You: Your Most Important Performance Review

If you've read a few of these posts you know by now that I like to deal in specifics. Generalities are very safe (just ask political candidates) because you have the laws of averages on your side. The idea behind mixing words and speaking in generalities is to make as many people happy (or, in some cases, as few people angry) with you as humanly possible. Think of someone that you know who bets their happiness and success on what everyone around them thinks. Now let's rename this person "Pat." Is this person a strong individual that you look to for guidance or motivation? Probably not. They are probably so busy making sure that they are liked that they perform poorly in their professional and personal lives.

What does Pat's self of sense look like?

I phrased this title in the way that I did to capitalize on the importance we, as Americans, place on our employers' evaluations of us.  While it is certainly important to maintain a positive position in the eyes of your employer and, often more importantly, your employees, we are basing an increasingly great amount of our self-worth on our worth to our employers. As discussed in the CareerNinja.com article "So Let's Say: You're Getting Fired" part 1, this can be extremely dangerous.

Remember this, Career Ninjitsu pupil: A business is a living, breathing organism.

The senior management of a company are, typically, its brain, which chooses how the organism will move and how (if) it will survive. If the organism decides to change its diet, it won't need the same set of teeth, the same digestive tract, the same tools. Depending upon your level in your company, you may very well be the brain deciding what the organism needs. The odds are, though, that you are an herbivore's flat tooth, or a hunter's rope, or an omnivore's third stomach. This means that, as the business climate changes, which it will, the organism may need to alter itself to adapt and survive. While you may be the best plant grinding tooth in recorded history, if the available botanical population in the area vanishes you will either be sharpened to a canine point or you will be shed in order to adapt more quickly to the change. The same is true of the vanishing of available huntable prey and of the need for a third stomach in drought.

Long story short, you are, to your business, expendable.

Cold? Yes. The concept, however, is a necessarily cold one., and I mention it to illustrate how bad life will get for Pat when the organism that he has happily and successfully contributed to adapts away from needing him and he finds himself discarded. Many of us have experienced this and it can be absolutely life-shattering for an individual who has not reviewed themselves.

What do I mean by "reviewing yourself"? I am talking about personal happiness. Does your job provide you with more than a paycheck? I'm not talking about compensation of any monetary or material type. If you were released of all debt and fiscal responsibility would you continue to do what you are currently doing? If your answer is a "No" or even an overly-hesitant "Yes" then something needs to change and soon.

That's it. Please read on for ideas on how to find what it is that you want to do with your life, but as for this article, please take the abrupt end as a very clear message: Get into something you actually like no matter what it takes. Don't make excuses about financial needs, family constraints, or anything else. You're not too old, you're not too sick, you're not too good at what you do to do something you actually want to do.

So start now and figure out what it is and do it.