We are tempted to both give and receive bad advice when we wish something were true. I wish, for example, that college and career advice could be as simple as โfollow your passions.โ But itโs not.
โFollow your passionsโ may be part of great college and career advice, but it falls woefully short on its own. In their Westernized adaptation of the deeply nuanced Japanese concept of ikigai, Hector Garcia and Francesc Miralles do an excellent job of showing us how and where our passions fit into these weighty decisionsโand what additional factors need to be present.
In their book, Ikigai: The Japanese Secret To A Long And Healthy Life, they define ikigai โas the convergence of four primary elementsโ:
- What you love (your passion)
- What the world needs (your mission)
- What you are good at (your vocation)
- What you can get paid for (your profession)
As a financial advisor, Iโd like to focus on the two big mistakes Iโve seen people make specifically related to the last piece of this ikigai puzzleโthe financesโand how these mistakes can be avoided in college and career decisions.
1. In college decisions, students (and their parents) focus too little on the financial implications.
The commencement of college represents such a rich and vibrant time of life for so many that it has become unhelpfully romanticized. There is no denying that college isโor, at least, can beโso much more than a mere education. It is also an experience, an exploration in phased independence, that tends to grow (most of) us up into responsible adults. But part of that adulting is acknowledging that college is also a hyper-pragmatic ticket of entry into the workforce.
The romanticization of the experience part of college has led to this dreamy notion that it is pricelessโthat once you find the college of your dreams, the financial cost is relegated to virtual irrelevance. Whatโs especially interesting about this is that we donโt struggle to put a price tag on the other experiences we seek out in life. Vacations, concerts, movies, and dinners out are all experiences, too, but weโd never undertake these experiences without considering the cost.
Somehow, weโve set a college educationโthe experience of your dreamsโon such a singularly virtuous pedestal that any amount of expense is justified, even if it means incurring mounds of debt that will impair you from pursuing years of great experiences as a new graduate. And thatโs why itโs imperative to acknowledge that college can, and I believe should, also be viewed as a value proposition. Hereโs what I mean by that:
What you pay for collegeโthe education, experience, exploration, and entry ticket to real lifeโshould be directly connected to what that degree will entitle you to receive as compensation. This certainly doesnโt mean that everyone should follow a monolithic path toward the least expensive degree. Indeed, the world needs great neurosurgeons, so if you have the capacity and the love for that type of work, it could be worth it to pay the full price of admission to Johns Hopkins University. You may even justify racking up a mountain of debt for undergraduate and graduate school because youโll be making enough money to pay it off quickly.
But the inverse is also true: If you are pursuing any number of incredible professions that the world desperately needsโteachers, social workers, civil servants, pastors, priests, and rabbisโthat are also notorious for underpaying their workers, you must consider the financial implications.
While rules of thumb often fall short, one worthy of consideration here is that you shouldnโt take on more aggregate college debt than you expect to make in your first yearโs salary. And even if youโre not taking on debt, the logic still holds, to tie your educational expenditures to the income you expect to earn.
But hereโs the ironic twist.
2. In career decisions, people focus too much on the financial implications.
Iโve had the privilege of serving hundreds of families in some capacity throughout the course of my 27-year career (dang, Iโm getting old!), and one the saddest things Iโve observed is when people get backed into a career corner because of the money.
Especially once you support a family and lifestyle (and have kids in college!), it is exceedingly difficult to change gears in pursuit of ikigai, simply because you canโt afford to. And irony on top of irony, this is a vicious cycle that often starts because people struggle to pay off their college loans!
The end resultโeven, if not especially, for the proverbial 1%โcan be a race to retirement, where the work lacks the sense of meaning, purpose, and enjoyment that can turn a profession into a vocation.
Hereโs the good news:
If youโve missed the mark, there is still time. In Ikigai: The Japanese Art Of A Meaningful Life, author Yukari Mitsuhashi writes that, โIkigai is not about seeking perfection or achievement, but about embracing the imperfections of life and finding beauty in them.โ
Nobuo Suzuki instructs further in The Japan Times, “Ikigai is not something you find outside yourself; it’s about looking inside yourself. It’s about reflecting on what you like to do and what you’re good at.”
So, if youโre starting from scratch and building your plan for collegeโor just beginning to craft a meaningful careerโI believe you could do no better than to return to the graphic above and ask yourself: What do I love doing, that Iโm good at, that the world needs, and that could pay me enough to live the life I want?
But if youโre one of the majority reading this who are already well down the road of life and career, you might instead ask what calibrations you can make to the plan youโre already living out:
How could I enjoy the work Iโm already doing more? What can I do to become even better at my chosen craft? Where might the need for my services be even greater?
And yes, because this final factor can erase the fulfillment of all the others when out of balance: How could I reduce or eliminate the strain of stretching finances by either making more money or spending less?
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