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Many of you will remember this commercial. Some will have no clue. Others will have only seen parodies.

Click Here to Watch Video

But to shortcut it for you, it is about patience. And about persistence. Unless you are willing to bite down hard.

How many licks does it take to get to the center of the Tootsie Pop?

Of course, the world may never know.

But this post has little to do with a sucker. Or being one. It is about the hard work that many of us have in front of us. To find a career that truly matters. A job where we can truly feel happy.

Some of you have known your entire life. And I hate you for it.

You played with trains in your crib. Re-built your first engine at 11 and now enjoy an awesome career at Ford Motor Company. Building the newest cars to save the environment and let us all drive the way we want. With power, speed and comfort.

OK, so I don’t hate you. But I once envied you. For knowing. When I was searching.

Maybe you were a three lick and a crunch kind of a person. And I just kept on licking. No one told me to crunch.

Or maybe I crunched too soon on the wrong flavor?

Confused? OK.

My point is this. Some of us know early what we want to do. We simply point the nose of our career in the right direction and pedal harder. For others, we choose the best first career that we can. And hope for the best.

Once chosen, we either look up early and shift gears. Or we make a variety of turns until the horizon seems level and right.

If you feel like you made all the best decisions you could early on. But still aren’t happy.

You need to keep licking.

For me, licking was thinking and writing. Praying and paying attention to those things that I’ve always loved doing. Not just where I was making money.

I know that the soft gooey center (the right career) is in there somewhere for all of us. And the trick is to find a way to soften that hard outer shell.

In my experience, there is only one way to do that. To determine (after all these years) what you really want to do.

You have to go do it.

Specifically, you have to experience the feeling of doing it. To separate fantasy from passion. Long-held dream from true calling.

The only reason I was able to make my move – the decision of a lifetime – was because I tried some things. And I used a job search. Four months in 2007 that included some extra time. To do some focused experimentation.

Had I carried a different plan in my bag. And not decided to open my idea book. I would not be writing this blog today and I would be wondering. Still. What am I supposed to be doing with my life?

Now I know some of you are not wondering. You are pretty solid in a career. You love it and just need your next job to keep things going. And this may not be your favorite post.

But I heard a stat the other day that 80% of workers are unhappy in their jobs. Not sure I believe that. But that’s a big number if it even half is true.

So here are some things you can do to kick off a few career experiments. Especially since going out and interviewing for that new career right now is really difficult. Few will hire you without experience in the job.

1. Pick three areas that you think might “be you”.
2. Write out three reasons for each. Reasons why you feel that way.
3. Pick three really good friends and ask them what they think. “Is this me?”
4. Pursue two of the three in some way for three months. A time long enough to either get your fill or begin to warm into the role. You can do this by volunteering, taking classes, going to seminars, participating in a cross-functional project at the office, helping people in your neighborhood or community (i.e. being an accountant, personal trainer, event planner, writer)
5. Be patient. You will not become an expert over night. In fact, you may fail early on. But that’s not the point. The point is to pay attention. How does it feel to do it over an extended period of time?

This last point is really important. Because for me, I felt awkward (but alive) once I started writing this blog. Once I started helping people. Awkward because for the first 3-6 months, nobody was listening. Easy to think of that as failure.

But it wasn’t failure. It was just new.

So, I ask you. How hard is that candy shell? Any of you getting close to the gooey center?

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Tim Tyrell-Smith works full time as a marketing executive and part-time as a blogger, creator, and idea generator. He discovered a passion for helping others after his own 2007 job search. Click Here to check out his blog!

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