Why All Your Career Ideas Feel Uninspiring And Unreachable (And What To Do About It)

Two young fish are swimming along in a fishbowl. After a while, they pass by an older fish swimming the other way. The old fish nods at them and says: "Morning, boys. How's the water?" The two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?" – David Foster Wallace

Why can't you figure out what your next career might be? You're spending so much time thinking about it, reading about it, looking around you for clues, but you don't seem to be getting any closer.

You're repeatedly going over old ground, considering and dismissing the same possibilities. Picking up the same ideas, bumping into the same obstacles and challenges...

And it's not just frustrating any more. It's actually getting kind of boring.

What you'd really love is a light-bulb moment – a flash of lightning or an "A-ha!" – where you see or realise something totally new and exciting. Or to see an old idea from a new angle – an angle that makes it fresh and interesting and viable.

So what does all this have to do with a story about fish?

Because when you really look at it, you and your life aren't so different from those fish and that water.

What's the water you’re swimming in?

Your understanding of the world – of what's possible and available to you – is directly correlated to the way you live your life, on a basic, minute-to-minute, experiential level.

The newspaper section you read first. The shows you watch. The buildings you go into. The people you talk to. The way you get to and from work. the things you do to relax. The websites you visit and magazines you read and choices you make at the supermarket.

These experiences, these seemingly meaningless actions and choices – they shape who you are, what you believe, and what you know.

And, as a general rule, we slide into these routines and ways of being without too much thought. Sure, maybe you made a conscious decision to start going to the gym, or to spend more time with your kids. But, on the whole, a huge proportion of our lives operates on autopilot. Unchosen, thoughtless, intention-free.

Once you've started reading a certain newspaper, you don't even think about picking up a different one at the kiosk. You watch whatever's on TV at the time you get back from work. You go to the same places, run through your usual routines, walk the same streets. Every now and again you do something different, but, on the whole, your life looks a certain way, and you know it inside-out.

And then you realise: you want a career change. You want to do something you love. And you have no idea what that might be.

You scan your mind, looking for something that inspires you and that you could enjoy doing every day, and you come up empty-handed. You look around you, at your life and your friends and the world you know, and there's nothing there that jumps out at you as being enticing enough to warrant packing in your familiar, secure position at work right now.

It can be a scary realisation: the moment you discover that you have no idea what would make you happy. But there's a good reason for it. It's not because there's something wrong with you. It's simply because, chances are, the career you're daydreaming about can't be found within your life as it looks right now.

The life you live is the water you're swimming in

It forms your entire perception of the world. It's so all-encompassing and so natural to you that you don't realise it's completely specific and unique to you.

You're so accustomed to the water that you don't even know it's there. And it's limited, just like a fishbowl. The boundaries of your experiences form the walls of your fishbowl.

A useful way to think about this is to consider that there are three different types of knowledge:

1. The things you know

These are your old familiar favourites in the fishbowl. The water, the little ceramic pirate ship, the career ideas you've considered and dismissed and then considered again. The things your friends do for work that you know you're not interested in. The things you know about your industry, how to find job opportunities, what to say at an interview.

2. The things you know you don't know

They're all there, in the water too, because they're still contained in your life as you know it. How to make your CV stand out. Your psychometric profile in that latest personality test. Whether or not you'd be well-suited to a job as a dentist.

You don't know these things, but if you wanted to find out about them, you could, because you know they exist. This is the kind of knowledge that most career changers focus on.

It's the reason that so many of us spend hours 'researching' our career changes online – because we think that if there's more water in the bowl, we'll be able to swim further.

But you're still inside the bowl. Swimming further, in more knowledgeable waters, but still inside the same old fishbowl.

So what this all means is that you can't be what you can't see. You can only choose from the careers you know are out there – the ones floating around in the water of your bowl. Because if the right one was in there, you'd have found it by now.

If you can't find your ideal inside that fishbowl, inside your current experience and perceptions of the world, then the key must lie outside the fishbowl – in the third category of knowledge:

3. The things you don't even know you don't know

They're so far outside of your experience and perception of life, you don't even know that you don't know them.

For me, my current career fell into this category for a good proportion of my career change journey. I didn't even know that "online career coach" was something that existed as a concept. I didn't know that I didn't know about it.

And this is where fresh ideas lie. This is where true inspiration is waiting.

