Don't find a job, find a mission | Celeste Headlee | TEDxAugusta

to grab whatever paper you have next to you, whether it's the program or not, and I mean it, I really want you to do this, grab a writing utensil and I want you to answer a question for me and write the answer. Do you like your job? is number one and number two, do you think you'll still like doing that job in 20 or 30 years? So write it down and then set it if you're already laughing and put it aside, we'll come back to that. Later, the most common question I get asked every time I speak in public is how did you get to where you are and I usually say I stumbled upon it by accident, but today I'll admit something to you.

I've been lying about that for a while. For a long time I didn't come across it, it was a very carefully executed plan that I didn't realize until much later, so if you don't know who I am, I'm a public radio host, I hosted a show called takeout for several years I've hosted tell me more for NPR Talk of the Nation week plus many others I went into presidential coverage for PBS World I've talked to movie stars and presidents and Pulitzer Prize and Nobel Peace Prize winners Prize winners, but I never studied journalism in school. I am a professional opera singer and radio is my day job.

I have a master's degree in music, so you might be thinking that I'm not using my music degree and my job as a broadcast journalist. but you would be very wrong, yes, radio show host and professional opera singer are two very different jobs, but in fact the main

mission

of both is exactly the same in both jobs. I am getting closer to the people I am communicating with. with people I inspire people, I move people using only the power of my voice, so now if you ask me how I got to where I am, I say I found my

mission

and I forgot the job title, let me say it again . because that's the point of all this talk, I found my mission and completely ignored what the job title was.

The fact is that most people in the world don't like their jobs, so I want everyone to take a look around you and count ten people around you somewhere using global statistics. Nine of those people don't like what they do, but this is America. So let's use American statistics. Let's count your ten people again. Take a look at them. One of them really likes what he does to that person. Congratulations. Six of them think he's not killing me. And three of them really hate their jobs. They really hate it. Job dissatisfaction. Cost. Up to five hundred and fifty billion dollars a year in productivity are lost in this country, that's a billion with a B.

Around the world, almost 90 percent of people don't like their jobs, and that statistic really doesn't matter. It tells us a lot, maybe human beings don't like it. I like working, maybe we have universally horrible bosses, but let me tell you what I think that statistic means. I think it means we're terrible at choosing the right job, what things we consider when looking for a job, and I'm not talking. about I'm unemployed, I'll accept any situation, I'm talking about I don't like what I do, I want to try something new, what do we think, we think about the salary, obviously, it's a no-brainer, we think about the location that Americans have.

They have been very reluctant to move and, in fact, we do not even like to travel very far to get to our work. The average travel time is about 20 to 25 minutes and has remained the same for over a decade. What other benefits are there? vacation time healthcare retirement sick days and believe me, that's actually very important, but research like Harvard Business Review asked if those things made you happy too, so they studied it and the answer was no, of all the many things that They imply happiness. At work, the biggest impact is purpose. People who think that the work they do is important and meaningful are more than three times more likely to stay in their job and they also have higher job satisfaction and they are also more engaged and listen, I can, I can almost hear your thoughts coming to me, I know you've heard it before,

find

your dream job, right, you've probably heard it from some lifestyle guru Scott, who sells millions of books, telling you to look deep inside yourself, but I would never tell you that.

Look for your dream job and here's why it doesn't exist. Okay, there is no such thing as a dream job. The best minds doing the best research into what makes you happy at work have found that it's usually your partner. -workers, your boss and your sense of purpose, there is nothing you can

find

in your job description, so let me make sure we are all on the same page. Dream jobs don't exist. There was a young girl named Ashley Stahl, she spent her entire life with her. young life longing for a career in national security earned a master's degree in international relations spoke fluent Arabic went to DC and spent six weeks attending 90 events chatting with everyone he could find and it paid off in At age 23 he got his dream job at the Pentagon and he hated it.

She quit after eight months. She didn't even last a year. After spending nearly 20 years preparing for that job, she told the Wall Street Journal that she hadn't paid attention to it. her friends when they told her you know that you are very good at making us talk about our jobs, you are very insightful in identifying our weaknesses and our strengths, so three years later, she is working as a career counselor for youth and I guess she loves her job, let me give you another example. There are thousands, maybe tens of thousands of athletes who never get that call from the NBA or NFL Major League Baseball, so they have to find another line of work.

Now you might think that something like sports psychologists would be a perfect fit and many of those athletes think the same, but the giant Journal of Applied Sports Ecology published a study last year in which they found that, in fact, if you can't make a living from sports listening to professionals athletes talk about their problems all day is really disturbing and that's how it is for many of us, no matter what it looks like on paper, we are terrible at choosing the right job, so I have a presenter talk shows, right? You'd be surprised how many people consider that to be their dream job, so let me raise my hand quickly and again I want you to be completely honest.

