By Steve Tobak
(MoneyWatch) The most common and
insidious problem people face in their careers has nothing to do with finding a
job, boosting their pay or climbing the corporate ladder. It's called inertia.
Career inertia is so common it's almost an epidemic, especially among baby
boomers.
The problem goes something like
this. For whatever reason, you end up on a particular professional path. Maybe
your parents pushed you into becoming an engineer or you watched a lot of legal
shows on TV and decided to become a lawyer. Then you wake up one day and
realize you haven't actually made a career decision in 20 or 30 years.
Thinking back over your career, it
seems as though everything just sort of happened to you. You got your first job
offer making good money and you were excited. You climbed the ladder until a
headhunter or someone you knew came up with an opportunity for you to make more
money. And so it goes. Here you are.
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That's all well and good if that
serendipitous path somehow resulted in you being a fabulously successful and
happy top executive or something similar. The far more likely scenario is that
your career path could just as easily have happened to someone else. And the
results were somewhat less than stellar.
That's because it wasn't really you
making big decisions about what you want to do with your life. It was you
jumping on the next opportunity that presented itself. It may have even seemed
as if you were taking risks and "going for it" when, in reality, you
were just choosing the path of least resistance from a very limited set of
options.
I've known lots and lots of people
who succumbed to career inertia. Some figure it out, usually as the result of a
personal crisis of some sort, and somehow manage to get off the treadmill and
reinvent themselves before it's too late. Others find themselves locked onto a
course that flatlined long ago or live in a constant state of denial filled
with one excuse after another.
The only way I know of to avoid
that fate is to look in the mirror and ask yourself, "Is this really what
I want to do with my life?" Then you have to have the courage to actually
listen to the answer and act on it. Sure, that means you have to be honest with
yourself, painful as that may be. And yes, it's scary to change, I know. But
you know what? Waking up one day and realizing you wasted the only life you
have is way, way worse.
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