A million years ago, when I was in grade school, my favorite thing to read was these “choose your own adventure” books. They were a story with a series of choices you had to make to survive, solve a mystery, or catch a bad guy. You’d turn to various pages depending on your decisions and you’d succeed or fail depending on your choices. If something didn’t go well, you could always go back a choice or two, do something different, and arrive at a different result. Exciting stuff to a third grader!
The military often doesn’t provide that kind of self-determination. You might pick your MOS; you might not. You might get to pick your post or unit, but probably not. You get orders telling you where to go and what to do, and there are regulations and standards about how we work, dress, talk, and live. It’s like that by necessity, but one downside is that when we move beyond the military to another profession, the dynamics can be very different.
Before we continue, I want to say thanks for serving. Whether you’ve served for 24 months or 24 years, you’ve done something important for our country and become a part of America’s tradition of citizen veterans. While you won’t wear a uniform every day, you’ve learned important lessons about what it means to be an American and serve something bigger than yourself. Thank you.
That’s the nice part.
Now I’m going to move to the not-so-nice part: each and every one of you faces challenges ahead. It’s not easy to make a change of this magnitude. It’s not easy to move from a system and team you’ve spent years as a part of and shift into a very different environment. It’s not easy, but it’s what you’re about to do.
You’re approaching major changes to your life and lifestyle. Some of you will struggle. Some will succeed. Some will fail, then succeed at something else. And some will fail and stop trying, or quit when the first thing doesn’t work out.
I’m here to tell you that this transition prep you’re getting is the last bit of support and help you’ll get. The Army is a big machine that, for better and worse, reduces a lot of unknowns for us when we’re in uniform. You’ve always got a chain of command and battle buddies who are supposed to be looking out for you, developing you, and giving you feedback.
But that same structure doesn’t exist when you take off the uniform. Your career is a “choose your own adventure” book, and where you end up depends entirely on what you want and what you do.
One critical value of being in the military is that your team is more important than you. We emphasize and reinforce the practice of accepting personal risk to accomplish the mission. The team and the mission are more important than the individual—even the leader—and we teach and train this value constantly.
We reinforce selfless service, but I have to tell you a big, bad, important secret about your future: now you have to look out for yourself.
Nobody else can do this for you. It’s up to you, and you alone. And that’s a big change from the Army machine telling you where to go, what to do, and who to be—whether you know it or not.
I’m sure you’ve heard a lot of different things about building a career after the military. Lots of it is true, depending on your situation. It’s often possible to find a job doing something similar to what you did in the military. But I’m here to tell you your goal shouldn’t be to just “find a job.” It should be to choose the right adventure for yourself, your loved ones, and your future.
It’s easy to define ourselves and our identity by what we did for the military, but you don’t have to do that if you don’t want to. No branch manager or sergeant major is going to tell you where you belong. So, here’s a framework that will help you reflect so you can choose the best path for yourself.
The 3 M’s: Mission × Mentors × Mindset = Opportunity
Mission
Your mission is what you want to do—the company or cause you want to contribute to, how you want to spend your days. You’re not getting it from an Operations Order, and it doesn’t have to be something you’ve done in the military or before in your life. You may find some employers who are happy to have you do something similar to what you did in the military, but you don’t have to do that. You don’t have to “chase your passion,” but you do need to seriously reflect on what you are willing to spend your days doing.
I went from studying history, to being an infantry guy, to studying business, to working for a tech company planning and leading projects building machine learning algorithms. Those transitions weren’t easy, and they weren’t guaranteed—but with some good luck and hard work, I tried to make the most of my opportunities.
If you’d asked me 10 or 15 years ago, I never would’ve expected to be on my current path—but I’m glad I am. And you can be too!
The fun part—and the scary part—is there are tons of options, and it can be hard to choose or understand what’s possible. But if you want to explore it, the opportunities are there. You just have to do the work to define your mission and give yourself direction in your search. The path doesn’t have to be a straight line, but if you’re going to move, you have to decide which direction to go.
Mentors
Mentors are people who can help you learn and grow. They can give advice and feedback as you move through your career. The amazing thing is that there are tons of veterans and civilians who’ve made big changes in their careers—so many people you can learn from if you invest the time and effort. They can be people you haven’t met before or people you’ve known a long time; they can be your age, older, or younger. What matters most is that you can learn something from them and benefit from what they can share with you.
One of the biggest mistakes people make is to go it alone and not ask for help from others. The veteran community is strong in almost every profession and industry, even when it’s small. And if you ask for help in the right ways, doors can open that you didn’t even know existed.
What matters here is connecting with people who can assist you by being in your corner. There are many different types of people who can be an asset to your transition if you know who to ask for help.
Mindset
Your mindset is a critical multiplier for the other aspects of your transition equation. A resilient mindset can offset weakness in your mission or mentor network and help you overcome the challenges and obstacles you’ll face along your journey.
When we talk about mindset, we mean a balance of determination and openness. Determination allows you to do the work necessary to achieve your goals and not get derailed by obstacles or setbacks. Openness allows you to learn along the way and use the information and feedback you get to adapt your approach and keep making progress.
It’s important to know that you aren’t owed any job, let alone your dream job. People appreciate your time serving in uniform, but it’s up to you to convince them that your experience, skills, and work ethic make you the right fit for their business or team.
Opportunity
When you smash those three areas together the right way, you’ll make something happen. You’ll find an opportunity—maybe something different from what you envisioned, maybe exactly what you were shooting for from the start. But what matters is that you make it happen by learning and working, because the job or life you want won’t get handed to you on a platter.
What’s great is these principles can help you not just once, but continuously as you grow your career. You can choose your own adventure—find something more than “just a job,” do work you’re proud to do, and give yourself a worthy purpose.