Remember, these questions are prompts to help you delve into your career journey. You don’t need to answer all of them. They are meant to guide your reflection and journaling, especially if you’re finding it challenging to know where to start. The goal is to help you articulate the role and impact of your career on your life and the wisdom you’ve gained from it.
Easy
Uncomfortable
Fucking Brutal
All right. We are doing the video now on, what is it called?
This is Career.
Career. Okay. So I’m an entrepreneur. You’re an entrepreneur, but you’ve had a really big background in career education, right?
I’ve been in both worlds. Yeah. Yeah. Mm-Hmm.
So, there’s a real big opportunity for you to discuss how your children want to move forward with their career. Right. And a lot of high level, surface level stuff, like, “What did you do wrong or what’d you wish you did? Or how you hate your job or you love your job?” And then the real, real deep stuff as well. Right?
Exactly. Yeah. As we talked about in some of the other lessons here, you can look at the real tactical stuff. You can talk about your career path and maybe that involved a certification of some kind or maybe that involved a particular degree or a program that you had to take and, what was the value in that? And, that’s the kind of stuff that might be helpful. But you can also go all the way up to the really deep stuff you can talk about, like ethical dilemmas that you face. Maybe there was a problem in the work in the office and you had to make a tough call on somebody. Or maybe you had a tough call made on you. Like, these are the kinds of life experiences that you have an opportunity to share, and to pass along that otherwise might escape you.
Yeah. I mean, what’s great about when you start getting in the mindset of creating this content, and as soon as you get your tech figured out, however it’s comfortable for you, for example, I just do videos. So you always have your phone with you, right? Let’s be honest, it’s with us all the time. I’ve always got it in my pocket and when I have something, these prompts, because that’s what these are, they’re prompts. These prompts get your brain thinking and then you start going, you know what? That would make a good video. And if it’s 30 seconds or 10 minutes, it doesn’t matter. But I pick up my thing and I just talk to my kids and I go, “You know what? I had a really, really shitty experience managing my team today, and here’s why. And here’s what I learned from it, and here’s how I handled it, and I want you to understand something…” You don’t have to have a parable, you know, theme answer for everything. But the whole point of this is to instruct them, right? Career is a big thing. So if you’ve gotten enough what you think you need, you can just stop this video. We’re gonna keep talking about this in more detail, but if you’re ready to go and start talking about it, look at the questions we have and go out there and do it right now. Do it.
Okay. So let’s get deeper into this. Let’s talk about some of the types of high level, easy questions to the fucking brutal career stuff.
Alright.
Is there fucking brutal career stuff?
There is fucking brutal career stuff.
Okay, let’s start there. What’s fucking brutal about…
You wanna go right to the tough stuff?
I do.
All right. Uh, so, fucking brutal: “Have there been moments in your career when you felt you had to compromise your values?”
Yeah.
Right?
It’s a good lesson for them, because that’s gonna come up, right? It is like, at some point in their, not just their career, but their life. It’s gonna be like, uh, you know, I, I’ve always wondered about this as like politicians or, people who, like, for example, people who work in insurance companies, right? I’ve always wondered how those people can live with themselves. If you work for an insurance company, I apologize.
We just lost the insurance company segment.
But I’ll give you my opinion. Like, I don’t know how, like this is a video I will make for my children. Like I could never walk into a career and a job where I knew my goal every day was to screw people out of their insurance money because that’s, I mean, let’s be honest. That’s their job is to keep the money. They don’t wanna write claims, watch any insurance movie, read any book. It’s reality. It’s not fake. So the answer is no. I would, I could never do that. So the question I would say to my kids is, “Do you think you could do that?” I didn’t raise you that way. If you get into a situation where somebody asks you to screw over somebody, it’s probably not gonna be worth it. And this is how I handled it.
I can crystallize this concept for you. This is the, “I’m just doing my job.” Right? If you’ve ever been in a situation where you’ve heard yourself saying, “Hey, I’m just doing my job,” but yet in your heart you feel like there’s something really wrong there, like that is an experience I think I’m gonna share with my kids. I’ve had that. I’ve had that experience of saying to someone, “Hey, I’m just doing what I was told,” or, “This is just my job,” but I knew it wasn’t the right thing to do, and that’s gonna happen.
