Don't find a job, find a mission | Celeste Headlee | TEDxAugusta

[Music] [Music] [Music] to grab whatever paper you have next to you whether it's the program or not and I I think serious I really want you to do this grab a writing utensil and I want you to answer a question for me a write the answer down do you like your job it's number one and number two do you think you'll still like doing that job in 20 or 30 years so write that down for me and then set it if you're laughing already and set it aside we're gonna come back to that later so the most common question that I get asked whenever I'm speaking public is how did you get where you are and generally I say by accident I stumbled into it but I will admit something to you today I have been lying about that for a very long time I didn't actually stumble into it it was a very carefully executed plan that I wasn't aware of until a long time later so if you don't know who I am I am a host on public radio I hosted a show called the takeaway for a number of years I've hosted tell me more for NPR Talk of the Nation week in addition many others I entered presidential coverage for PBS world I've spoken to movie stars and presidents and Pulitzer Prize winners and Nobel Peace Prize winners but I have never studied journalism in school I'm a professional opera singer and radio is my day job I have a master's degree in music so you might be thinking that I am not using my music degree and my job as a broadcast journalist but you would be really really wrong yes radio show host and professional opera sing are two very different jobs but in fact the core mission of both of them is exactly the same in both of those jobs I'm reaching out to people I'm communicating with people I'm inspiring people I'm moving people using only the power of my voice so now if I'm asked how I got where I am I say I found my mission and I forgot about the job title let me say that again because that's the whole point of this entire talk I found my mission and I completely ignored what the job title was the fact of the matter is most people in the world do not like their work so I want you all to take a look around you and count out ten people okay surrounding you somewhere using global statistics nine of those people do not like what they do but this is the u.s. so let's use American statistics count out your ten people again take a look at them one of them really likes what they do to that person congratulations six of them think it's not killing me and three of them really hate their work really hate it job dissatisfaction cost this country up to five hundred and fifty billion dollars a year in lost productivity that is billion with a B worldwide nearly 90 percent of people don't like their work and that statistic really doesn't tell us very much maybe human beings don't like to work maybe we have universally horrible bosses but let me tell you what I think that statistic means I think it means we are terrible at choosing the right job what things do we consider when we're looking for work and I'm not talking about the I'm unemployed I'll take anything situation I'm talking about the I don't like what I do I want to try something new what do we think we think about salary obviously no-brainer we think about location Americans have shown themselves to be very reluctant to move and in fact we don't even like to move very far to get to our work the average commute time is about 20 to 25 minutes and that has stayed the same for more than a decade what else benefits vacation time healthcare retirement sick days and believe me that is all really really important but research such as the Harvard Business Review wondered if those things also made you happy so they studied it and the answer was no of all the many many things that go into happiness on the job the highest single impact is purpose people who think there's significance and meaning to the work that they do are more than three times as likely to stay in their job and they also have higher jobs job satisfaction and they're also more engaged and listen I can I can almost hear your thoughts coming at me I know you've heard it before find your dream job right you've probably heard it from some life Scott's lifestyle guru who's selling millions of books telling you to look deep within yourself but I would never tell you to go looking for your dream job and here's why it doesn't exist okay there's no such thing as a dream job the best minds doing the best research into what makes you happy at work have found that it's generally your co-workers your boss and your sense of purpose not anything that you would find in your job description so let me just make sure we're all on the same page dream jobs do not exist there was a young woman named Ashley Stahl she spent her whole young life yearning for a career in national security she got a master's degree in international relations she spoke fluent Arabic she went to DC and spent six weeks they're going to 90 events schmoozing with anyone and everyone she could find and it totally paid off at the age of 23 she got her dream job at the Pentagon and she hated it she quit after eight months she did not even last a year after spending almost 20 years preparing for that job she told the Wall Street Journal that she had paid no attention to her friends when they said you know you're really good at getting us to talk about our jobs you're you're really insightful eyed at identifying our weaknesses and our strengths so three years later she's working as a career counsellor for young people and guess what she loves her job let me give you another example there are thousands maybe tens of thousands of athletes who never get that call from the NBA the NFL Major League Baseball right so they have to find another line of work now you might think that something like sports psychologists would be a perfect fit and lots of those athletes think the same thing but the giant Journal of applied sports ecology published a study last year in which they found that in fact if you can't make a living in sports listening to professional athletes talk about their problems all day is really upsetting and that is how it is for many of us it doesn't matter what it looks like on paper we are terrible at choosing the right job so I have a talk-show host right you would be amazed at how many people hold that up as their dream job so let me take a quick show of hands and again I want you to be absolutely honest here okay raise your hand if you think in a pinch you actually might be