How to get a job you want, part 2: Choice – good to have it, bad to have it

Blogs Maria Boicova - 11-17-09

Being meanwhile completely stuck at the question: “So what do you want to do upon graduation?” I decided to start the other way round and, so-to-say, reverse engineer the subject. Well, of course at the time I embarked on my MBA journey, I knew the answer (I guess I said that already in one of my previous posts), but now certain things have changed and those changes have made me a little bit disorientated in terms of what I want to do. Here I would like to stress the “want” part, because having performed enormous quantity of different career tests I have more or less clear picture of what I can do and can be good at (some things were obvious and practiced for quite a while before, though some were more like revelations to me), but that does not take me any closer to what I want to do.

That is why yesterday I took a piece of paper and just jotted down everything I wanted in my life – starting with, probably “silly”, items like “Louis Vuitton L’Ingénieux handbag” and “iPhone 3Gs” and ending with “a feeling of contributing to something worthwhile” and “being able to grow and learn”. Of course, some of items still need clarification like, for instance, what do I mean by “something worthwhile”? Hmm… I guess that is something of a level of “heritage” (ouch! too strong word!). But even if controversial and probably incomplete at least I have the initial list of what I want.

I don’t recall the exact quote from “The Mafia Manager: A Guide to the Corporate Machiavelli” but there was something like “You cannot fill a bag with one grain, but at least you can start”. Now, the next step is to figure out what I need to do in order to get (or to be able to get) what I want. According to my “plan” that has to lead me to the more or less clear understanding of further steps in terms of my career. Alternatively, I will still be stuck but at another point, and hopefully, that point would be at least a bit closer to the ultimate goal.

Choice… Good to have it, bad to have it. You choose something, but there are always alternative costs – all those things that you could have done, “if…” Being optimistic, I know I will figure it all out eventually and I know I will make a good choice (here this is partly confidence, partly - self-persuasion), but sometimes I just wish this “eventually” to come sooner…

About the author: Maria Boicova

Maria Boicova is a Full-time MBA student at Vlerick Leuven Gent Management School (Leuven, Belgium). She is a Patent and Trademark Attorney from Latvia with a background in law and management.