By Jan Marino
I love Simon Sinek’s book Start With Why and I also love BNI chapter meetings.
If you don’t already know, BNI stands for Business Networking International and is the most successful networking business of its kind in the world. Each week 2 members get to present a Feature Presentation to the other chapter members in an effort to educate on the business and offer suggestions on their best referral sources. One thing I have noticed in BNI meetings each week when the members give their 8-minute Feature Presentation is their Why. 99.9% of the time the Why is the same. They say they got into the business because of their family, and they show pictures of their spouse, cute children and their pets.
Now let’s think about this for one second. How is it possible that someone got into roofing due to their spouse and someone else got into insurance for the same exact reason? Fact is, that’s not possible. It simply could not be that anyone chooses their line of work due to their spouse and children unless the speaker agreed to go into a family business even though there is no particular interest in that field.
Rather, you choose a field of work or career based on a passion or an interest at the very least. Someone thinks graphic design might be fun and they go to college to attain a degree in it. Or they attend Julliard to study music. Now, taking graphic design or music as examples, you can study all you like, but you must also have a talent in it or there will not be any success in that field. People tend to do things they are good at and that could be something creative or it could be building something with their hands.
I took a course where the Why of a career choice was looked at in depth and many times a path is chosen based on what happens to a person. Speaking for myself, I got into healthcare because as a child, I met a woman who I admired who was a nurse. What she did sounded interesting to my 8-year-old self, I read Cherry Ames nurse stories and eventually went into healthcare as a nurses’ aide. Over the years I moved on from the physically demanding and very low paying position but healthcare was obviously the right choice for me because I stuck with senior healthcare for over 45 years until retirement.
Have you ever really thought about WHY you do what you do? People work because they have to support themselves and their families but why did you choose your field. Give it some thought and let us hear back about what you came up with.
Comments