Okay, raise your hand if you think, in a pinch, you could be a pretty good host. a talk show raise your hand come on I know you've been out there okay a lot of people think that actually like I said that's one of the most common questions I get my husband used to say he'd give quite a talk good. program host but after years of watching me he no longer says that what you hear on the radio is a small fraction of what my job is every day I can't turn off my cell phone I don't mean I can't stand turning my cell phone off I mean no I can turn it off I have to read two hundred page books in three days it is very difficult for me to take sick days or vacation and when I make a mistake everyone knows so yes Being a talk show host is your dream job.

You have to make sure you know what that job really is. If we are not very good at identifying what our dream job is, how do we choose well? I mean, it's really hard if you can. Don't look at the job description and know that this is the right job in the first place. Don't burn down the house you live in until you have somewhere else to go. Don't quit your job. You have to try things. Become a volunteer. a part-time job ask your boss Can I go work in another department for a couple of weeks?

The point is to keep the stakes high. Putting nothing in the outcome, whether successful or unsuccessful, so that you are brave enough to venture into completely unexplored territory. put things you haven't trained on for things that aren't related to your college degree. I mean, most of us choose our college major in our early 20s. You think you've changed a little since then, maybe there was a woman named. Erin Hochstetler got her degree in art history and took a job as an intellectual property paralegal and kept that job for 15 years, but she didn't like it, so she sat down and asked herself: okay, what makes me happy and besides? family and friends, the only thing she could think about was her phone.

She really liked her smartphone, so she started taking coding classes and became a mobile app programmer. She then left the law firm and loves what she does. That's the problem we often don't do. I don't know what we enjoyed until we tried it well. I mean, you don't know what food you like until you try it, so forget about that nonsense about what you would do even if you didn't get paid. I mean that. It would be like walking my dogs and reading mystery novels all day, but come on, what I really want is to read mystery novels for eight hours a day and a guy comes to the door asking me how many novels I've read in the last few hours.

There are a lot of bad novels. There's a career counselor who was trying to help a guy change careers mid-career and she asked him the terrible question: what would you do if you didn't have to worry about salary? and he said, "Well, me." I'm a little league coach, but I have to worry about salary and you can't make a living teaching kids how to play baseball, but this is where she made her mistake. He came up with a job title, little league coach, not a mission, what was that? He liked coaching in little league, it was being with kids, working with sports, being outdoors, because those are things you can make a living doing, you just have to forget that very specific job when I graduated with a degree in Opera.

I knew I would have to get a day job. It was very realistic that one day I walked into my local public radio station. I was accompanying a friend and I saw an old college friend there and she told me Celeste, right? I want a job and I made sure what the job was and then she hired me to be a weekend classical music presenting couple. Later, the news producer came up to me and said, you know, we don't have anyone who can report on the arts, are you interested? in learning to be a reporter and I said yes, a month after that conversation I sold my first feature film to NPR, but here's the thing, if you had asked me what I wanted to do, I would never have said broadcast journalist, I had no idea what.

That job was I didn't know what it entailed and I sure didn't know if I would be in a good place, so the other part of that is remembering that the main mission. I wouldn't want to remind you of the main mission. the mission was the same actually I landed in a job where my mission was not change it hasn't changed I still use my voice to communicate people with people I still use my voice to touch people and inform people exactly the same job same mission different job title no matter how much you look inside yourself it will tell you what will make you happy we learn about ourselves through practice not theory and if you take nothing else away just remember that you learned more about yourself not in theory but in practice. so go back to that document, take a look at it because I want real answers.

Go back to that document and take a look at what they said. How many of you said you don't like your job? If some people are not completely honest with us. Today how many of you said you thought you would be happy? They would be happy doing that in 20 or 30 years so here is your homework this is what I want you to think about when you get home what do you really like? your job, what do you think you do very well? What do other people say you do it very well? What part do you enjoy?

Somewhere in those answers is your mission, find that and you will find the right job. Thank you for the extensive research that went into my preparation for this, tell everyone about your grandfather. I assume you mean the famous one, the other one was just a mechanic, my grandfather was William Grant, yet he was the dean of African-American composers, the first to conduct a major orchestra to have the first time. a symphony performed by a major orchestra, the first to conduct an opera, there are about 14 third firsts, where the love of music came from. I would assume I'm the only one in my family after him who makes music, so maybe it's not genetic. really yeah, okay, did you know him?

Of course, yeah, he was the best guy ever. Celeste is going to help us with a melody. I'm some Porgy and Bess Celeste, not your grandmother Celeste Headley, ladies and gentlemen, you will rise. see