How to choose your career: Interview with Ken Mattsson
In 2018, I published a book about how to choose your career. In 2024, I moved the content to this site. Below is the interview with Ken Mattsson.
Many people have concluded that searching for satisfying work is a recipe for unhappiness when finding work at all can be so difficult. What do you say to those people who think this?
Is being unhappy the only choice? No!
Giving up is saying you have no personal power, no control. You are just at the whims of the powers out there. That mindset isn’t helpful. You will then have a lot of people who just take whatever they can and they are likely going to be very unhappy. We all know people who take jobs out of fear, and then they get into that job and within the first day, week, or year they ask, “What did I get myself into? I am really unhappy.”
Maybe you are getting your financial needs met, but you are dying inside. These are the people who then sabotage themselves. You see them bolt suddenly in destructive ways.
I’m a firm believer in reality. I use the Ramen Noodle Scale: How close are you to needing to eat Ramen noodles for dinner? If you have a family to support, that’s reality.
But I open up with the question, “What is really important to you?” You don’t have to have just any job. Take some personal power and decide where you will be happy. Narrow down all the thousands of jobs to the ones that would be good for you.
What can you do with your interests? Ask yourself, “How do I represent myself so that people can see how helpful I will be to them?” You might not be able to say, “I’m going to leave everything now and be a novelist.” You may need a long-term plan with specific steps that move you in the right direction while you are still earning a living.
Even people who are in jobs they don’t like, if they have a sense of progress toward something they want to do, it helps them to tolerate what they are doing now.
I am the last person to squash anyone’s dreams, but I encourage people to find out the reality of what they want to do. What qualifications are required? What skills? What is the market? If you want to make major motion pictures, but live in Boston, is that realistic? You can’t be on Broadway if you live in Minneapolis.
I support people’s dreams by helping them with the planning. They do some exploration and then they know what is possible. I don’t say, “This won’t work.” I help clients come to their own conclusions. I help them investigate their options and then they can either move forward or put an idea to bed because it isn’t doable.
You work a lot with creative people in career fields that don’t have a predictable linear path to success. What do you teach your clients about career decision-making given the unique challenges of creative career paths?
I use two analogies—here is the first one: People think getting a job is like baking a cake. They think you follow the recipe and you get a job. But then they follow the recipe and it doesn’t turn into a cake and they are confused. Actually, getting a job is more like getting hit by lightning. You can put yourself in the right place with the right conditions at the right time, but you don’t control exactly when and where lightning will strike.
You do have some control here. You can control the industry, job title, type of company, geography, and conditions. You can find out what the hiring manager needs and can explain to the hiring manager that you have what they need in language that they understand, so that when a job opening comes up, the hiring manager remembers that you have what he or she needs.
But you don’t know what the right time is. Someone else who is more competitive might have interviewed, or there is no job available right now.
Career changers, in particular, have to learn the language of the new field. Creative fields are storytelling fields. The story isn’t about you, but about the hiring manager. If you have been doing engineering project management and you want to do theatre project management, you have to be able to explain what you can do in the language of theatre.
You can tell the same story to two different audiences and tell it in two different ways. For example, if you are talking to eight-year-old children about the Japanese tsunami and nuclear threat, you would use different language than if you are speaking to a group of nuclear engineers.
Here is a second analogy: The difference between a standard business career and a creative career is that the standard career is like filling up a container of water, like filling your bucket with liquid. As a junior accountant, you fill the bucket with a cup of water. When you get a promotion to accountant, you fill the bucket with another cup of water. As your titles increase with responsibility, you fill your career bucket with water.
With a creative career, you have a portfolio, and you are doing projects. It is more like filling the bucket with marbles. You put in marbles one at a time and it takes a while to put in enough marbles to fill a layer.
Maybe you are a writer and you give a reading, or speak at a conference, or write an article in increasingly prestigious publications. Each time you do one of these things, it means more marbles go into your bucket. As each layer fills in, you can start another layer.
