In my first two jobs out of college I worked as a D&O liability insurance underwriter and as an analyst on a fixed income trading floor. Having been an English major, I was proud of myself for weaseling my way into analytical jobs, surviving a financial analysis bootcamp with a Wharton professor and passing my Series 7 & 63 licensure exams. Even though I knew neither job was natural fit for me, I convinced myself that if I learned how to do it, I could figure out a way to add some value in my own way.
Except I wasn’t interested in the work.
I couldn’t make myself care about insurance underwriting or interest rate derivatives. And in both circumstances, I only felt like I had a superficial understanding of what was going on around me.
But those jobs provided me with two key insights that helped totally redirect my career.
The first insight was that I was so much more interested in the people around me than the job itself - how did they get into underwriting/bond sales, why they liked it, and what kept them engaged? The second was that it seemed like each place attracted or created people who enjoyed that kind of work, and in either case I knew it wasn't the right thing for me.
In my previous note, I talked a little bit about how character and capabilities can shape our career decisions. Here I’ll talk about how career decisions can in turn shape our character.
If character is the distinctive nature of a person (e.g., their personality, values, etc.), it makes sense why we would consider character in thinking about job-fit. The right person in the right seat can do wonders. “Fit” broadly speaking, tends to be associated with higher levels of motivation, satisfaction, and performance in a job.
The theory at work here is called “trait activation,” which suggests that your personality will tend to attract you certain types of work, then your experiences and behavior in that work will strengthen and reinforce your traits. Your natural preferences will magnify over time.
But “fit” also presupposes that traits are fixed. Common psychological wisdom is that personality tends to solidify around your mid-twenties and then changes very little over the course of your lifetime (though aging produces some predictable changes, such as decreases in extraversion over time).
More recent theory and research, however, has raised some questions about the fixedness of personality. Specifically, that personality doesn’t just inform the kind of work we’re likely to enjoy, but the work itself shapes our personality. In that sense, what you do will quite literally shape who you become.
The theory here is called “work adjustment,” which suggests, among other things, that in low-fit work your behavior will adjust to meet the needs of the job and the social-organizational environment. This adjustment will be strengthened and reinforced over time through repetition, causing your personality traits to develop and change. Said another way, where the stone settles in the river will determine how it’s shaped by the water.
This is the point at which it’s tempting to say something annoying like “so choose wisely,” or “be mindful of what you do everyday, because you’ll get good at it,” or some other type of useless platitude.
More useful, I think (I hope?), is to consider this as yet another angle from which to evaluate decisions about work. If I know that a choice will activate and reinforce certain parts of myself and will cause me to develop and change, I can make decisions with the explicit goal of developing and changing in certain ways.
During my time at the investment bank I was considering going to law school, as every good English major must.
I studied for the LSAT and met with a variety of lawyers to learn more about the day-to-day work and how they actually liked the job. One tenured corporate finance attorney joked that I “could become a litigator if I wanted to be an asshole my whole life.”
Now that’s a pretty broad characterization of litigators that’s not entirely accurate. But there’s a kernel of truth in that it’s the type of job that will reward and reinforce traits like assertiveness, decisiveness, confidence, comfort with conflict, etc. All things that make a great litigator; all things with which I tend to struggle.
But that conversation was clarifying because it got me thinking more about my natural interests. What I think I’m good at. What I want to be good at. Who I want to become.
I like helping people and I’m curious about human behavior, especially at work. Consulting psychology seemed like a perfect fit in that regard, and a choice that would reinforce my desire to help other people and hone my curiosity about people in a specific way.
I still wrestle with these questions though when I’m making decisions about what projects to carry forward or what type of work to take; but the stakes feel somewhat lower because I know I've at least gotten myself to the right part of the river.