Why Career Planning Is Time Wasted
Our culture worships planning. Everything must be planned in advance. Our days, week, years, our entire lives. We have diaries, schedules, checklists, targets, goals, aims, strategies, visions even. Career planning is the most insidious of these cults precisely because it encourages a feeling of control over your reactions to future events. As that interview question goes: where do you see yourself in five years time? This invites the beginning of what starts as a little game and finishes as a belief built on sand. You guess what employers want to hear, and then you give it to them. Sometimes this batting back and forth of imagined futures becomes a necessary little game you play in order to 'get ahead'.
In reality, people frequently don't know what they want and psychology has proved it. That's why career planning, or at the very least just deciding what you're going to do next, is so unpleasant. It's no fun at 18 years old when people ask what you want to do. There seem to be so many different options, each with myriad branching possibilities, many of which lead in opposite directions, but all equally tempting. Surrounded by these endless spiralling futures, it is no wonder that many a school-leaver sticks with what they know and follows in parental footsteps. But we don't all want to trust the tried and tested, whether for good reasons or bad. We want to make a decision all of our own, based on our own values and preferences.
Midlife crisis
If it's hard at 18, it's even harder in midlife when people are theoretically better equipped to make their choice. In reality by your 30s wide-eyed optimism has normally been replaced by a more cynical outlook on jobs and the workplace. Now it's more clear what the downsides of certain jobs are. There's not only our own experiences of work but we also have friends at work, all of whom colour our perception of their careers.
Everyone has their own internal trade-offs. How much routine do you like: boring but safe? How much do you like travel: exciting but you'll be away from loved ones? How much do you care about earning more money: and taking a more boring/stressful/less fulfilling job? Whatever the outcome of all these swings and roundabouts along with many more, the reason that deciding what to do with your life is so difficult is that it involves predicting the future.
There's many reasons why it seems we should be good at prediction what we want. If I know that I'm enjoying what I'm doing now, then I should enjoy it in the future shouldn't I? On top of this I've got years of experience building up a set of things I like - cinema, books, sitcoms - and things I don't like - trips to the dentist, severe embarrassment and flu, especially not all at the same time. If I've got this huge bank of likes and dislikes it should be easy to predict my wants in the future. And yet, it seems we are often surprised by what the future throws at us.
Miswanting
The idea of making mistakes about what we might want in the future has been termed 'miswanting' by Gilbert and Wilson (2000). They point to a range of studies finding we are poor at predicting what will make us happy in the future. My favourite is a simple experiment in which two groups of participants get free sandwiches if they participate in the experiment - a doozie for any undergraduate.
One group has to choose which sandwiches they want for an entire week in advance. The other group gets to choose which they want each day. A fascinating thing happens. People who choose their favourite sandwich each day at lunchtime also often choose the same sandwich. This group turns out to be reasonably happy with its choice.
Amazingly, though, people choosing in advance assume that what they'll want for lunch next week is a variety. And so they choose a turkey sandwich Monday, tuna on Tuesday, egg on Wednesday and so on. It turn out that when next week rolls around they generally don't like the variety they thought they would. In fact they are significantly less happy with their choices than the group who chose their sandwiches on the day.
Prediction failure
This variety versus sameness is only one particular bias that people display in making predictions about their future emotional states. There is another counter-intuitive bias emerging from the work being done in positive psychology. This looks at how people predict they will feel after both catastrophically bad, and, conversely, fantastically positive occurrences in their life. For example, how good would you feel if you won the lottery? Most people predict their lives will be completely changed and they'll be much happier. What does the research find? Yes, people are measurably happier after they've just won, but six months down the line they're back to their individual 'baseline' level of happiness.
So, in the journey from the sublime - predicting how we'll feel about winning the lottery - to the ridiculous - predicting which sandwiches we'll want for lunch - we are incredibly bad at knowing our future selves. And if we can't even decide what type of sandwich we might like next week, how can we possibly decide what type of job we'd like to be doing in twenty years?
With age occasionally comes wisdom. Over time we learn, whether implicitly or explicitly, that we are not that good at predicting the future. At the very least we begin to recognise it is a much less precise science than we once thought.
A stranger future
This means your future self is probably a stranger to you. And, on some level, you know it. That's why it might be hard for an 18 year old to choose their career, but it's a damn sight harder for someone in midlife when limitations have been learnt.
This might seem like just another way of saying that people get more cautious as they get older, but it is more than that. It's actually saying that it's not caution that's increasing with age, but implicit self-knowledge. People begin to understand that the future holds vanishingly few certainties, even for those things that would seem to be under our most direct control, like our sandwich preferences.
Best guess beats careful planning
The argument about miswanting applies to any area of our lives which involves making a prediction about what we might like in the future. Career planning becomes painful precisely because it's such an important decision and we come to understand that we have only very limited useful information.
The best strategy for career planning is this: make your best guess, try it out and don't be surprised if you don't like it. But for heaven's sake don't mention this in your interviews.
[Also see the aptly named 'chaos theory' of career planning that I've noted before.]
