The Four Factor Career Theory
Overview
I look around and I see youngsters who are lost. Most of them don’t know what to aim for in careers and even if they do, they have no idea how to get there.
I have been thinking hard about a framework to help them. Something practical and based on my experience.
Because while I know a lot more now, I was shockingly naïve and ill quipped when I started my career at 23. I never thought of these questions till recently.
Of course, it’s not essential that you have a framework. I suspect that millions around the world live day to day without a rhyme or reason and you can easily join this giant club.
But if you are smart and curious you may not want to.
Read on.
Framework
Some of you may have heard of the Japanese concept of Ikigai which is the magical intersection of your mission, passion, profession and vocation.
I have my own take on this.
I think you should look at what you like to do ( Passion), what you are good at doing ( Performance), why you exist (Purpose) and what you can make a living out of ( Profit).
I call it the 4Ps.
Passion
The much talked about P word. This is the most elusive and frustrating part of the 4 Ps. For three reasons.
Reason # 1
It is nice and noble to talk about this how do you find out your passion? It’s not a neat attractive package with all the answers waiting to be opened on day # 1 or day # 1000!
Reason # 2
Of course, when you are young you have no idea what you are passionate about because you haven’t tried anything. It’s difficult to get turned on at a purely intellectual level. To be passionate about something you need to first experience it.
Reason # 3
Also, your passions will change as you mature. Typically, it moves from career growth to making money to respect and finally independence/freedom. At least in my case that’s what happened, and I don’t think I am an exception or even in the minority.
How do you discover your passion?
The popular solution seems to be to try out multiple jobs and eventually settle on one that you really care about. But that is long and painful, involving terrible jobs and bosses along the way. It’s a colossal waste of time (which by the way is your most valuable resource, not money).
Try interning instead. Try multiple internships. If you watch carefully, you don’t need more than 6 months to figure out whether you are turned on or not by a specific career.
Try hobbies that you do on the side while you work. Parallel process. Don’t jump jobs. Try out different hobbies on the side like teaching, writing etc. The beauty is you can try this outside work. One day one of those hobbies may evolve to be your Passion.
Till recently I’d always believed that I “discovered” my passion when I turned 40 which is when I co-founded Genesis, the financial training company. I used to wonder why it took me so long.
I was wrong.
Because it turns out I KNEW my passion, right from the age of 26 when I delivered my first class to a small bunch of CA students in Trivandrum. I loved the feeling of owning the space, getting people to listen to you for hours on end, demystifying the concepts and getting the feedback. It gave a special “kick”.
No, my passion wasn’t teaching. It was not presenting. It was not even communicating.
It was getting people to pay attention to what I am saying. Yep that’s a confession from an attention seeker.
I was obsessed with this, well before the ideas of freedom and impact ever entered my head. In class, a teacher is the master of the space and you have remarkable freedom compared to most professions.
The teaching part is relevant because it was a hobby.
The issue with passion is that the lack of it rarely hits you when you are young. When you are 25 you are thinking of getting a job and earning some money, not passion. This normally kicks in when you are 35 or 40 after you are jaded from slogging in the corporate world.
Performance
What are you good at doing? That’s the Performance bit.
Its not just absolute performance but relative performance. It not only matters how good you are but also how good you are in relation to the competition.
This is easier to find out than passion because this is far more objective, based on observed facts and feedback from those who have seen your performance.
You probably start finding out your strengths and weaknesses as early as school. Unless you are a complete retard, you will have strengths and you will discover them.
I knew I was quite good at writing and speaking English by the time I was 12, thanks to being brought up in a 100% English medium education from age 6. That skill has remained and has served me exceptionally well.
Then there are the skills you develop along the way.
For example, I became good at analysis (tearing apart complex stories) and synthesis (connecting the dots, seeing the big picture) in my mid 20s after I entered the workplace. I worked at a government company and there was so much bureaucracy and inefficiency plus I was appraising loan proposals and this combo gave me lots of opportunity to develop the skill of cutting to the core quickly. My later audit experience helped even more in this.
Also, work under someone you will learn from.
Now there may be many things that you are good at, but you may not be passionate about a lot of these. And vice versa. You got to look at areas where the two Ps intersect.
For example, I love collecting airplane models, but I am not good at it. I like hiking and the mountains a lot, but I am an average hiker. Or the other way; I am quite good at teaching, but I am no longer passionate about it.
Also, pay close attention to what your friends, colleagues and bosses say about you. A lot of it will be hyper critical, flattering and superficial but ignore that and dig deeper and ask often and you may get some insight.
The hypercritical part is important. If you are from an Asian family, you would have been told by parents that you are never good enough. Ditto school and college. At work especially with Asian bosses you will get the same treatment- ten harsh words of criticism for every word of praise (if at all). Because of the above, unless you are endowed with enough self-confidence, you will pass into your 20s and 30s wrongly thinking you are shit at everything.
