The Advice I Gave the Students

I had the great pleasure of talking with two different groups of graduate students and faculty in Industrial/Organizational Psychology at two different universities recently. Here are the top five takeaways I thought were important to leave them with:

1. Learn to trust your own judgement and clearly define what financial success and life happiness mean for you. You will receive well-meaning good and bad advice on your journey.

2. From Positive Psychology, there are four major sources of happiness:

   1. A caring relationship with yourself

   2. Caring relationships with others

   3. Work you love doing

   4. Enough money to pay your bills with some left over for fun

3. An I/O degree gives you lots of options. Teaching, research, external consulting, internal consulting, owning your own business, etc.

4. In choosing your career path, find the intersection of three things: 

   1. What you’re passionate about, i.e., follow the path with heart.

   2. What you are good at or can get good at 

   3. Something that people will pay for

5. You are now or soon will be a card-carrying member of the High Achiever Cohort. Avoid the perfectionism trap. Follow Dockery’s Principle of Balance &Justification (PB&J), i.e., most decisions are about the right balance on the bell-shaped curve. It’s important to know how much is “enough” or you’ll never be happy and content with what you have. In the long run, being happy is much more important than being rich. 

Don’t be a stranger. (770) 993-1129. tdockery@TheResolveFirm.com