I first came across this book via a podcast from Dave Ramsey's Entreleadership. I can read (and listen to) stuff like this all year. If you've taken a class from me, you know I'm passionate about helping students discover their elements (to borrow the term from Sir Ken Robinson. Check out his classic TED Talk here). That is what I consider my "Why" to be (again, to borrow from another classic TED Talk, this one from Simon Sinek).
So when I listened to professor Kaplan talk about What You're Really Meant to Do, I knew this was a book for me.
I passionately believe we all must find what we are really meant to do, and, if we are lucky enough, we have the chance to do what we love for a living. Yet, I know many people, especially young adults who roll their eyes and think, yeah, yeah, yeah . . . that's all well, but I want to be rich. But it's not quite that easy. And Kaplan explain why in his book.
The topic that most interests me in Kaplan's book comes from the chapter "Finding Your Passion." This topic is under the heading "Money Versus Passion: A Flawed Trade-Off." It is here that the author illustrates why having the attitude of yeah, yeah, yeah . . . that's all well, but I want to be rich almost guarantees that you won't have wealth. Or if you do, you'll likely be miserable with it.
Many of my fellow Gen Xers, otherwise known as "yuppies," foolishly believed the age old mantra, "money can lead to happiness." Thus, a lot of my classmates went into careers that would bring them the all-mighty dollar while not necessarily giving them any personal satisfaction or sense of accomplishment (both of which, thanks to Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi's work on Flow, actually lead to happiness and fulfillment).
So, why doesn't money buy happiness? Kaplan makes this claim in his book: "If you believe that one of your primary goals is money, you need to be prepared to consistently perform at your best for a number of years" (77). In past generations, this was not a problem. Members of the Greatest Generation were very familiar with the concept of delayed gratification. After all, they were well aware of it having survived the Great Depression and done without for much of World War II thanks to war rationing of almost everything. However, with each successive generation - and thanks to the advancements in technology - the importance of delayed gratification became less and less. That brings us to the millennials, who believe they deserve to be either the best in their field or CEO of the company within a year (check out the last two trophies on this site if you don't believe me).
Simply put: in order to be the best in your field (and hence make the most money) you will need to put in years and years of not just great effort but also superb performance.
Kaplan argues - and I adamantly believe this to be true - that if you don't have a deep seated passion or love for what you want to do, you will never survive the slow grind that will result in the big money, "Again, to be at your best for an extended period, you need to enjoy a certain number of intrinsic motivators at your job" (77). Those intrinsic motivators are what will sustain you as you slog away in your cubicle, in the classroom, in the lab, in the emergency room, or in the classroom.
So what are these intrinsic motivators? The main one is passion. In example after example, Kaplan illustrates how students, who are on the verge of accepting positions in exclusive firms or businesses, come to him with second thoughts and misgivings. Something for each of them just doesn't feel "right."
If you are a millennial, the odds of you putting in years and years of effort in a field you don't enjoy are minimal.
Even members of Gen X struggle with this, as Kaplan has found in his work at Harvard:
I emphasize these point because I am regularly visited by people who choose jobs that manifested many of extrinsic goals they thought they desired. After a brief period, they began to realize they didn't actually enjoy the job sufficiently to work through the frustrations and challenges that are typical in early stages of a career. The ultimate extrinsic motivators were great, but these prospective rewards didn't help them actually enjoy the day-to-day grind. (78)
So for the millennials, who struggle to wait in line at Wal-Mart let alone wait for longer than a few seconds for a web page to load, it is very unlikely that they will devote years of effort to something they don't enjoy (or find meaningful) regardless of the the salary after years of work. The article, "Delayed Gratification: A Good Lesson For Millennials," states the problem clearly:
We face a conundrum in that our own ability to solve problems with technology and to communicate more quickly than other generations has led us to the want of one thing: instant gratificatton, the human desire to see our needs and wants immediately fulfilled so that we don't have to wait to be pleased. (TNGG)
Even members of Gen X struggle with this, as Kaplan has found in his work
