The first question I ask someone when they interview to intern with me is:
“What is your best case scenario from this internship?”
It is an important question, and one that is never really asked. Everyone has dreams, but no one has a plan for how to get there. The next question, and probably the more important one is:
“Why do you want that?”
More times than not, the answers to the above questions do not match up. Typically, the answer to the first question is “I want to work with elite athletes” or “I want to work in the team setting.” The answer to the second question is typically: “I want to do this because I want to help people.” This aspirational-altruistic view of the world is what people usually think I want to hear, but it does not really land in the way that people think it does.
There is a phrase, “never meet your heroes,” that has symbolic meaning for our professional tracts. Putting a job or a position on a pedestal will always have its downsides until you are sitting in a locker before a game at the highest level and asking yourself: how much am I really contributing? You really have no idea what working with elite athletes means. The truth is that the more genetically gifted, more talented, or more elite the population is, the less value your impact will have. Yes, there are marginal differences in which the best performance training leads to the slight edge over your opponent, but that difference is really hard to determine objectively.
This is not a blog post to crush dreams—it is a post about trying to find the best path towards your goal. The second question is a loaded question, however, and is the one that holds the most weight. Once you find out someone’s real intent, you can lean in and see what the best path is to getting there directly. Wanting to help should be the goal for everyone, a goal which stems from each of us wanting that for ourselves and our shared desire to not let people repeat our mistakes. We should all want to give guidance. The important thing to remember is that the people who need help from your wisdom and knowledge are not the ones you are aspiring to work with. This creates a lack of synergy, and a lack of synergy leads to misalignment of priorities.
The path to wanting to work with elite level populations is paved in interning with higher profile institutions. This leads to a trajectory of low level, low paying, low responsibility work with minimal level of direct impact. It is not a bad thing to work at a place that is recognized; it just comes at a cost. But again, if your goal was to help, are you really doing that? Instead, you are prioritizing the job over your claimed intentions.
The path one should take should be built on WHY they are doing something not WHAT they want to do. This is a very difficult thing to process. Our world is set around creating a goal and achieving it. It is not set around understanding the underlying context of why that goal is important. The path based on WHAT will be filled with things you do not want and will eventually lead to feeling frustrated. The path based on WHY is not easier, just more meaningful. The less glamorous aspects of a profession will be perceived within a greater understanding of the end goal. This is called Perspective.
The other phrase that is important to understand is: “find out what you love and you will never have to work a day in your life.” This has a lot of impact in directing one’s path. This cliche line is readily understood but rarely applied. This statement is based on wisdom from our parents and grandparents who could not turn a hobby into a vocation like we now can. Their efforts allowed us to take our passion towards being a profession that we can actually make money from. A school or a team or a specific athlete/higher profile client is not something you love. It is a job that pays you for rendered service. It can’t be something you love because you do not know it on a personal level yet. You can be a fan or admirer, but to say that you love it already is a misconception.
The whole point of this is to demonstrate that we need to evaluate our plan of attack when choosing the steps in our profession. Do you want to help people? That should lead to working with people who actually need your help – high school, gen pop, or rehab. If you want to be in the most competitive environment imaginable and see what you are capable of, then team setting (college/pro), private training with athletes/higher profile clientele is your path. If you are looking to intern or volunteer somewhere and you are not evaluating why, then you will be choosing a directive that is not in line with your ultimate purpose. Which becomes a huge waste of time.
Interning, volunteering, low level jobs, part time jobs, lateral moves, or backwards moves should all have an outcome that is conducive to your why. A haphazard choosing of jobs based on the notoriety of a school or team is not a good strategy towards your career. The realization that a job that occupies all of your time is unrewarding or unfulfilling is a product of your poor understanding of why you are there. When you enter a job, you should have an idea of what it will lead to: does the position give me a direct opportunity to work here or somewhere else? Does it give me the prerequisite experience to work at that place? Does it get me within the network that will help me towards something I want?
I have been on both ends of the spectrum – hoping to get hired and hiring the guy hoping for me to give them a job. From a person who has had a job opportunity with every internship position I have taken—it was strategy not luck. I wanted to be a head S&C coach in college football, so I deliberately chose internships that would provide me with the best opportunity to get that job. I chose my masters program based on that. I chose my network based on that. I worked my ass off and delivered each day I was there, but that was after the fact of carefully selecting my next steps.
Reverse those questions and ask yourself why you want something before you ask what you want. What you get is largely a product of circumstance. You have very little control in determining where you will end up or how long it will take to get there. When you do get there, if you have a strong understanding of your why, you will be where you are supposed to be.