Our Choices, Our Destiny

Today's Career Tips

Our Choices, Our Destiny

By NELSON T. DY

http://www.careerguide.ph

Jay was about to graduate from college with a degree in business management, but he wanted to become an actor. His parents asked him to reconsider. Jay came to realize that he was simply attracted by the glamour he sees on TV. Had he followed his dreams, he would have spent his early adult years in “showbiz” with no guarantee of success. These are the same years—precious time which he could not recover if his acting aspirations turn sour—he can invest to learn the ropes of the business world. Today, he is a trusted analyst in a leading accounting firm, with a stable income and promising career path.

Cecille has a wise aunt who fed her a lot of sound advice. What Cecille considered restrictive and old-fashioned was the aunt’s firm admonition, “Absolutely no boyfriend yet. Finish your college course and have a steady career.” To make the long story short, Cecille began secretly dating someone and got pregnant. She had to stop her studies as she became a young, unemployed single mom.

Many of life’s blessings and problems can be traced to one word – choices. We are the product of the decisions other people made for us and we make for ourselves. Specifically, one’s life is profoundly shaped by career decisions. For example, some choose jobs where they work regular hours from Monday to Friday, while others enter industries that compel them to toil on night shifts, weekends and holidays. There are jobs that lead to dead ends and jobs wherein the sky’s the limit. One can embark on a certain profession that, after many years down the road, will make it difficult for him to shift careers.

In short, our choices are our destinies. This is especially crucial when we are still young, mobile and flexible. Therefore, we must heed the following principles.

We are free to make choices, but we are not free from the consequences of those choices

Life operates on a sort of cause-and-effect pattern. The Bible puts it this way, “A man reaps what he sows … Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.”

Generally speaking, if we study and work hard, we boost our chances of landing a good job and get promoted. If we get lazy and negligent, we doom our careers and watch other people getting ahead of us. So the next time we envy the accomplishments of a businessman, doctor, athlete or musician, keep in mind the hidden years of preparation and hardship before he reached the peak of that success.

True, there are people who dropped out of college and became billionaires. But it is safer to see them as exceptions rather than the rule. They may not have a diploma, but they had other factors working for them: street smarts, industriousness, perseverance and simply being at the right place at the right time. So, if we suppose we can bum around and be the next Steve Jobs, we better be sure we have the same qualities and opportunities Steve Jobs had.

Therefore, learn how to make wise decisions

Universities train students how to make technical choices. For example, finance people are taught how to evaluate investment alternatives and choose the best. A medical student learns how to spot symptoms and arrive at a correct diagnosis before prescribing the cure. Engineers know how to select designs and systems for optimum efficiency.

What I would like to see are more courses on how one can order his life so he can be all that he can be. Wisdom is not limited to college and career. One can be a successful manager and yet his personal relationships are in shambles. One can earn a ton of money and yet remain mired in debt. One can be so driven to succeed that he suffers from ulcers or is cut short by a heart attack.

Today’s workplace desperately needs wisdom and yet wisdom is not easy to come by. One starts with being humble and teachable, as the contrasting stories of Jay and Cecille attest. Being teachable necessitates teachers. But it is not enough to have advisors. It is to have wise advisors whose counsel is tempered by years of hard-earned experience and unquestionable integrity. These are the guys who made mistakes so that we don’t have to. It takes one piece of advice to make or break a career. Therefore, choose your sources of wisdom carefully.

Lastly, we can still make the best of bad decisions

Unless we have done something incredibly stupid such as embezzling company funds or sexually harassing a co-worker, most of our bad decisions can be redeemed. For people like Jay, the world is his oyster. For those like Cecille, it is not the end of the world.

If we have time and resources to correct or reverse an ill-advised career move, well and good. If it is too late—for example, we are stuck in what we consider “second best” careers—the challenge is to be faithful to the task, even if it doesn’t seem to fit our training or aspirations for the meantime. One must learn how to make peace with his past or better yet, make peace with himself. Bad decisions also impart an unexpected but precious gift—one becomes more understanding and empathic to people who committed their own blunders. He grows to become the wise advisor he wishes he had and the generous mentor other people earnestly seek.

In the end, we must believe that God’s specialty is in picking up the broken pieces and mending them into something beautiful. But we must deal with our bad decisions not by wallowing in self-pity or bitterness, but by getting up on our feet, finding ways to be productive and entrusting our destinies to God. God can reach back to our misspent past and use it to prepare us for a significant future.

More career tips can be found in Nelson T. Dy’s book Your First Job: A Practical Guide for Success. Give your just-graduated friends and loved ones a great gift with this book that’s full of insights from seasoned Filipino executives. Comment or questions are welcome via nelson_dy@hotmail.com.