Finding Your Five Most Important Things
This is a (pretty corny) exercise to help frame what matters most to you in your work life. If you haven’t already read my thoughts on why this is a critical tool in your career growth toolbox, you might want to give that a look before you tackle this.
How To Prepare
- Clear some time. I’d recommend about a half hour, but your mileage may vary.
- Find a quiet place where you won’t be disturbed. This is about putting some sustained thought into what matters to you.
- Have your favorite note-taking thing handy. I’m a fan of a notebook, if only because they don’t offer too many distractions to pull you out of this.
- Be willing to mentally picture yourself in the situation below. Visualizing quite often helps focus and helps reach a better result faster.
The Exercise
In a moment, there’s a knock on your door. As you open the door, a delivery person is walking away and waving acknowledgement over their shoulder at your, ”Thanks!” as you’re looking down at the box they’ve left on your doorstep. It’s about the size of a box of copy paper, but not super heavy — maybe ten pounds. You pick it up and carry it inside.
On top of the box is envelope with your name on it. Inside the envelope is a letter and a check, and like every normal human you look at the check first and see it’s something fairly close to half your annual take home pay. That’s definitely got your attention, so you turn to the letter. It’s addressed directly to you, from the CEO, handwritten, and clearly not a form letter.
We’ve thought long and hard about it and decided to shut down the company. You’ve done great work — and I mean really great work, we wouldn’t have gotten so far without you. Still, it’s the right thing to do. We’re giving everyone six months’ pay and benefits so that no one has to rush into their next job because of money or other concerns.
While we were at it, we talked to a lot of companies about you! We told them about the places you are amazing — and there’s a lot of them! — and the places you’re maybe not so amazing (which was a much shorter chat). It turns out that there are a thousand companies who’d like to hire you, just based on our conversations!
We asked them each to write up the role they’re offering and all the important details that we knew you’d care about. They’re all inside the box, each in its own envelope. All you have to do to accept one of these jobs is open it, sign it, and send it back. Anything you care about — engaging work, compensation, recognition, influence, life balance — is in some set of those envelopes. Do you want a company car? Company jet? How about a company flying unicorn that farts rainbows? It’s in there, somewhere.
Good luck in your next adventure!
You realize immediately that this is way too many offers to evaluate in the usual A vs B vs C vs … G? H? With this many, relative comparison is likely to end up in a long, winding trail or, worse, an endless loop. You’re going to have to step back and develop some framework, some set of criteria, for thinking about this so that you can judge each one as you look at it and feel confident that you’ll know when you’ve opened the right one.
So take a moment now and think about it. What would your criteria be? What are the five most important things about your next job? Make that list, and make sure they’re in order of importance — you’d never say yes to something without #1, and if you were going to say yes to anything without all five, it’d have to have #1-4.
FAQs
Do I have to have five? I’ve {only,already} got {3,20}.
Yes. Five is important; it gets you to the right level of detail, and can conveniently be counted on the average human hand.
Why is this useful?
You’re making a concise, explicit (and shareable) definition of what matters most to you in a professional context. It’s a valuable tool to measure your current role and judge what’s working well and what you’d like to work differently. It’s also like a map to finding deep job satisfaction, especially when you share it with your leadership so they can help.