References
Gilbert, D. T., & Wilson, T. D. (2000) Miswanting: some problems in the forecasting of future affective states. In: J. Forgas (Ed.). Feeling and Thinking: the role of affect in social cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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I've planned my next years! But I planned it because I discovered what I want to do. After several frustrating experiences in the corporate world (I hate the corporate world and the rat race and having to work for others) I discovered I want to run my own business! This is why I'm now working in the corporate world, have a good salary that enables me to save money and I plan in 2/3 years get out of this job for good and start my own business. I know that in the beginning it will be hard work, so I plan in 5 years have my business up and running.
Hi . . . While I'm shifting careers at 38, and not altogether very gracefully or smoothly, I keep thinking we're kind of misunderstanding this article and the studies it's referencing. First of all, miswanting isn't the same thing as prediction failure, right? I can't say one is the cause & one is the effect . . . I don't know enough to say that . . . they are related but not synonymous. Is this right?
I don't think career planning or counseling is presented as wholly negative unless you believe the career you choose via these methods WILL MAKE YOU HAPPY. That's the key. It might make you some money, might give you some status, more choice, etc (and it might not, of course), but the studies suggest what those things likely won't do is make you happy -- and this is because those achievements could very well be examples of how we miswant (I want safety, I want variety, I want power, I want 3 weeks paid vacation, I want limited supervision and that will make me happy).
We are falsely predicting that the results will make us happy. And that's because we're poor at predicting what will in fact make us happy, AND our wants are based on these errors. Which brings us round to the close of the article: Experiment. Make hypotheses and test them. Discover and assess what you want and what makes you happy, instead of presuming a certain thing, job, or circumstance holds the secret to your happiness.
I read this article (and helpfully, too) as saying that it's not what we do to get there (counseling, education, etc), but what we're thinking about the results of these efforts that we should bring more scrutiny & less certainty to.
CLH, Carla, Anon, Articles, thanks for your reflections on this article.
Its disturbing when an analogy is made between sandwich picking for a week and a career choice for years to come, which entails training and or school. *shudders* I think it is best to have a plan and be disappointed than not have one and be a bum. "Hope for the best expect the worst." What could be done instead of planning when it comes to career choice.?
Our culture worships the idea that you can control the future, others, your health, butterflies on your finger (thanks Wayne Dyer) If you just really really believe it will happen! This fantasy is a cross between Tinkerbell and Success Theology. It appears to be a new kind of post-religious fundamentalism to me. It's practically a crime to admit that you didn't plan your day to the last minute, your kid's career too. "wo/man proposes, God disposes".
It's been proven time and time again over the last 10,000 years that modern civilization (i.e. working/paying for food/shelter, the evolution of a global community and away from the smaller tribes that worked for millions of years) doesn't work for us as a species. We can use all the psychology we want to try to accept the fact that most of us must spend the rest of our lives slaving away, but we'll still be denying what we really are: animal.
If you want to be "happy", forget everything you've been taught about the way you "should" live. Pick up 'Ishmael' by Daniel Quinn. And then just walk away.
Most recent Anon, yes, that's exactly what I'm getting at!
Illuminating article and well articulated. Those were all things I felt but would have had a harder time expressing, and an even harder time trying to back up with scientific proof! Thank you.
When I left teaching 21 years ago I guessed the general theme of my future career path would be somehow related to education and a love of learning.
Prof Edgar Schein's work on career anchors has been of some interest to me especially when an opportunity to begin making a mid life career adjustment beckoned a few years back.
As part of my annual performance review, I had to write out a "career plan". Reading this terrific article and the comments, I'm glad that my feelings about this are not isolated.
I started out my career as an entertainment journalist and am currently a project manager at a website. not the path I would have ever imagined when I started out 12 years ago.
Also, thinking about a career path in the context of the company you're in will always be limiting, as the ladder set out in front of you is basically your boss' job and his boss' job.
I'd agree that happiness planning and making sure you don't sell yourself out are probably more important than career planning.
Either that or "more money, less work" seems to be a good mantra.
Hi,
this is such an interesting little article and comments !
i have let myself fall into what i was good at and made the mistake of making my hobby in computing a career. i'm now studying psychology which i am loving along with being a mum.
i reccommend "who moved my cheese" its only a little book but SO mighty!!! cant remember who wrote it but i'll bet google knows !!
Claire.
"Continue to eat the sandwich, until you desire another, then change"
That's been my sentence since ever. Fortunatelly I discovered at an early age that human being change, that all things are impermanent and that security is an illusion!! That we don't want today the same things we want 5 years ago and that in 5 years I'll not want the same things I want today!
Why? Because I'll have more experience, more maturity, more knowledge about myself and I'll want diferent things that will make sense for me at the present moment! Companies love a person who plans a career because that will give them a sense of security, but that doesn't mean that's the way to go. Maybe you should have your own business and not being in a company in the first place?!
So let me continue eating my sandwiche for now...
Different interpretation on sandwich choosing. You know your likes and dislikes. But you don't know the quality of the sandwiches.
If you choose the sandwich for one day only, and you get it wrong (ie you don't like it), your choice affects one day only and you know more about the sandwiches so your next choice will probably be better. Very soon you will find the choice you want to stick with.
If you have to choose for a whole week/fortnight you don't put all your eggs in one basket. The rational, odds-based assumption is that you will get some days wrong and some days right. So you pick a variety.
Hello,
please have tryed the time planning or time management but, if you can add the table planning it would be very better.
thanks.
Omowunmi A.K
There are select few in this life who have the power and the resources to completley plan their career. The rest of us are just like fallen leaves in the wind.