There is a clear outcome of all the lectures and speeches I have given at the university and the talks I have had about career interviews in recent years: Do not make a career plan until you are 28!
I came across this subject once again while I was reading the biography of Richard Saul Wurman, the founder of TED. (www.fastcompany.com) He founded TED, which I think is one of the most important social brands of the world. Wurman, who is the founder of TED, a conference brand that makes us reach the peak of intellectual richness even if we know or don’t know it, should be a role model for our university students.
Wurman, who went on expeditions to South Africa, visited historical places, examined ruins and recorded them when he was only 23 years old, has written and designed more than 90 books. He is going to graduate in architecture next year. He was 25 when his passion for travelling and sightseeing led him to his first professional experience in London! He undertook the job of building a floating pontoon on the Thames with the famous British architect Louis I. Kahn. Jack Heinz, the CEO of Heinz food processing company, was the owner of that business. That floating pontoon hosts the Wind Symphony Orchestra.
We see that many people that we define as “successful” focus on gaining life experience rather than “pursuing careers in a concrete area” when they are in their twenties. Like Steve Jobs. They live a life which is focused on discovering themselves and the world, and go from one place to the other as a matter of personal preference.
www.usq.edu.au
We must mention Victor Ananias exactly at this point. (www.victorananias.org) Victor, who is one of the five people that affected my career, passed away due to an unfortunate accident caused by carbon monoxide poisoning. Victor was the pioneer of the ecological movement. Today, we have ecological markets and farms thanks to Bugday (Wheat) Association founded by him. He was the opinion leader of ecological product certification in the EU and in Turkey. He hosted the World Organic Congress in Turkey. However, he was not even a university graduate. He quit university in his second year since he believed that “he could do other things that would be useful to the world”. He was vegetarian. He was a good cook. He had a simple restaurant called Bugday in Bodrum. Thanks to his talent, he travelled the world. He saw many different cultures in China, Argentina and various European countries. He became a real world citizen. He had friends that he could trust all around the world.
Global developments in the 1980s led our world to the formation of “finance society”. A cherubic type of young people that we call “yuppies” emerged from this circle of developments. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuppie) They actually became “yuppies” in their thirties. However, in their twenties, they aimed to get to the days when they would have loads of money in no time without producing anything. They did not care about intellectual shallowness, global problems and the quality of relationships at all. They could easily afford a lifestyle where saving the day and financial issues were adorned with drug addiction thanks to the high salaries taken from financial institutions. They did not care about being excluded from society in their moral erosion, because they earned enough! They could earn so much money in the world of “equities” which was defined as value although it wasn’t valuable at all. That’s why, nobody questioned the millions of dollars they had in their thirties. When they were older, most of these people made financial institutions worth hundreds of billions of dollars go bankrupt as in 2008. They ruined the future of the people who bought houses or cars relying on these institutions, but they did not leave those bankrupt institutions without getting their compensation worth millions of dollars. They may have earned a lot of money, attracted attention with their lifestyles or made each other jealous for a while, but what are they doing now?
youremploymentsolutions.com
Twenties are the years when people design their lives. Right? However, they should look at the input of this design. They somehow finish university and “their families want their kids to knuckle down to some work” immediately. This is a huge mistake! They are not in a hurry and they have “an entire life” waiting for them. How far can a life designed with inadequate materials can take them when they cannot even “fall in love”?
We should question the quality of our university years. How much young people can discover their selves when taking classes? How intense are their interests, abilities and competences in their own worlds? How much time have they spent on “volunteered” work? Have they only applied to the companies in their own fields of study for an internship? Have they thought that they can work as an intern in other fields to have a different sort of experience? How about culture, art and literature? I think “art history” is the most important thing. My lack of art history, which is the backbone of general knowledge, is still gnawing at me. What difference does it make if we become architects, engineers or doctors without having enough knowledge about subjects such as sociology, philosophy or social psychology?
A lot of universities have exchange programmes in collaboration with different universities. Getting to know different cultures is equal to having a few degrees. Getting experience abroad even if it’s for a month or for a term will definitely be a “gain” in your future. It will at least help you meet your need to learn a foreign language when you are at university. International observation and experience contribute greatly towards developing ideas and thoughts about cinema, theatre, dancing, music and writing. These are the things that we can fit in our university years.
Then, there are a few years after you finish university. I describe these few years as the period until you are 28. You can enrich this period by getting to know as many office cultures as you can. Do not take superannuated HR managers seriously when they say “You’ve changed jobs too often”! During these years, every office experience is a cultural treasure which is not written in books. Even if they just make you photocopy documents, you will see numerous ways of doing this in different companies. It provides the basis for how to manage jobs, how to hold meetings and how to make decisions. Young people who are employed on the basis of this richness are always the ones who make a difference, because they see how different the same job can be done in different companies. They see right and wrong. They have an idea about these things.
You should count all the incompetent, short-sighted and malevolent managers that you work with during these years as “richness”. They will show you “what you shouldn’t be like” if you become a manager in the future!
jobsearch.about.com
Twenties are the ages when we find out that our “relationships” are the backbone of our lives in addition to our personal competences. As they say “Man is known by the company he keeps”. In a sense, it is true. Life is shaped among relationships. Actually, careers are always managed among these relationships during life. Job offers are received thanks to these relationships. You come back when you are on the brink of an abyss thanks to these relationships. Relationships lead us to success. Therefore, how to build relationships, how to manage them, how to get rid of useless ones and how to make good ones last long are some of the issues that will be waiting for you. The basis for these issues is also built in your twenties. Your family will of course help you, but you will need to form your own idea of what is right.
Mentors will enter your life in this period even if you know or don’t know it. People who visit www.gelecekdaha.net, will better understand what is written here. This platform which is a social innovation product helps hundreds of students meet hundreds of professionals who mentor them voluntarily. Young people ask, mentors answer.
Working in places requiring close human relationships until you are 28 can have different results in terms of personality development compared to working only in offices. For instance, I worked as a beach cleaner, a tea-seller, a pollster and a journalist when I was in my twenties and studying at university. They were jobs that required me to have close relationships with others. Maybe, it didn’t make much sense to meet all kinds of people, to get to know them and to observe different personalities and behaviours at that time. However, I reaped the benefits of those jobs in the following years.
I definitely recommend my young friends to work in a café when they are still young so that they can understand what it means to take responsibility and perceive the richness they will gain from a job environment requiring close human relationships. Conducting a poll is another area of richness.
If you discovered your interests maturely enough, built a network of relationships as required and kept general observation about local and global tendencies at the background, you would probably have the dynamics to decide what kind of a journey you would like to make when you turned 28. People who have done these things until they turned 28 have already pushed their luck. After that, it’s all about being in the right place at the right time.
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