December 2007 – Overcoming career obstacles

Most of us will have had childhood dreams: places we want to see, people we want to meet, work we would like to do. Some of those dreams will be modified as we get older. Some may fade completely.

Others, however, may be moulded in to a career. The more audacious dreams, perhaps, will remain forever out of reach and people – teachers, parents, friends, career advisors – will tell us to forget them.

Yet those dreams - call them ambitions - can be powerful sources of motivation. To sever oneself from ambition is to lose one of the underlying qualities that makes a difference in the human spirit.

Randy Pausch, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, held on to his ambitions and seems to have fulfilled most of them at the age of 46.

The story of how he did so framed an inspiring lecture* he gave at the university earlier this year, made all the more poignant since he has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and doctors have told him he has no more than a few months left to live.

He’s packing a lot in to the life he has left, lecturing most recently on time management. But it is the talk that was billed as his “last lecture” at Carnegie Mellon that has been attracting thousands of viewers worldwide on the internet.

I want to review it here because I have found it more useful than any of the books on leadership and motivation that have crossed my desk this year.

Perhaps its most telling point for those who are struggling with their careers is about how to deal with and how to understand those obstacles – he calls them “brick walls” - that stand in the way of getting what we want.

We must all have experienced such barriers – demanding qualifications, rejection letters, regulations, officialdom, interviewers who assume the roll of gatekeepers, blocking our path like nightclub bouncers.

“Brick walls are there for a reason,” he says. “They let us prove how badly we want things.”

I once read a biography of Major Edward “Micky” Manncok, Britain’s highest scoring fighter pilot of World War One, an achievement that was all the more remarkable since he was blind in his left eye.

The Royal Flying Corps’ eyesight test was Mannock’s personal brick wall. He overcame the test by memorizing the letters on the card when an orderly left the room.

Some may argue that such obstacles should be removed if they prevent outstanding people achieving their ambitions. But Prof Pausch argues otherwise.

“The brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They are there to stop other people,” he says.

He lists a whole string of ambitions - some of them career-related, some of them fantasies and some that verge on the bizarre.

It’s important, he says, to have specific dreams. He did not, for example, dream of being an astronaut, but he did want to experience the sensation of floating in zero gravity, something he achieved when he helped a group of students to win a trip on a NASA flight, the so-called “vomit comet” that reproduces weightlessness for about 25 seconds by flying in a parabolic arc.

The programme had a space for journalists but did not take lecturers. Prof Pausch overcame the restrictions by promising to film and publicise the flight. Here, he says, is another lesson: “Have something to bring to the table because that will make you more welcome.”

This is a vital lesson for job seekers. If you have something that others believe they need, particularly if it is something in short supply, you are far more likely to stand out from the crowd. Sometimes, however, a special quality needs to be emphasised, even “sold” to a prospective employer because it may be something they have not recognised as significant.

One ambition that Prof Pausch never achieved was to play American football in the National Football League but he cherishes the training he received, nevertheless. “I probably got more from that dream and not accomplishing it than any of those I did accomplish,” he says.

A vital lesson from football training, he says, was to take criticism and learn from it when doing things wrong. “When you’re screwing up and nobody is saying anything to tell you anymore, that means they have given up. Your critics are telling you they still love you and care.”

People must learn also how to deal with frustrations, he says. “Experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted.”

Students who attended his courses were set short projects where they were expected to work in teams. Every two weeks the projects and the teams would change so that the students experienced working with many different people. A spin off from this work for individual students was the production of a bar chart that represented how easy each of them were to work with. This allowed people to reflect on qualities that may need to be improved.

Coincidentally I received something similar last week – the results of undertaking the Gallup Clifton Strengths Finder test that I covered some months ago. The idea here is to home in on personal strengths, but it’s not a bad idea to note of weaknesses at the same time. All I will say is that there were few surprises.

One of the toughest career challenges for Prof Pausch was to be accepted in to Walt Disney Imagineering, a part of the company that was established originally to develop the theme parks and resorts that have become famous throughout the world.

As a specialist in virtual reality technology, the professor might have seemed a natural recruit, but, as he explains, it was not easy to convince Disney that an academic could contribute in a more corporate culture. He secured a consultancy with the company by creating and making the best of opportunities to meet the right people. As he points out: “Some brick walls are made of flesh.”

The Pausch legacy will probably be felt most strongly in education where he has pioneered ways to teach young people what he calls “hard things” such as Java code, in creative software programmes that focus on storytelling using three-dimensional graphics.

In a lecture at the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce in London last week, the film-maker, Lord David Puttnam, urged the UK government to encourage similar educational development among computer games makers. A computer version of a game such as Escape from Colditz, for example, said Lord Puttnam, could include language-learning as a way for players to make their escape.

In the US, thanks to Prof Pausch and his collaborators, such ideas are becoming reality. “I, like Moses, got to see the promised land but won’t get to set foot in it,” says Prof Pausch. “The vision is clear: millions of kids having fun while learning something hard. That’s pretty cool. I can live with that as a legacy.”

*Read more about Randy Pausch at Wikipedia

See also: Building careers in management