pretty good at hosting a talk show raise your hands come on I know you were out there okay a lot of people think that in fact like I said that's one of the most common questions that I get my husband used to say that he would make a pretty good talk-show host but after years of watching me he does not say that anymore what you hear on the radio is a tiny fraction of what my job is every day I can't turn my cell phone off I don't mean like I can't bear to turn my cell phone off I mean I can't turn it off I have to read two hundred page books in three days time it's very hard for me to take sick days or vacation days and when I make a mistake everybody knows so if being a talk show host is your dream job you have to make sure you know what that job actually is so if we aren't very good at identifying what our dream job is how do we choose right I mean it's really difficult if you can't look at a job description and know that's the right job first of all don't burn down the house you're living in until you have somewhere else to go don't quit your job you have to try stuff out go volunteer freelance take a part-time job ask your boss can I go work in another department for a couple of weeks the point is make the stakes really low put nothing on the outcome either successful or failure so that you're brave enough to venture into completely uncharted territory places things you haven't trained for things that are not related to your college degree I mean most of us choose our college major when we're in our early 20s you think you've changed a little since then maybe there was one woman named Erin Hochstetler and she got her degree in art history and she took a job as an intellectual property paralegal and she kept that job for 15 years but she didn't like it so she sat down and asked yourself okay what makes me happy and so besides family and friends the only thing she could think about was her phone she really liked her smart phone so she started taking coding classes and she became a mobile app programmer then she quit the law firm and she loves what she does that's the problem we often don't know what we enjoy until we've tried it right I mean you don't know what food you like until you taste it so forget that crap about what would you do even if you weren't being paid I mean for me that would be like hiking with my dogs and reading mystery novels all day but come on what I really want to read mystery novels for eight hours a day with some guy coming to the door asking me how many novels I've read over the past few hours that's a lot of bad novels there's a career counselor who was trying to help a guy change careers mid-career and she asked him the terrible terrible question what would you do if you didn't have to worry about salary and he said well I'd coach Little League but I do have to worry about salary and you can't make a living teaching kids how to play baseball but here's where he made his mistake he came up with a job title Little League coach not a mission what was it that he liked about coaching Little League was it being with kids was it working with sports was it being outdoors because those are things you can totally make a living at you just have to forget that very specific job title when I graduated with a degree in Opera I knew I'd have to get a day job it was very realistic about that one day I went into my local public radio station I was just tagging along with a friend and I saw an old college buddy of mine there and she said Celeste do you want a job and I went sure what's the job and she then hired me to be a weekend classical music host couple later the news producer came up to me and said you know we don't have anybody that can report on the arts are you interested in learning how to become a reporter and I said sure a month after that conversation I sold my first feature to NPR but here's the thing if you'd asked me what I wanted to do I would never have said broadcast journalist I had no idea what that job was I didn't know what was involved in it and I sure didn't know if I would be in a good it so the other part of that is to remember that the core mission I wouldn't wanna remind you the core mission was the same I actually landed in a job where my mission wasn't change hasn't changed I'm still using my voice to communicate people with people I'm still using my voice to touch people and inform people same exact job same mission different job title no amount of looking within yourself it's going to tell you what will make you happy we learn about ourselves through practice not theory and if you take nothing else away just remember that you learned the most about yourself not in theory but in practice so go back to that paper take a look at it because I want real answers go back to the paper and take a look at what you said how many of you said you don't like your jobs if some people not being fully honest with us today how many of you said you thought you would be happy you would be happy doing that 20 or 30 years from now so here's your homework this is what I want you to think out about when you go home what is it that you actually like about your job what is it that you think you do really well what do other people say that you do really well which part do you enjoy somewhere in those answers is your mission find that and you'll find the right job Thanks [Applause] in the extensive research that went behind my preparation for this tell everybody about your granddad I assume you mean the famous one the other one was just a mechana one my grandfather was William Grant still he was the dean of African American composers the first to conduct a major orchestra to first have a symphony performed by a major orchestra the first to conduct an opera there's about 14 third firsts is that where the love of music came from I would assume I'm the only one of my family after him that does music though so maybe it's not genetic really yeah okay did you know him of course yeah he was the best guy ever um Celeste is gonna favor us with a tune I am a little something from porgy and bess Celeste not by your grandmother Celeste Headley ladies and gentlemen [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you're gonna rise up see [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 1,414,459

Rating: 4.8998485 out of 5

Keywords: Career, tedx talks, ted talk, English, ted x, ted, TEDxTalks, tedx talk, United States, Dreams, tedx, Life, ted talks

Id: VVx6ntr5OqI

Length: 16min 37sec (997 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 16 2015