How to help decide personal goals
As a student, I have an education I’m trying to achieve. However, there are some (aka many) things that I’d like to learn in addition to my education. Understanding that learning specific things will help you get to that next point in your life is great motivation for actually doing the learning. For example, what will help me get my next job? This may seem rather shallow, but understand that when I say job I mean that one thing you do that you’re completely passionate about and dedicated to. Also realize that usually, there are requirements in order to get the job you want that’s acting on your passion, and those requirements are more than just…having a passion.
For me, I knew that I wanted to work in the technology sector for amazing start-ups working to revolutionize the healthcare or education space. This is how I found out what I needed to do to get there:
- Find your passion.
- Find companies/organizations that you think you could work for, because they’re working on something you would be passionate about/are chasing the same dream as you.
- Think of what you’d want to do in that company. What part of chasing that dream do you want to be. It could be ‘all of it’, or ‘CEO’, whatever. Just know what you want.
- Look at the job postings for that kind of position. Just to get a rough sense of what that position means to you. This step is helpful because sometimes you’ll realize that the position you want isn’t necessarily the same way the company thinks of it.
- Write the dream resume. Write the resume you would hand to them in order to get hired on the spot for exactly what you want to do.
- Look at that resume. What’s on there that you don’t have?
Those ‘don’t have’s are where you need to focus. Now the process may seem obvious, but for me the real take away from this was affirming for myself that the things I want to learn are indeed necessary for what I want to do, even if the skill isn’t directly being able to do what I want to do (make sense? maybe?). For example, I tried to learn JQuery 2 months ago. I got bored, and it tapered off. Today, I am aware that knowing JQuery is a great skill to have as a designer, as it allows me to effectively build what I design and validate my work. Either way, I should learn JQuery, but with the latter approach a) I know why and I want to, and b) I actually am.
