Most of us think about pursuing our dreams, as well we should. Dreams are powerful motivators. Equally important to consider is the reality that results from pursuing the dream. Once you have your unique assets in place, what are the chances for success? If you are successful, what do you have, what have you become, and what are your next possibilities? If you are not successful, you still need to answer those same questions: what do you have, what have you become, and what are your next possibilities?
For example, if your dream is to be a poet, it is unlikely that you can support yourself by selling your poems. Of the thousands of poets in the United States, very few can live off what they make from their poetry. Since most poetry journals pay between nothing and $100 per poem, you would need to write and publish 8 to 9 poems per week at $100 per poem to simply make the average U.S. salary of $44,000. If you are a trust fund baby or otherwise independently wealthy, you can have the luxury to write poetry full-time because you don’t have to depend on the $100 that poetry journals pay (if you’re lucky). Most well-known poets have “day jobs” like teaching, editing, or waiting tables, that bring in the money they live on. The money they make from publishing their poems and poetry readings is supplemental pocket change. The fact that writing poetry doesn’t yield economic rewards sufficient for poets to support themselves and their families doesn’t, however, make poetry any less meaningful or pleasurable to these poets.
Some realized dreams, by contrast, become nightmares. John was a successful IBM executive who had grown weary of the rat race of corporate life and New York. Over the years, he and his social worker-wife Millie had acquired a hobby in bee keeping and honey making. Avid readers, they had learned all they could about the process and had a successful hive at the small rural retreat they used on weekends. After much discussion on how to live their lives more fully, they followed their dream by moving to New Hampshire and starting a honey bee farm.
Although they had over 20+ years of business and social work experience, John and Millie had not fully appreciated how difficult it would be to make a go of their new business. After three years, with their savings depleted from equipment purchases, the farm mortgage, and not enough replacement revenue coming in, the bills piled up. To make ends meet, John had to start selling real estate in their small community while Millie took a job as a teacher’s aide. The bee farm was not only a bust, but it became a stone around their necks. Their hard-earned savings were gone and they were now in debt. Their financial downfall even caused them to delay their kids’ college plans. Climbing out of their self-created hole would take years. Their idyllic country-life dream turned into a nightmare.
Note that the problem was not necessarily the dream. The problem was their view of their personal bundle of money-making assets in relation to the dream. They did not have the right assets—such as marketing experience or relationships with retailers—to make the bee business work. In other words, they neither understood the critical path of bee keeping, nor did they have the right assets to succeed on that critical path. An interest or enthusiasm is a starting point, but it’s only a starting point. John and Millie needed additional assets to be successful. Plus, even if they could make money at the bee business, they never asked themselves what the likely economic potential was. Would they always just make enough to pay their bills or was there considerable upside potential?
Returning to the house analogy from the previous lesson, was John and Millie’s business the equivalent of a house in a poor, rundown neighborhood or one in a growing, prosperous, upscale neighborhood? Even if the couple were able to not lose money, would it always be a break-even business or would its value, like a house in an appreciating neighborhood, increase over time?
What happened to John and Millie starting a new business can happen to anyone starting any new job. People think of their “dream job” only to find that it is an illusion. People go into journalism thinking they will expose the latest fraud or cover the presidential election. Instead, they find themselves assigned to write columns on the local spelling bee or the rising cost of corn production. People go into politics thinking they will pass laws that affect public policy. Instead, they find that garbage collection and snow removal are more important to voters. Or, they find that in backroom horse trading, they end up compromising their stance on one issue in order to get another issue passed. People compete for venture capital jobs thinking they will uncover the next Facebook or Airbnb. Instead, they find that entry-level VC jobs are more like ambulance-chasing lawyers trying to track down viable entrepreneurs who have swarms of VCs chasing them.
All of the above examples could be explained away as naïve job seekers who didn’t understand the reality of the jobs they were seeking. They looked at their dream jobs through rose-colored glasses, mentally distorting the day-to-day life in that job. Or they didn’t realize that to achieve their dream jobs, they needed to start at the bottom, learn their craft through experience, and work their way up.
We would argue that these dream job seekers, like John and Millie the beekeepers, had a problem that was bigger than the dream or their assets: they didn’t understand their businesses’ critical path.
We want to help you see your life’s possibilities through a different set of lenses. We will start with learning about your economic worth and then look at potential paths to make
Critical Path Action Items
What are your job dreams?
Do you understand the critical path of making your dreams come true?
Do you have the job assets to succeed on that critical path and make your job dream come true?