What Is the Best Career Advice for Motivation?

Colin Dunn calls the best career advice getting in touch with what is uniquely motivating and figuring out how to optimize for it. He always understood that autonomy was important for his motivation, and he does not know whether he was listening to it as much as he should have. He assumes the same pattern is not true for everyone, because people have different configurations of what motivates them.

Ask where someone wants to be in five years or in 10 years and most people cannot answer, even if the plan is to design a career as a path to getting there. Most people collect a set of offers, run a pros and cons analysis, and choose the option that seems best. The habit has a LinkedIn quality. It is a good way to find a local maximum, and it is not the way to find the thing that will make someone most happy. The harder work is thinking back on experiences: where he felt most energized, where he had the feeling he would keep manufacturing over and over, and what common threads ran through them. Autonomy was a big part of the pattern, so being a founder was a perfect fit, maximum autonomy, and he owns his destiny.

Another mistake is assuming that what one person wants is what everybody else wants. Some people might want autonomy. Others want clarity and stability: here is the job, and they want to do the job really well. As somebody who is hiring, he needs to get clear on what each person on the team wants and create the environment for them. Each person is a unique puzzle, and a manager may have to solve it before they have solved it for themselves.