only his first year of taking skiing seriously, he has already become a certified instructor and has improved tremendously over the course of just a few months. I believe that if he dedicated his life to it over the next eight years, he could potentially be in the Winter Olympics come 2018. Why do I mention this? Because beyond the fact that he likes to ski - he also has a natural aptitude towards it. And following the hedgehog concept - skiing is also a viable career path that can lead to quite a few well-paying jobs. 

But is he going into a career path involving skiing? No, for the simple reason that he does not have a true passion for it. By this I mean that he cannot see himself being involved in a skiing career for the rest of his life. Skiing is just an interest, and something he likes to do. Can you call this one of his passions? Sure - but I think that it is better called a hobby he loves to do.

This sounds like a perfect scenario, and some hubris was used for literary effect. But when that child grows up and becomes a dancer, this will be her true passion. Sure, she will have other interests on the side, maybe painting and gardening, but she only likes those things. She only loves to dance, and can't imagine her world without it. Even after she is too old to continue dancing, she will transition into a career still within that industry. She may become a choreographer, the owner of a studio or a writer. Even though she will fluctuate careers - she will always stay within the category.

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Here within lies the difference between world-class individuals and those who like what they do. People at the top of any career have found their passion in life - and can't picture their life without it. They wouldn't be themselves anymore if it weren't in their life. They are partly defined by what they do as a career. We term this a passionate calling. 

Those who like multiple careers throughout their lifetime are not any worse off - it's just not the same thing. Most people that happen to find multiple careers they are passionate about are extremely lucky. But these careers are defined more by interest than they are by intrinsic value - making them passionate careers.

A fantastic video here – Sir Ken Robinson talks about topics from his new book The Element. He explores education, creativity, human possibility and the magic point at which natural talent meets personal passion -  finding the thing that resonates with you that leads to personal success. Highly recommended, funny and insightful.

You won't just be happier when you follow your passionate career path; you'll be better at it. IDEO's General Manager Tom Kelley quotes author Jim Collins who identifies a Venn diagram in every career path - the overlapping intersection of what you're good at, what you're born to do, what people will pay you to do, and finding a happy group of co-workers with whom to work. In the pursuit of self-discovery, Kelley suggests keeping a laboratory notebook tracking the happiest moments in life to discover our own true passions.