But if they're totally invisible to you, how do you access those things?

If there's one thing that will guarantee you new ideas, possibilities, and unexpected opportunities, it's getting out of your current reality.

Change the water you're swimming in

"If you keep doing what you've always done, you'll keep getting what you've always got." – Anonymous

You're going to need to start experiencing things that are totally new, and totally foreign to you.

The key is not to try and orchestrate this in such a way that a career idea will magically appear, or to filter your choices based on how productive you think it will be. 

Focus purely on the question: "what would take me – physically – outside of my usual reality?"

And the beautiful part about this is that it only takes a few little pushes to set the process in motion.

A few micro shifts in your lifestyle can spark major shifts and light-bulb moments.

Lisa was an architect, who had spent years circling inside her fishbowl.

When she joined our Career Change Launch Pad, she challenged herself to do one thing each week that she'd never done before – and not only that, but something that she'd never even thought about doing before.

On her first week, she took herself to a pottery class. She had virtually no interest in ceramics at all, and certainly didn't consider it a potential career path for the future. But she'd never done it before, it was outside her comfort zone, and she figured it might be fun to make a bowl for her mother.

At the class, she got chatting to the instructor about different kinds of clay, and another of the participants mentioned something she knew about working with clay. It turned out that this participant knew a lot about working with clay in other capacities – she was a herbalist and used clays as part of her work making natural skincare products.

The more Lisa heard her classmate talk about natural medicines, the more she felt herself getting excited. Lisa had suffered from psoriasis for her entire life, and exchanged contact details with her classmate in the hope that they could meet up for a coffee and talk further.

Now, Lisa's not about to become a herbalist. But her conversation with this woman did spark an interest in nature that she hadn't felt since she was a kid, so for her next excursion outside her fishbowl, she found herself volunteering for an afternoon at a city farm, helping them build and care for their new permaculture garden. She's now gone part-time at her architecture firm and is spending the rest of the time working with an eco-building project, designing cob structures for community projects.

"I still don't know exactly where I'm headed in terms of my long-term career path, but I'm so much closer to loving what I do than I ever got before I started my weekly experiments.

"Just that one conversation at the pottery studio has launched me into this whole new world of permaculture, gardening, alternative medicines, and healthy eating. I've never learned so much so fast, and been so engaged in something new before. I may not have the specific job title yet, but for the first time in my whole career change, I know for sure that I'm on the right path.

"And what's really amazing is how much I found out I was wrong about before. I thought I knew how moving into a new field would have to work: retraining, quitting my job to make a big leap, spending loads of my savings… But since I've started opening up my world, I've found out so many different perspectives on how to make things happen.

"I dread to think where I'd be right now if I'd just stayed in my old routines, searching job sites, talking to recruitment agents who could only see where my CV could take me… All I had to do was try something new, and so many possibilities opened up."

If you've been spending a long time, like Lisa, trying to figure out what you want to do and coming up empty-handed, it might be time to take a good, hard look at the water you've been swimming in. Is it stale and familiar? Are you spending most of your time trying to turn the things you know you don't know into the things you do know, adding more water to the same bowl?

When was the last time you swam in brand-new waters?

Five ideas to get you started

1. Today, before you go to bed: open your phone's events app or local listings site, filter by a category you'd normally skip past entirely, and message one person to come with you to whatever's happening this week. 
    
2. Pick one person in your life whose job you've never actually understood (not admired, understood) and ask to shadow them for a morning, or take them for coffee and get them to walk you through an actual day. Don't ask "what do you do?" Ask "What did you do yesterday, hour by hour?"
    
3. Try Lisa's experiment. Go somewhere you'll be a beginner in a room full of strangers (a class, a workshop, a volunteer shift), and make it a rule that you talk to at least one person there about something other than the activity itself.
    
4. Sit somewhere you don't belong. Pick a place where a completely different kind of work happens in public; for example, a courtroom's public gallery, a trade show you have no business being at, a lecture at a university on a subject you've never studied. Spend an hour there, then ask one person nearby a genuine question about what they do. 
    
5. Audit one part of your life that you haven't questioned in years. It might be the way you commute to work, the news you read first, your lunch routine... and swap it for its opposite for a week. 

Are you just doing laps of the fishbowl? And, if so, what could you do to change your conception of what's possible? Let me know in the comments below!