How To Choose A Cool Career

How do I choose a cool career?

I think career counselors make it more complicated than it needs to be. It's not a precise science. Most career counselors will give you this long inventory of questions and strong interest inventory of the mires, brigs and fill out this computerized thing, spend three hours in front of eureka. In the end it's not that precise. You can't narrow it down like that. For example, let's say you ask me to answer this ninety-seven questions and it says you should be a lawyer. The reality is there are 97 different kinds of lawyers. There are lawyers who are not people people and will sit by themselves and write contracts all day so a non people person would be fine as that lawyer. Let's say you are a people person, you could also be a fine lawyer working in negotiations or in trial work. Yet the computer program or whatever is going to say, you're not a people person, you shouldn't be a lawyer. The reality is that you can reduce it to three simple things: number one, basically, more often than not, would you rather be working with words, would you rather be working with people, would you rather be working with data, or would you rather be working with concrete objections. Once you identify your number one or maybe your number one and two choice, then, and I really feel self conscious for saying this, but I wrote my book, Cool Careers for Dummies, to find an easy way to hone in on your career. So after you identify, are you either a word person or a data person or a people person, I've come up with 5 career little scoops, little profiles of each career, so in almost two hours you can go through 5 careers marked by whether they are mainly people or data or whatever, and find in two hours a career that emotionally turns you on and that's all you really need to do.