How to Pick a Career (That Actually Fits You) by Tim Urban
This is an article by Tim Urban about path-making.
Time goes by
For most of us, a career (including ancillary career time, like time spent commuting and thinking about your work) will eat up somewhere between 50,000 and 150,000 hours. At the moment, a long human life runs at about 750,000 hours.
When you subtract childhood (~175,000 hours) and the portion of your adult life you’ll spend sleeping, eating, exercising, and otherwise taking care of the human pet you live in, along with errands and general life upkeep (~325,000 hours), you’re left with 250,000 “meaningful adult hours.”3 So a typical career will take up somewhere between 20% and 60% of your meaningful adult time—not something to be a cook about.
The Denial Prison
People often have difficulty admitting their true feelings and desires, due to either their own stubbornness or the influence of others. This can result in these feelings and desires being repressed and pushed down into the subconscious, in a place called Denial Prison.
It takes courage to confront these repressed feelings, but it is the only way to grow and reach one’s true potential.
The Want and the Reality
The Want Box deals with what we think we want, while the Reality Box deals with what is actually possible. Self-reflection helps to bring both of these boxes closer to accuracy. When considering a career path, we must consider both the world’s beliefs and our own potential.
We often overestimate the impact of innate talent and luck in non-traditional careers. To get a better understanding of how great careers happen, we should brainstorm and explore possibilities.
Filling in the Reality Box
To complete our Reality Box audit, we need to evaluate:
1) The general landscape. Take our best crack at evaluating the world’s current career landscape—the full range of options available (or create-able).
2) Specific game boards. For any careers that sound remotely interesting, ponder what the deal might be with that career’s current game board—the parties involved, the way success seems to be happening for others recently, the most up-to-date rules of the game, the latest new loopholes that are being exploited, etc.
3) Starting point. For those paths, evaluate your starting point, based on your current skills, resources, and connections relevant to that field.
4) Success point. Think about end points and where on each line your star should be placed.
5) Your pace. Make an initial estimate for what your pace of improvement might be on these various game boards, based on your current pace-related strengths and how much you think you can improve at each of them.
6) Your level of persistence. Evaluate the amount of time you think you’ll be willing to put into each of these respective paths.
Impact
On top of your career being the way you spend much of your time and the means of support for the rest of your time, your career triples as your primary mode of impact-making. Every human life touches thousands of other lives in thousands of different ways, and all of those lives you alter then go on to touch thousands of lives of their own.
We can’t test this, but I’m pretty sure that you can select any 80-year-old alive today, go back in time 80 years, find them as an infant, throw the infant in the trash, and then come back to the present day and find a countless number of things changed.
All lives make a large impact on the world and on the future—but the kind of impact you end up making is largely within your control, depending on the values you live by and the places you direct your energy. Whatever shape your career path ends up taking, the world will be altered by it.
Making your move
After making a life decision, it can be difficult to take the necessary steps to make it happen. It is important to talk to the parts of ourselves that are causing the hesitation and explain why the decision was made.
This internal struggle is a big part of life, and it is essential to become a better kindergarten teacher to ourselves in order to make progress. If you have decided to make a major career change, it is important to be able to make that leap.
Identity
In our childhoods, people ask us about our career plans by asking us what we want to be when we grow up. When we grow up, we tell people about our careers by telling them what we are. We don’t say, “I practice law”—we say, “I am a lawyer.”
This is probably an unhealthy way to think about careers, but the way many societies are right now, a person’s career quadruples as the person’s primary identity. Which is kind of a big thing.
So yeah—your career path isn’t like my shitty sweatshirt. It’s really really deeply important, putting it squarely in “Definitely absolutely make sure to be a chef about it” territory.
The Yearning Octopus
The Yearning Octopus audit looks at the hierarchy of one’s yearnings and fears. It is important to look at both the positive and negative aspects and to assess where one’s actions are coming from.
A ranking of yearnings is also a ranking of fears and should be done from first principles, based on a person’s individual values and what matters to them. It is a balancing act between values and self-acceptance, and it is important to know when to accept certain parts of oneself and when to reject them.
After the move
Making a major life change (like a new job) can be liberating but also bring up internal fears and doubts. Contentment is a better goal than pure elated happiness, as the latter is usually temporary.
When you find yourself in a place that feels right, it is important to dedicate your energy to the present and live in the moment.
Quality of Life
Your career has a major effect on all the non-career hours as well. For those of us not already wealthy through past earnings, marriage, or inheritance, a career doubles as our means of support.
The particulars of your career also often play a big role in determining where you live, how flexible your life is, the kinds of things you’re able to do in your free time, and sometimes even in who you end up marrying.
Your Potential
Assessing your chances of success in any particular career involves determining how much time and effort it would take to get good enough at the game to reach your definition of success.
The length of the journey depends on where you currently are and how lofty your definition of success is. Reaching the star in a non-traditional career involves getting good at the entire game, not just a narrow aspect of it, and conventional wisdom often misunderstands this and attributes success to luck.
Progress is determined by your pace and persistence.
Persistence
When I say persistence, I’m referring to long-term persistence (as opposed to day-to-day work ethic). Persistence is simpler than pace. The more years you’re willing to commit to chasing a star, the farther along the road towards the star you’ll get.
A car going 30 mph that quits driving after 15 minutes gets a lot less far than a car that drives 10 mph for two hours.
And this is why persistence is so important. Someone who has decided they’re only willing to give a dream career a shot for three years before they’ll go for their fallback plan has essentially disqualified themselves from a chance at their dreams.
It doesn’t matter how awesome you are—if you’ll give up after two or three years of not breaking through, you’re unlikely to succeed. A few years is just not enough time to traverse the typically long distances it takes to get to the raddest success stars, no matter how impressive your pace.
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