People in creative careers want it all at once. They want to be “found.” But it rarely works that way. A breakthrough actor who is age 33 doesn’t really get discovered without having built his portfolio. It takes time. A portfolio shows what you have done, and it also builds connections with people with whom you have worked who can vouch for you.
I work with creative entrepreneurs. They have passion that they want to express in the world. But to manage a creative career takes business sense. You can write the great American novel, but if it stays on your hard drive, no one will see it.
An example is Madonna. Many people may not think she is the best musician, but she has the best business sense. For 30 years, she has been successfully producing creative work and marketing it.
Creative entrepreneurs are not just people in film, theatre, writing, and the arts. Ministers, yoga instructors, and teachers are also creative entrepreneurs.
How realistic is it to hope that someone will take over the business side for you? Maybe an agent or career coach?
That can work, but you are taking a big chance. You aren’t developing your personal power if you rely on someone else. That’s very passive. That would be like walking around town with a fishnet in your hands, hoping that fish will fall into it.
It is better to decide what you want and to make it happen. Usually, if you are hoping someone else will manage your career, you are feeling like a victim and you are not ready to take control. In reality, you have to have a certain level of success before you can be represented well. You may need to do internships and volunteer projects and slog it out in the field. With creative careers, you have to give away a lot before you are successful.
The bottom line is that in the creative fields, you need to develop a track record and you need people who can vouch for the quality of your work.
I have heard you say you don’t use the term “day job.” What term do you use instead, and why? What can clients do to tolerate a job they don’t love as a means to earn a living while they build a career they do love?
I don’t think people should have “day jobs.” When you say “day job,” you communicate you don’t care about this position and that no one else thinks the other creative work you do is important.
People get into a mindset that any day job will do, but I disagree with that. A creative career is a portfolio career. The earlier you build it up, the better. Instead of a day job, you need a Career That Supports Your Creative Career.
The problem with a day job is that while it might support you financially, it doesn’t support you with energy or time. A Career That Supports Your Creative Career supports you creatively, energetically, and with enough time to do your creative career. This Career That Supports Your Creative Career should be something you can develop. It shouldn’t suck you dry. You need to think about your Career That Supports Your Creative Career as much as you think about your creative career.
The key question to ask is: In what ways does your Career That Supports Your Creative Career support you in developing your creative career?
One way to do this is to choose a Career That Supports Your Creative Career that is very like your creative career. For example, a novelist might do technical or PR writing to support the novel-writing career.
Or you can find a Career That Supports Your Creative Career that is as opposite as possible from the creative career. For example, if you are a novelist, you might choose to do research or project management and customer service, but only if it doesn’t drain you. An introvert might prefer research and an extravert might prefer management or customer service.
The Career That Supports Your Creative Career has to supply you with energy and time. If you are a writer who wants to write early in the morning, you can’t be a baker who has to get up and bake at 4 a.m.
I help people to figure out the best options for this Career That Supports Your Creative Career.
People hope that someone will find them in the supermarket and recognize them as the next Stephen King or the next Glenn Close. If you aren’t taking control and developing a plan to get recognized, it probably won’t happen. You can have passion, but you also have to take action steps.
I joke that people need to be hit with a “clue-by-four.” I help clients realize how much they don’t know yet and how much they are expecting things to happen without taking action.
I ask clients to imagine me as a producer. Why should I choose your screenplay over the other 300 screenplays that were submitted? Have you won any screenplay contests at the student, regional, or national level? Has any of your other work been chosen for a 15-minute short or at a film festival or on TV or cable or at a theatre? Has the short won any awards? Was your work included in any compilations?
The more people say your work has value, the more chance you can advance to the next level of success.
Mid-life clients sometimes feel that it is too late for them to choose work that is deeply satisfying because they don’t want to go back to being entry level and paying their dues again. What do you say to clients who feel this way?
First, realize that when they say that they don’t want to do creative work, they are rejecting what they just said was their passion. Where will you be in 10 years if you don’t do this?
