All the talents you are good at on your present job will be talents that you’ll use on new jobs/careers. List the 10 aspects you feel comfortable with on a job. Don’t be afraid to change or modify your list.

Put it in a conspicuous place and check it over every day.
A career shift is easy after you understand the qualities you must have for any job. What are your interests and desires?

Career Questions:

Where do you see yourself five years from now?

Where do you see yourself ten years from now?

Is there something in your life that you want and don’t have?

What is stopping your moving forward?

What do you need to change today to make your career move forward?

Another author has suggested these questions:

1. What one subject can you enjoy talking about for many hours?
2. Do any of your hobbies involve working a lot with other people?
3. What specific concerns preoccupy your mind, breaking into whatever else you’re thinking about?
4. What do you most enjoy doing for others?
5. Let’s pretend you’ve reached the end of your life, and you’re in heaven looking back on it. What’s the one thing you want to be most happy about having done or having been?
6. Who ‘out there’ in the world have you come to care about the most? Who do you most want to help, enable, or reach? (You define the categories, whatever way you want. Go with your first instincts.)
7. Now, write down at least five of your life experiences that most gave you a sense of fulfillment and/or growth. (Don’t think about them until later — just write them down for now.) If more experiences come to mind, just keep listing them until you exhaust yourself. You’ll sort them out later.

Steve Jobs in the commencement address he gave last year to Stanford University told three stories in what he called connecting the dots. The name of the address was: “You’ve got to find what you love.” The dots included the choices he made that later led to some of his amazing career development.

The choices were:

(1) He dropped out of college formally but stayed at the school for another 1 ½ years to take the courses he liked. One of those courses was calligraphy which later became the fonts for our personal computers.

(2) He was fired from Apple but started Pixar and NeXT during his readjustment period. Pixar created the first computer animated feature film, Toy Story. Apple bought Pixar and rehired Jobs.

(3) In 1994, he was diagnosed with cancer of the pancreas. His type of cancer was curable with surgery. But the lesson he learned from this experience is that death is life’s main change agent.

Our time here is limited so his message is to enjoy it and find what we love to do in life.