So, listen carefully to the compliments you get. Do you hear any skills? Someone saying, “you should work on this”? Think.
Purpose
Why do you exist? What is your real value to humanity? Purpose is your Vision Statement.
Incredibly fuzzy, big questions that have been debated and answered by wiser heads than Yours Truly.
Some people (like my friend Leo) simply shrug it away as pretentious and as a luxury and don’t bother about it, claiming there is no deep purpose to life. You just eat, sleep, work, raise kids, make merry and die.
But if you are like me, it’s a question that may start nagging you once you realize the awful and immutable trifecta of one life/short life/ you live only once.
That realization may not happen now but when you cross 30 or 40 or 50 or never (lucky you!). It hit me hard just before my 40th birthday, and perhaps not coincidentally when I was being stressed out working for a paranoid jerk in a highly political, massively corrupt and restrictive company. I think that was when one day I stared at mortality in the face and I thought “Why?”. There had to be something to life than working your ass off in a corporate dungeon.
I needed to free myself from the golden chains of corporate slavery (the most important) and once I started the entrepreneurship journey in 2009, I also wanted to make a significant positive impact and leave a legacy. In short, I didn’t have a Purpose till well after I turned 40.
The beauty of Purpose is that it’s much broader than the first two Ps. For example, if you are in Finance and are keen to make an impact you can do that by mentoring youngsters, teaching finance or advising/running an impact fund.
How do you find your Purpose, your True North? Ask yourself the below:
How will the world be better off because of you?
What do you really care about?
Who have you been when you’ve been at your best?
Who must you boldly become, despite challenges?
You may think Passion and Purpose are the same or similar. Nope.
Passion is emotion, purpose is reason. Passion is inward looking, purpose looks outwards. Passion may run dry or change, purpose normally stays the same. Purpose is the engine while passion is the fuel.
Purpose fits well with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs which you probably mugged up in college. Purpose is related to the last (and the highest) namely self-actualization which means feeling that we are doing what we believe we are meant to do. It’s about nailing one’s full potential. And as the protagonist in a recent forgettable movie said, “my biggest fear is unfulfilled potential”.
A related point are your Values.
Purpose inspires. Values guide. Purpose is about why we do what we do, Values are how we achieve purpose.
Values matter because we all seek intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation. We seek motivation from within - work we feel good about doing, rather than what we are rewarded for doing, or punished for not doing. It's important to us to do work we feel is valuable, to achieve purpose we feel is important, for a company whose values we find inspiring.
If your values are out of whack with your partners or employers, you will have a tough time and either underperform (individually and/or as a team), quit or be fired.
Your purpose will most likely be linked to your values. But first you got to find out your values for which this free online resource should help: https://www.findmywhy.com/
Profit
So, you can be wild about something (Passion), be good at it (Performance), be driven by a deeper cause (Purpose) but its not going to meet the bills unless people are willing to pay. This is the Profit element.
By profit I don’t mean that you should be an entrepreneur and set up a company. I am not only talking about the company P & L. What I mean is will you be rewarded for your time? Will you get decent Return On Time Invested (ROTI)?
Of course, if you were born with a platinum spoon in your mouth or are a self-made zillionaire the ROTI angle may not matter. I am talking of the common masses who are not so fortunate or so endowed.
You have a good stamp collection and you like it? Great. I just can’t think of a viable business model. Or you love being a poet or standup comic but there’s no way you can make a living off it.
By the way the profit and purpose perspectives don’t have to be mutually exclusive (think ESG or impact investing).
The profit element is easier to figure out. Look at the market trends and long-term outlook. Talk to people in the field. Is this field growing or dying? Is it worth studying your ass off, passing that exam, paying a ton of fees, acquiring skills etc.?
One warning- do not focus too much on the profit element (e.g. salary) to the exclusion of everything else. I once jumped jobs in my late 30s mainly driven by a 40% raise and bitterly regretted it. It was an unbelievably toxic workplace helmed by a CEO who used to unabashedly declare to me that his motto was “to enhance my personal net worth”. You will also note immediately that our values were completely mismatched as well.
Guide
You also need a Guide to help you figure out the 4Ps because you lack experience, you don’t know yourself that well and you don’t want to reinvent the wheel.
This is the Mentor.
You may require several mentors along the way, and they are probably of most help in the Performance and Profit parts. Check out my presentation on how to identify, attract and work with mentors in my Career Insight: Closing the Skills Gap Webinar here.
Conclusion
You may ask why to bother about the 4Ps when you are probably struggling to survive.
Yes, all this may look like a luxury right now. But if you ignore these, they may hit you like a freight train 10, 20 years down the line.
The big fat problem will be that it may be too late to do anything about it. You will be burdened with a spouse, kids, a big mortgage, and an expensive lifestyle and a job and boss you detest but that you must put up with to pay for all this. Even if you figure out your 4Ps then, your flexibility will be extremely limited (divorce and disowning your kids for no reason are not really choices!).
Start the process.