Get A Remote Job Faster By Knowing Your Fit, Part 2
Finding Your Purpose By Matching Skills to Vision and Values
Before you start this, I recommend reviewing part 1:
It’s not “tomorrow” according to this post, but I feel confident the information will be valuable. So let’s dive in!
Beyond Professional Past: The Other Parts of Purpose
As noted, your professional past is an incredible source of clarity for understanding your purpose.
You can gather what skills you developed, what domains you worked in, and the kind of company styles you are familiar with. This will give you a solid sense of what kind of value you can bring based on experience, and how will that will fit a given job.
But chances are high that your professional past is only a PART of what can lead you to finding your remote work purpose. After all, many times we do jobs because we have to, not because it really suits as. As I said in the previous post, as humans we are almost infinitely flexible, meaning we can take any number of jobs.
And it’s not uncommon for someone to have 10, 15, or even 20 years of professional experience doing something that does not fully fit their purpose.
So today, let’s finish our dive into purpose for your remote work by looking at the other two factors: vision and values.
Remote Work Creates The Freedom to Live The Life You Want
10 years ago, the idea of working in the tech industry while running a farm would have been laughable, unless of course you were rich. And even then, splitting your attention between the two would have been considered near impossible.
Running a farm requires living on the farm, directing farm workers, and probably doing a good deal of the farm work yourself.
Working in the tech industry required, until recently, living in a big city, commuting to work every day, and spending around 8 hours a day or more in the office.
Mutually incompatible, right?
With remote work, it’s now possible to have both. And in fact many people do!
A former colleague of mine runs a farm while working FT on two different tech start ups. Another manages his farm from another city, going there on weekends and occasionally during the week to check the land and guide the workers. Yet another goes on weekends and some week days to manage his family’s coal mine. Remote work has changed the game.
Step 2: Defining Your Vision
This idea of holding a job in tech while living on a farm is just one of many examples of a life vision that remote work can enable.
Other life visions might include:
Working in a SAAS company and traveling to different locations to learn to surf.
Moving with your family to a country in Europe to settle while working in Customer Success for an Enterprise B2B company.
Building your own multi-million dollar side business while living working as a Product Manager in a fully work from anywhere company.
Notice none of these is exactly the same. #1 focuses on a lifestyle, #2 focuses on a location, and #3 focuses on a financial goal.
What’s critical in each is that work is just PART of the vision. In fact, we can say that in each example remote work is just a way to make sure that you can achieve your vision.
Diving a little deeper into #1, what kind of jobs would be suitable? Could you work as a customer support specialist while traveling and learning to surf? Probably not, but a job in sales or as an engineer would be much easier to combine with this lifestyle!
Could you settle in Europe while working in Sales? Maybe, but you’d like have more success with a high-tech job that makes you a competitive worker in the local economy, or earns you enough to leverage other ways of immigrating (like education).
And would it be realistic to expect you could build a multi-million dollar business while working in a fast-paced remote startup? Almost certainly not, as that kind of environment typically demands a lot of your attention.
As you can see, having a vision for your life helps you filter the kind of company you want to work for even if your professional history doesn’t exactly match the kind of company or job you’ll need to find to reach your vision.
We won’t dive deep into how to determine a vision today, but an exercise on developing your life vision that I recommend for everyone is to spend 20-40 minutes imagining what life should look like 1 year from now, 2 years from now, 4 years from now, and 8 years from now. Imagining who you are with, where you are living, and how you got there can do a lot to inform your life vision and guide your remote work purpose.
A good way to think of your remote work purpose is combining the question “How do you add value?” which is answered by considering your professional history, and the question “How will your work facilitate your vision?”which is answered by considering what your vision is and how work will fit into/support it.
But there’s one more thing to consider: what values will act as boundaries to guide your purpose and keep it aligned with you deeper self?
Step 3: Determine Your Gating Values
Values are a funny thing. I have often heard people say “I took this action based on my values.”
I find this interesting because in almost all cases, I’ve found peoples’ values don’t really dictate what actions they take: they dictate what actions those people DONT take.
Take my departure from my last job: I left for many reasons, but the number 1 reason I don’t tell people is that the company didn’t take the idea of pursuing a new product line seriously. There was an opportunity to build a product that would have helped us make progress towards our long term (multi-year) goal as a company, but may have stopped us from hitting a shorter term goal.
In the moment where I saw the company decide to ignore an opportunity for progress in the long term because in favor a shorter term “ was assumed it would block us from hitting an ideal “perfect goal” by the end of the year, I knew it was time to leave.
This is an example of values guiding our decisions via negativa. In other words, we remove things from our lives because we they go against our values.
Using your values to make decision about what you should do is actually quite difficult, because we often compromise on one value in order to suit another when we decide to take action.
It’s much easier to use values as gates around your decision making process of what kind of remote work to pursue. But how do you know what values you have?
The answer to this question is outside the scope of this post, but there is again a simple technique you can use. Look at any job post and ask yourself: would I take this job?
If you immediately answer “NO” then your decision is mostly like driven by a value you hold. Ask yourself why you wouldn’t take the job, and you’ll uncover that value.
The more you use your values, the better you’ll be able to make the right decision about your work. Remember, remote work is no better than in-office work if you are not happy.
Action Items
Take some time to consider: what is you purpose for your remote job? Combining your professional history, your vision for your life, and your values can help you quickly filter out jobs that are not a good fit. And this is the most efficient way to find a job that suits you well.
IF you like this, leave a like! If you have questions, leave a comment!
In the next issue, we’ll talk about company types and why it’s critical to consider them in more depth when deciding whether or not to take a job.