43: Career, Success, Vision, & Goals
with Dana Fonteneau
Transcript Highlights:
We have hobby, job, career, and vocation. And Liz Gilbert is someone who I found defines those beautifully.
A hobby is something you love with no pressure of any kind to make it professional or financially viable.
A job is your time for money.
A career I perceive to be a series of choices professionally over time that eventually gets distilled into a resume and it looks like a career. But it's really a series of choices, consistently over and over.
And then I personally love vocation because vocation is doing what you love, making impact, serving people, and getting paid a fair exchange to do it.
We have the standard, professional definitions that are based on stature, awards, professional recognition. We have a lot of people perceive success to be winning a job where they have some kind of financial security. We find a lot of people going towards teaching as a way to get some security financially. A lot of times it's How often does the phone ring and Who's calling? But it's not necessarily the most healthy way to go about building a career. I have learned to throw the word success out and think about it actually more as a duo: so, success and failure.
I think of success as confirmation that something's working, and failure, “failure,” is feedback that it didn't work this time and this way. Both are ways to pay attention and to evaluate. Something about this lined up and it's working. So, tweak it, refine it, uplevel it, upgrade it. Something about this didn't work, so, what was it specifically? Was it how you engaged? Was it timing? Was it who you engaged with? What specifically wasn't fitting about that?
I personally define failure as a round hole and a square peg. It's really both our feedback systems - otherwise we get addicted to ‘success is confirmation that we're enough’ and ‘failure is a confirmation that we're not enough.’ And that's actually total B.S. It's just really more about, what would you love to accomplish?
Achievement is embracing both on the path of growing who you need to be and developing the skills you need to have to accomplish the goal. So the goal does not define good or bad. And so that thinking is the most crucial to change and how we educate our musicians. Many - if we just speak about musicians - many musicians have gotten into this because they either were really good at it at a very young age, and then they got so much feedback from their external world that said, You're really talented, you're really special, you're really ‘this,’ you need to keep going, and they got funneled into this hamster wheel without ever stopping to ask, Do I want this? Do I love this? Oftentimes it's, I don't know how to do anything else and it's too late.
Other people want it so badly that they have to work their tail off to get to a level of accomplishment. That sense of ‘not enough-ness’ is like a fire under their tail. And then there's a very, very tiny percentage that have both where they show ability at a very young age, then they've got a right team of people around them who really get them and get what's intrinsically inspiring for them and guide them to the mentors and the people who help really fulfill their potential. We call those, ‘the Masters,’ but really it's just that they had a right team around them who saw their vision and potential very young and very early and other people find it in their own way or they don't find it.
So when we talk about vision, ultimately it comes down to Why am I here? Who am I? and What gives me meaning and purpose? and What's my life for? I mean, it’s these existential, crucial questions that at some point everybody has to ask and that pandemic really, really made a lot of people stop and be uncomfortable with those kinds of questions on the table. What am I doing this for? Who's it for? And if the world is saying, This is not essential and we don't need to pay for this, then what is my life going to look like? So a vision really is nothing more than an intrinsically developed and created plan outcome of how you would love to grow your life. How you would love your life to be. And it gets defined into something like a master plan or a strategic plan. Or we break it down into goals or into micro habits.
There's all these terms, these are all buzzwords now, but these are all things that are all crucial components. Oftentimes when we don't have a vision, we are like a ping pong ball getting batted around by life, doing whatever everybody else says or getting the feedback from other people. And it's a pretty tough way to go through life.
At some point, I think artists have to remember that they're whole human beings. And as goals become more specific, they, by nature, become more holistic, which means that if you're going to set a big, ambitious, inspiring goal, that's going to require a certain amount of self-care, that's going to require a certain level of empowerment financially, that's going to require influential and impactful relationships where people have a network that you can tap into. It requires the capacity to listen to others and actually pay attention to what needs are you serving.
So it's not this ivory tower or bubble of ‘I just want to make beautiful music’ because that's a pretty hard way to go through building a career. And then it keeps refining that level of self-awareness into, What really brings out my best work and What's the most efficient, effective way for me to achieve those goals, and, How do I learn from the setback or, What is that course correction trying to teach me? Is it just a five degree pivot or is it a 95 degree pivot? It's often just five degrees, or even one degree. And when we're not paying attention, there's just a lot of emotional angst, you know?
And really what we're talking about here is that it's really not about is it vision, is it goal setting, is it strategy? It's really more about an individual taking charge. Where they take accountability for their sense of self, their well-being, their goals, what they want to accomplish. But they're no longer being batted around by the system or they're no longer delegating their well-being and their life's fulfillment to what other people said they should do.
At some point, that autonomy and that individuation and that authenticity kicks in. And that's very inspiring because that's when doors start opening, because when you're actually true to who you are and you're clear on who you'd love to serve, it's much easier. I mean, everything's hard, but it's much easier in that regard because you're not, you're not playing hit or miss on what your life will be like.
When a person's self-worth and self-confidence shifts and when they're no longer worried about, Am I enough? And they're more focused on, Who can I impact, or How can I help? Or Who can I teach, or What can I share? That's an incredible pivot at every level of the industry and every level of profession I've worked with, because then it gets really exciting to see how a person is going to evolve and fulfill their potential. And, people have achieved beautiful things financially and professionally, but really that that sense of self, when that light comes on and they stop suffering from the I'm of ‘not enough-ness’ to I'm so inspired to contribute and here's how I'm going to do it and here's who is on board and here's the funding I got and here are the people and here's ‘this.’ Then all of a sudden it's like a Christmas tree just lights up. And that, to me, is very fulfilling.
Watch Elizabeth Gilbert’s TED Talk, “Success, failure and the drive to keep creating”