No one goes into the creative fields because it is easy. You can make a legitimate decision that a creative path isn’t for you because it isn’t what you want in life. Maybe you would rather have stability and health insurance and 9 to 5.
The people who are most unhappy are the ones who feel completely stuck and powerless. Here is an analogy: When you use a screwdriver to open a stuck paint can, you make little bits of progress until you finally pop off the lid. You need to take many small, incremental steps to get what you want. Just like dieting or adjusting your teeth with braces, it takes constant effort to make it happen.
What are those things that you hate doing? Can you re-engineer your job to do less of those things? What things are energizing for you? Can you do more of those things? Can you get back to your core values and what is important to you? It is progress to move from a bad place to a better, even if imperfect, place.
The goal is to get happier, even if you can’t drop everything and write screenplays full time. As long as people feel they are moving toward their own happiness, with some power, and say in how they live their lives, they are happier.
I ask people to tell me their level of misery between 1 and 10. People say 10 when they feel that they have no options.
Why do you think people struggle so much with career decision-making? What could parents and educators do differently to prepare young people to have better skills at this?
It comes down to personal power and knowing yourself. We have such a fear-based society, where people think they are lucky to have a job, whatever it is, and people think they have no power or control.
People don’t do enough work to decide what is most important to them and to take control of their own happiness. The current generation has had little practice making decisions because many of their parents have made all their decisions for them.
People get asked, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” and when they don’t know, they don’t know what to do. Instead, people should think in terms of what they like to do rather than job titles. If you like to “work with people,” where can you do that?
Parents and teachers could put less pressure on students to know what they want to do and instead help them with decision-making. It isn’t a conveyer belt from choosing a major to retirement. You can change your mind. You can change fields and jobs. You can use your skills differently. You can ask for a new role in your work. You can gain new experiences that will take you in a different career direction.
It all comes down to knowing yourself and knowing that you have an ability to make a change that will serve you. We aren’t a self-reflective society, and that makes things harder. There are two parts to career development: first planning and then execution. The resume is the execution part—it has to be targeted to the right audience. In career work, everyone wants to go directly to execution and skip the planning.
Some people think that trying to make a living in a creative career (vs. keeping the activity as a “sacred passion” or hobby) risks ruining the creative endeavor. Do you believe this? Why or why not?
Yes, it can be a risk. With any creative passion, there is a vicious side. Some people don’t have the tolerance for this. If you don’t want to market yourself, you have to pay someone to do it for you, and it doesn’t always work to hire someone.
For example, I worked with a pianist who stopped enjoying music once he made a career out of it. It is a valid decision to preserve your “sacred passion” rather than try to make your income from it. Know your motivation for doing something, and that can help you determine if you should make this a full-time career or not.
Can you give us an example of a client who learned how to make great decisions by working with you?
Yes. I run an intensive weekend workshop called Finding Your Calling: Making Connections Between Your Spirit and Your Work.
At one of these workshops, a participant’s passion was education, but he wasn’t happy in his career as a Washington, DC, lobbyist. He quit his job to go live in a farmhouse in the country. After going through my workshop and looking at some tangible steps, he did his homework exploring the options in his area and he ended up getting a position as the director of development for a small private school about 30 minutes from him.
When someone isn’t happy, it could be because they need a new boss or job, not just a new career.
Any other career advice that you would like to share with readers?
I’m an ENFJ on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). My primary expertise is connecting passion with something real in the world, and I work with creative entrepreneurs and people who haven’t yet identified their passions but are motivated to do so. To do this, I use concepts from David Allen’s Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity and other productivity theories. But you can’t be productive until you know what’s important to you. That’s why I work so hard on both sides of that equation.
Ken Mattsson is a career and professional development consultant and the founder of Resonare Consulting. He specializes in the connection between what your spirit wants to do in the world, and how to marry that to the work that you do in order to support yourself. While he works with people in all fields, he has significant expertise in working with creative entrepreneurs and the LGBTQ+ community.
