I’m sure just about everyone has gone through the following
conversation:
“What do you want to eat tonight?”
“I dunno, what are you in the mood for?”
“I don’t know. I could go for anything.”
“I don’t care you pick.”
“I don’t feel like making anything, , let’s go out.”
“Okay. Where are we going?”
Eventually, you wind up at a McDonalds because it’s the only
thing open after you decided to go out for dinner three hours earlier.
Some would call this indecisiveness, but the technical term
for this phenomenon is analysis paralysis,
which happens to rhyme. I usually call it “paralyzed by choice”, which doesn’t.
I’d make my version of the term rhyme too, but I wound up having so many
options to choose from (I actually started this article in February).
Officially, the term analysis paralysis means spending so
much time analyzing something that you fail to make a decision. It’s actually
something I do quite often, but my version of the term refers to having so many
options you waste time trying to decide which one to take. Eventually you do
make a decision, but usually because you’re out of time, or the line behind you
at Starbucks is getting restless.
At the moment, I’m facing a career change. I retired after
21 years (and 139 days) in the Air Force and now have to find another job. The
problem is that in the Air Force, you may have an official job title, but you
spend an awful lot of time doing many (many) other jobs. Officially, I was a
Cyber Transport Technician. Don’t bother looking it up, it’s basically an IT
installer and maintainer. Unfortunately, while I do have experience in that,
I’ve spent the last few years as a manager. Again, in the Air Force you wear
many hats, so I’ve been a Project Manager, a Human Resources Manager, and an
Operations Manager; frequently all at the same time.
This presents a bit of a problem looking for a civilian job.
I’m basically qualified and experienced in four different career fields. I know,
the easy solution is “do what you love”. Well, what I love is writing… and it
doesn’t pay crap. Maybe in the future I’ll have that luxury, but right now I
have a family to support.
I decided to go for Human Resource Management. I’m
interested in helping and guiding people, so it seemed like a good fit. I went
to the job boards and found a handful of HR jobs, and a few I meet all the
qualifications for. While researching HR jobs though, I found some IT manager
jobs and Operations manager jobs I’m qualified for as well. And hey, there’s a
Communications Manager job I might be interested in as well. Having so many
options must be a good thing, right? Not exactly.
Anyone who has looked for a job recently knows that there is
not such thing as “your resume”. Oh, sure, you have a resume, but in today’s
job searching world, it has to be customized and tailored for each and every
job you apply for. Automated software scans for keywords, and everything has to
match up to the job descriptions. Additionally, many job application sites
require you to basically re-write your resume in a narrative form, plus fill
out pages and pages of other information.
This takes time. Hours and hours of time. And having to
manage 4-5 different master resumes takes even more time. I am paralyzed by
choice. There are so many options to choose from, I feel compelled to choose
them all, and I am suffering. I want to be selective, but the reality is that
it takes weeks to hear back from a potential job, if you even hear back at all.
I’ve seen statistics saying for every hundred resumes you send out, you’ll only
hear back from 3-5 of them. I haven’t sent out a hundred yet, but so far, those
statistics don’t seem that far off. So, I’m taking the shotgun approach, and
frankly, job hunting is a full time job in itself.
Paralysis by choice isn’t limited to job hunting. Like I
mentioned earlier, I like to write. I also have about a hundred different ideas
I’d like to write about. All these choices make it hard to decide which one I
want pursue. I like screenwriting and have about five ideas that are either in
progress or I’ve started outlining. Unfortunately selling a screenplay is two
hundred times harder than finding a job (probably worse). I have several ideas
for novels. Getting a novel published is pretty easy nowadays (making money off
it, not so much), but novels take a lot of time to write. So which one do I
want to commit to? They’re all good. Or maybe they’re not, but I’ll have wasted
a lot of time trying to figure that out. I used to have to wonder what I was
going to write about. Now, I have way too many choices.
The good news is that I’ve made efforts to help avert
paralysis by choice. When I go to a restaurant, I usually have a policy that
I’ll order the first thing that catches my eye. When I dated, I committed to
one person at a time and put blinders on until it was time to move on. With my
kids, I chose a favorite and let the other ones fend for themselves.
America is a wonderful country. The fact that we have to
choose where we want to go eat or what place we want to vacation is a testament
to how good we have it. But all things come with a price, and ours is time
wasted trying to decide which choice we want to make. Now if you’ll excuse me,
I have to decide on something to watch from my Netflix queue.
