Archive for the ‘Human Resource’ Category
WHY I DID NOT JOIN B-SCHOOL
The lesson that working as a builder taught me above all others, one that’s not in the textbooks but should be, is this: There’s pure joy when you take a risk to pursue your dream and find work that you deeply connect with.
Now, as a college professor, I see my students struggling with a desire to have more than a career. They want to have a “calling,” but many are dissatisfied and frustrated, following a path set by others while afraid to set their own. I have counseled many of my students to follow their passion as I did. But it’s not an easy thing to do.
I learned in building that in the end, for my career to be my calling, it will not be what I designed, but instead the collective of what I experienced. It will not be aimed toward a fixed end of stability and certainty, but a continuous pursuit of growth and awareness. That growth will not be for others to critique and review but for me to judge and deem satisfactory. Now I know that my very first decision to become a carpenter in Nantucket was only the first step in a journey, I didn’t know I was taking. And that’s what makes it so wonderful. For all its seeming irrationality, it was my announcement to myself and to others that my life was my own.
When I started this journey, I just wanted to be a carpenter. But I surpassed my wildest dreams and became a builder, a distinction I didn’t even know existed when I started. And this realization leads me to one overriding and inescapable truth, that a life well lived must be a creative endeavor. Whatever form that creativity takes — whether it’s carpentry, building, teaching, raising a family, or writing a book — the challenge of looking within ourselves to find that creative element makes us who we are. But chances are, if we are genuinely open to the possibilities of a calling, we will find that satisfaction will come from someplace far different from where we expected to find it.
I cherish my experiences as a builder — and the astonished looks on people’s faces when I tell them that I chose this path over graduate school. I still maintain my set of tools and make constant repairs on my house (many not needed). And I recall the certainty of satisfaction I felt with a job well done. I felt a clarity in construction that doesn’t come as easily in academia.
This is not to say that academia is not a noble profession or that I should not be devoting my life to it now. It is to say that satisfaction in life comes from knowing who you are, what you want to do and sticking to your idea of what quality is; how a job well done is measured. Matthew Crawford has been writing lately about the need for society to reexamine the taken-for-granted assumption that everyone should go to college and get a white collar desk job; that the trades “suffer from low prestige” and that a choice to go into them “is viewed as eccentric, if not self-destructive.”
While I agree that the trades are an honorable profession (and presently quite a lucrative one, as anyone who has done a renovation on their home can attest). But the deeper point to me is the challenge to take the time to think about what you really want in life before laying out the time and money on higher education. And once you have a sense of yourself, stick to your own measure of who you are.
The pressures of conformity in graduate school can be quite strong; most vividly at graduation time when students compare starting salaries. And those pressures start much earlier for many. I see young students today building their resumes from the 7th or 8th grade. The danger in teaching this practice so early is the concurrent lesson that the measure of your worth comes from outside, from the evaluation of others as they survey your resume.
When students ask me where they should go with their careers to make the most money or to have the most impact, I am quick to tell them: “Wrong questions, try again.” The key questions are ones that only they can answer (with some prodding from me): “What were you meant to do with your life? What do you want to do? Where do you most fit?” The final lesson for my students from my years building houses is to pick their path and be open to the possibilities that emerge as they embark upon it. I truly believe that opportunities will be revealed to you.
As Henry David Thoreau said most eloquently, “I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”
Andrew J. Hoffman is at the Stephen M. Ross School of Business, University of Michigan, and is the author of Builder’s Apprentice Huron River Press, 2010. This is the fifth installment in a series of posts on five years spent running a construction company. The first post was Firing Someone: What They Don’t Teach You in B-School. The second post was, Talking Across Cultures (With or Without Profanity). The third post was, Trusting Your Gut: What They Don’t Teach You in B-School. The fourth post was, How Comraderie Works: What I Didn’t Learn in B-School.