That’s a great, great example. Okay, you can get as deep into that as you want. But just again, be honest, be authentic with them because the whole point of this is they get to hear the real you, right? And your real experiences that you may have not given them before. Okay. Yeah. So what other examples do we have?
So here’s another one from fucking brutal that I think is very relevant. We’re Gen X. One of my friends said, “Middle age is where dreams go to die.” And I think that, you know, one of the brutal elements of this is reflecting on your career path, realizing that certain things have passed you by, you are never gonna have a certain opportunity in your fifties that you did in your twenties. And so what would you have done differently?
This is where you could go so many directions with this. Have a raw, authentic moment that no one else is gonna see except them and talk about, you know, what I would say, and I’ve said in the videos I’ve made, I don’t have regrets. I’m extremely happy with my choices I’ve made in my life, the good and the bad and everything. But man, there are some things that I really wish I would’ve done.
At the very least, there are things that I wish I could tell my 25-year-old self. And like you said, they’re not necessarily regrets, but like, oh, if I had known that, right, right. If I had known that then—and here’s the kick in the ass. And this is why we’re doing this: at 25, I wouldn’t have heard that. If my future self went back in time to my 25-year-old self, I wouldn’t have listened. And so my kids are not gonna listen right now, but maybe they will when they need it.
Right. And again, your grandkids and your great-grandkids. This is more than just this surface level video or audio you’re putting on your phone that’s gonna be here for the next hour. This is literally called “Legacy X.” For Gen Xers who wanna leave a legacy. Get that into your head. That’s how important this is.
Let me give you a few buildup questions. The easy stuff to get you get will get you up to that point: “What is your current profession and what path did you take to get there?” So you could just talk about what it took to get where you are. And, it’s probably not a straight line, it rarely is a straight line, you know, that makes it interesting.
One real interesting way you could go with that is they could say, “Hey look, I ended up being a mechanical engineer and I worked at this company for the last 30 years. But then, you know son, I made money for the family and it was great and everything, and I don’t regret it. But I’m telling you right now—my opinion, don’t spend the next 30 years working at a company where you just sort of like…” There’s a real opportunity here to have these real conversations with them. That’s what we’re talking about.
Yeah, absolutely. And hopefully these questions and these prompts are gonna spark these ideas and concepts for you. Here’s another one that’s not quite easy and it’s not super personal, but, “Were there any significant turning points or decisions in your career that led you to where you are now?” So if you think back about all of the micro decisions that lead you to where you are. There might not have been a, there may have been a very big decision that felt like a micro decision at the time, and that might be something that you wanna share with your kids and be like, “Hey, be on the lookout for this. It’s gonna seem insignificant, but it’s not.” Let me give you an example. This is not exactly career related, but it does demonstrate the point. Who you choose as your significant other is one of the most important decisions anyone can make in your life. And nobody tells you that when you’re in your early twenties.
Of course not because you’re.
You kids are probably swiping and all that stuff that you’re doing.
Oh man, you just sounded really, really old right there. Um, it’s fine. We’re old, but he’s right. And I wanna just, again, continue to point out that your kids are not looking for you to have this pre-planned, thought out, scripted, right? So when you get a prompt, I want you to just immediately pick up the device you’re gonna do it in and start talking. And if you’re mumbling and I’m not sure, and whatever, just keep talking because that’s real, right? Yeah. That’s the real conversation that you’re having with them. That is the entire value of this. Your kids don’t wanna sit down and watch you do a robot, you know, newscaster.
And they don’t wanna be lectured. They don’t want you wagging your finger, telling ’em what they should be doing and, and who they should be with. That’s not the point of this. You need to talk about yourself, and that’s really hard to do. But you need to talk about yourself because they will see their path and their options in your stories.
You know, it’s really hard to do. You’re right. But it’s not hard to do when the purpose is there and the why is there, right? So if you’re still watching this video, you have that right? You’re here, you’re you. This is important enough to you that you want to do this. So it’s just you doing it at this point, right? It’s just you just going, you know what? I’m just gonna do it. And we’re trying to make it easy for you by giving you the prompts, by giving you the motivation to go do this. I want you to envision in your head how wonderful this is gonna be at the end. When you do have this kind of content out there, I’m telling you right now, after you create this content, you feel really good about what you’ve done. All right.
Onto the next one?
Yep. Let’s do it.