Your first job won’t always be your dream job.
Make career decisions for yourself.
Don’t take jobs just for the money.
If you hate your job, don’t quit right away.
Leave jobs gracefully.
It’s never too late to change careers.
There you are–armed with a coffee mug and a smile, you walk into a small village of cubicles, hopeful that you’ll make a difference, make some money, or maybe just hopeful you’ll make it past the first six months.
As you enter into the corporate world, you’re excited, nervous, anxious, hopeful, and overwhelmed with the idea that you have no idea what you’re doing, which doesn’t take too long to confirm.
You realize that most of what you learned in school didn’t exactly teach you how to succeed in the office. You can’t even figure out how to properly adjust your office chair, let alone master the nuances of office culture complexities that make you feel like you’re working in a different country.
So only months later as you consume yet another piece of office birthday cake, co-workers pressuring it on you like the cool kids giving you a cigarette behind your high school, you realize that the “Freshmen-Fifteen” is nothing compared to the “Cubicle Cincuenta.” Now the cubicle chair you struggled to get just right becomes something you’re struggling just to get up from.
The job you were so excited about just months before starts wearing on you like each email in your inbox is a brick, encasing you in something with little chance for escape.
So you start secretly beefing up your LinkedIn profile, fantasizing about finding your dream job that won’t have any of these problems. Yet, with each job change (and most twentysomethings have quite a few) you start realizing that the same work problems are following you around like a sick dog that won’t go home.
How do you actually succeed at work? How do you thrive in the office and in your career, instead of sitting at your desk dreaming about taking a never-ending road trip where you’ll blog about avocados and somehow make enough money to never have to work again?
For years, I felt like crappy jobs were a quicksand I couldn’t escape–the harder I struggled, the more they sucked me in. I yearned to figure out the secret to truly finding career success, but how?
The Secret to Succeeding at Work?
It took me far too long to realize the secret to truly finding your dream job: Stop worrying about finding the right job and start worrying about your job getting the right you.
I felt like I couldn’t escape working numerous crappy jobs because every job I worked, I brought in a fairly crappy effort. I mastered the art of “Cubicle Work”–spreading thirty minutes of actual work to fill an entire day.
It took me far too long to realize that you can learn a lot even in a job you’re loving very little. But you have to be intentional. Stay focused. Millennials need to combine their love for innovation, creativity, flexibility, and meaning, with “time-tested” qualities like perseverance, grit, humility, and service. A twentysomethings best ally in the office is quiet confidence and humble consistency to show up every day and get the job done well.
Millennials’ anthem should be “HYBO”—Hustle Your Butt Off. As a generation, I believe we have huge dreams of making an impact, making a profit, or most of the time, doing both. Our big dreams are not the problem; the timeline for how quickly we think those dreams should come to fruition is. Don’t chase your dreams. Plant them in the best soil you can find and then water them every day with old school values.
Dream big, and be faithful in the small. Kick those millennial stereotypes in the butt before your employer throws you out on yours. Success happens in the details that no one notices. That’s why Kayla Buell’s Corporate Survival Guide For Your Twenties is so important and an instant leg up for any twentysomething Millennial looking to do much more than master “Cubicle Work” like I did. Having now spoken with hundreds of corporate leaders who are desperate to find twentysomethings who “get it,” Kayla Buell saves you needless hours and hardships in helping you understand, survive, and thrive in any office setting. Buell’s work-wisdom runneth over like a waterfall in this new book and it should be given out in every HR new hire orientation.
Don’t make the same mistakes I did in my twenties. Grab an army of highlighters and reference this book every day. Your dream job will someday thank you.
Congratulations! You made it! You got yourself a job! You worked on your resume for weeks, networked your butt off, and after a million and five interviews, someone decided to give you a shot!
The hardest part is out of the way, right? Now you can kick back, relax, and post all over Facebook the fact that you’re finally employed. You can dress up in nice suits, go to work, collect that paycheck, and life is going to be awesome!
Hah! Not so much. Hate to break it to you, but the hard work is just starting! Yea, you heard me correctly. Now is when things actually get tough. You landed the job, but now you have to live it every day, and doing that isn’t always easy.
Welcome to the corporate world, my friend! A world where things aren’t fair, some people are mean, and if you want to succeed, your boss has to like you.
Let’s face it, no one prepared us for corporate life. No one taught us the difference between carbon copying and blank carbon copying, and if you don’t know what I’m referring to by carbon copying, that’s exactly my point.
Should you speak up in meetings? Should you stay quiet? Are you allowed to be friends with your co-workers? Should you eat at your desk? What should you wear? And what do you do when someone blasts you via e-mail?
You’re going to have all these questions and more, I promise you that much. And while it’s not your fault that college didn’t teach you this stuff, there are things you’re going to have to know if you want to kick-ass in your career.
I’ve been surviving in the corporate world since I was 18 years old, and no, it hasn’t always been easy! A lot of this stuff I’ve had to learn the hard way, and by hard way I mean I’ve been called into the Human Resources office one too many times.
But I’ve learned a lot these past few years, and