Career

Meaning

Accomplishments, Awards, and Asterisks

Nathanael Garrett Novosel, August 14 2024

What matters? It seems like a simple question. But here’s the thing: people every day ask themselves what they want in life or how they can find more meaning in life and never really face that question. They often end up looking around at what other people like and following them. With that approach, they had better hope that they like the same...

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Planning

Where Do You See Yourself in Five Years?

Nathanael Garrett Novosel, August 30 2023

In the immortal words of Creed Bratton of The Office, “If I can’t SCUBA, then what has this all been about? What am I working toward?” While this is quotation is meant to be funny since a man working an office job (with plenty of references to drugs, murder, and other seedy activities during the workday) for decades was all leading up to a...

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Planning

Writing Your Life Résumé

Nathanael Garrett Novosel, May 10 2023

I've spoken before about how HR departments cracked the meaning of life and success by optimizing professional growth within their organizations. In there, I linked to the life résumé template for folks to create their own. Today, I'd like to talk a little bit about when, how, and why you should create your own "life résumé" to plan your own...

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Happiness

Life Is Not a Zero-Sum Game

Nathanael Garrett Novosel, November 9 2022

Life is all about growth, but we live in a world with a near-incalculable (i.e., how many bottom of the ocean?) number of organisms on it, all competing for growth-enabling resources.  Trees compete for sunlight, animals compete over food and water, and some animals have to eat others to survive.  Naturally, it would seem that the fight-for-your-li...

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Planning

When You Are Feeling Behind in Life

Nathanael Garrett Novosel, January 19 2022

“I was supposed to have a spouse and kids by now.”  “One of my classmates from high school is now a CEO.”  “I’m so far behind in my retirement savings.”  People naturally compare their life progress to others, and they start to wonder what they need to do to “catch up” to others when they fall behind.

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Planning

How HR Cracked Life’s Formula for Success

Nathanael Garrett Novosel, June 23 2021

I know, I know—this headline is going to elicit groans from all of the memories of having to deal with an HR department when getting hired, promoted, or let go.  I get the stigma associated with HR.  But in my research and identifying the keys to success in life, I was looking for analogies that could best explain how it worked.  When doing so, the...

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Growth

Dare to Be Mediocre

Nathanael Garrett Novosel, June 10 2020

"Be the best." You hear it all the time. Constantly strive to be the best in anything that you do. But that's not realistic in a broad sense: you can't be the world's greatest chef, baseball player, parent, video game player, driver, singer, and dancer. Quite the contrary, you are constantly balancing everything you do—getting better in one area al...

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Meaning

Finding Meaning in Your Job or Career

Nathanael Garrett Novosel, March 18 2020

So, let me get my own personal experience out of the way first: I graduated from college a semester early because I took 18–19 credits for 7 semesters.  So, without a job lined up (I wasn’t expecting to graduate until May but crossed my credit requirements in December), I spent months applying for jobs and not really doing much else.  Out of the bl...

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