Does your career choice fit your personality?
(photo with caption “ Introverts often are drawn to sports like golf, biking, or long distance running.”)
Much confusion exists in today’s youth when it comes to choosing a career path and then earning a living. Despite the current worry that Gen Z and the Millennials all want to opt out of the system, the fact remains that to live one must earn money and that means one must work.
As a full-time, practicing psychoanalyst and sport psychologist, I interact daily with kids heading for college or college kids headed for the job market. I listen to their confusion and hesitation and worry as they struggle with what is known as the quarter life crisis. And in today’s world of hyper competition, longer work hours and stagnated wages, the question of finding a suitable and enjoyable career is a crucial decision.
One way that I help with these questions is to refer to Carl Jung, one of the founding fathers of psychoanalyst. Jung is widely known for a variety of brilliant concepts that have become cultural touchstones, including collective unconscious, liminal space, archetypes, anima and animus, the shadow, midlife challenges and theories about marriage.
But when someone is struggling with career decisions, Jung’s theory about extroverts vs. introverts is very helpful. Whether we are discussing a sports career or a more regular profession, your personality type will act like a tropism which will guide your choice to its correct and inevitable destination.
According to Jung, extroverts are oriented toward the external world, are outgoing, outer directed, friendly, open, candid, accommodating, confident, adventurous nd the life of the party. You see extroverts in the fields of finance, law, sales, politics, and teaching. In the world of sports, which I am most familiar with, you see the extroverts attracted to sports like football, basketball, lacrosse, and soccer which require one to interact continuously with teammates both on and off the field.
Introverts are said to be naturally introspective, thoughtful, more quiet, hesitant, cautious, reflective, retiring, serious, defensive, and wary about social interactions. They are naturally drawn to careers like research, writing, art, engineering and medicine. The sports that an introvert is drawn to include golf, swimming, long-distance running and biking. All these sports allow for a greater sense of isolation and aloneness.
There is a need for both personality types in this world. The extroverts are the ones that keep businesses going and I have met and admired the instantly likable businessperson who is naturally disarming, charming and fun to be with. These are the risk takers, the entrepreneurs and world beaters like Howard Schultz, the head of Starbucks, or former New York State Sen. Mike Balboni.
But the culture needs the introverts just as much. These are the dreamers, the thinkers, the creators. Men like Julian Schnabel in art, Merce Cunningham in dance or Gay Talese in journalism. It takes these two types to have a society that grows.
Thomas Kuhn was the American philosopher of science who wrote the book “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” where he said that fundamental change occurs in two phases. Firstly, there is the hard work of establishing a system of thought or a structure of business. I would say this is the work of the extroverts who establish this structure. When this is completed, the system is protected and safeguarded and resists change. This is why you often see such rigidity in the corporate world.
But phase two must eventually occur or the system will die. This happens when someone, usually a lonely introvert, dreams up something that they have worked on in isolation for years and presents the idea to the world. If this is a truly good idea, if it’s a better way to do things, then it shatters the old system.
Einstein is a good example of an introvert whose idea changed our view of time. There are many examples of this. Computers destroyed the typewriter. Cell phones destroyed pay phones. Netflix and Prime will destroy movie theaters. Photography and Picasso destroyed realism in art. To have a society that grows it takes two to tango, the extrovert and the introvert.
Jung was the first to outline this dimension of personality and it tends to dictate the direction you will go in with your career. Therefore, do not fear for all will work out in the end. Or as the great mythologist Joseph Campbell always told his students at Sarah Lawrence College, just “follow your bliss” and all will be well.
But, of course, to follow your bliss hinges upon that other ancient maxim spoken by Socrates to “know thyself.” And I suspect that is where the therapist comes in, for there is no better place on earth to discover who you are and what you like to do than on the analyst’s couch.