The meandering road towards a meaningful career

How to approach your career more intentionally, stand out, and play the long-term game

Sep 04, 2023

When it comes to doing good and feeling good, our career plays a critical role. As a key goal of Impact Drive is to help all of you do good and feel good, I wanted to share some of the favourite career principles I learned in the last five years with you.

I’m still very unsure about my longer-term career goals. I think this is to be expected for a 21 year-old, and I think at no age will I have it completely figured out. But the principles below have given me more clarity about my next steps, and will I believe pay off in the long-term. Thank you to everyone who shared them with me! I especially want to thank my friend and co-founder Utkarsh Amitabh whom I learned many of the principles referenced below from.

My top 12 career principles (not ranked)

Discover your priorities by imagining your funeral
Though morbid and unsettling, picturing your funeral can be insightful. Asking yourself who you want to be at your funeral and what you want to be remembered for helps you better understand your priorities, and gives you guidance on a meta-level for what to do next. It also helps contextualize daily stressors by showing how insignificant most of them are when looking at the big picture. Steve Jobs talks about what mortality, especially his cancer experience, taught him about life. You can listen to his inspiring speech here.
Design your ideal ordinary week
Picture how you would want an ordinary week to look like in the future. When, where and how much would you want to work? What tasks would you like to work on? What kind of people would you want to be surrounded by? I like to make this as concrete as possible by planning my ideal week on paper. You can use this to compare it to your current week. If you notice big divergences, you can use this as a nudge to make some changes. Don‘t only think about the most important highlights of the week, but truly picture how you want to do the little things. Habits matter. As the famous saying goes “how you do anything is how you do everything“.
Explore, then exploit
When it comes to designing our career, there will always be the tension of exploring different options, or exploiting the known (discussed here). I like the strategy of exploring different options early on in your career/ whenever you want to make a career change and then exploiting what you are best at. But I don’t know where the correct balance lies. What I think is important if, like me, you have many interests and tend to be indecisive, is to not stand on the sidelines for too long. Imagine a corridor filled with doors, each representing a career choice. It’s tempting to stay in the corridor, playing it safe, not having to choose a room. However, making a choice and stepping into a room is necessary to progress and belong somewhere. And often, stepping into one room opens even more doors.
Tackle indecisiveness using the chair method
Having many options (be it for your career, or where to get your groceries) is a huge privilege that many people sadly lack. That said, FOBO (the fear of a better option) is certainly real and gets us stuck in a trap of indecisiveness. When facing FOBO it‘s helpful to first think about the stakes of the decision. The lower the stakes, the less mental energy we should spend on making the decision (more about this here). Our career choice is clearly a high-stake decision. If you are undecided between options, you can try gaining clarity by using the chair method. Sit on one chair and imagine what your life would be like if you follow option A. Really imagine what your day to day would look like. Then sit on the other chair and do this for your other option (however many options you are considering). The insight into how you feel can be revealing, even if you don’t know how these options would play out in practice. If you can’t imagine at all what your life would look like if you follow a particular path, this a good indication you should learn more about it before making your decision.
Devise a career plan
If you would like to get more clarity on your career path, I think devising a career plan is an important step. Plans change, but it will give you an anchor to reflect on and will allow you to concretise vague ideas into actionable next steps. I personally found the career plan by 80,000 hours quite helpful. Here is the link to it. And if you feel stuck creating the plan, that‘s also completely fine. No one has it all figured out. A promising technique, discussed in this article by Utkarsh, is to look for your “ikigai”, a “reason for being” where what you love, what you are good at, what the world needs and what you get paid for converge.
You don‘t need to find and follow your passion
The advice that we should follow our passion sounds inspirational, but at the same time I find the thought of having to find my “calling” or true passion stressful as it implies there is one right path we should follow. I feel that interests, and even passions, can be cultivated over time, by deeply immersing oneself in a topic and becoming more knowledgeable about it. I therefore don’t worry about finding my passion, as I know I can become passionate about lots of different things, as long as I put in the time and effort. In this post, Utkarsh further discusses why following your passion is dangerous career advice.
Stand out by becoming a deep generalist
Standing out in the job market is becoming increasingly difficult. Should you aim to become a specialist (i.e., have deep knowledge in one field), or a generalist (i.e., have broad knowledge over many fields)? I think aiming to become a deep generalist, where you acquire and combine detailed knowledge of two or three fields hits the sweet spot. It will allow you to be more innovative, as you can apply and connect insights from different fields. Having a unique knowledge combination also allows you to stand out, and generally makes you a more interesting person to talk to. Roger Federer is a great example of a deep generalist who successfully used the explore vs exploit. You can read more about how Federer benefitted from playing a multitude of sports growing up, before committing to tennis here.
Take the initiative to expand your luck surface
Taking the initiative on and actively going for the things we want is daunting. But it is the best way to ensure we are living our life by design rather than by default. If you would like to connect with someone, reach out. If you have a question, ask. And if you want a job, apply. Women are typically worse at this. We tend to only apply when we meet 100% of the requirements; men when they meet 60%. To expand our luck surface, we should do great things, and tell lots of people about them (read more about this here).
Add value to build genuine relationships
Like most people, I dislike networking, at least in the way it’s commonly understood. It feels fake, superficial and transactional. Thinking about networking as building genuine relationships is a much better approach. The Jewish mathematician Paul Erdos, one of the most well-networked and loved mathematicians of his time, wholeheartedly focused on adding value to his peers, whilst leaving room for serendipity and being clear about his goals. You can read more about him in Utkarsh’s article here. Focusing on how we can add value to other people (no matter how senior), and actively listening to them, allows us to build genuine and lasting relationships.
If it’s not a hell yes, it’s a NO
Saying yes always means saying no to something. Like many, I would love it if I could just say yes to everything I’m interested in, but that’s not how it works unfortunately. We only have limited time, energy, and concentration… If you are saying yes to everyone else, you are saying no to yourself. Saying no is difficult because we don’t want to disappoint others and also don’t know what will come out of an opportunity. Nonetheless, saying no, unless it’s a “hell yes” is an essential skill to train if we want to make better, bolder decisions.
Use failure for reflection
I dislike the view that we shouldn’t be upset about failure because “everything happens for a reason” or because “failure is our biggest teacher”. We are allowed to be upset when something doesn’t work out, especially when we have given it our best shot. Yet, I think the saying everything happens for a reason is true given that we are always writing our story, connecting dots in hindsight. Even if you don’t know where you’ll go/ can’t make sense of your situation now, trust your brain that it will come up with a good story for how it will play out :) As to failure being our biggest teacher, it really depends how we contextualise the situation. It’s important to first acknowledge that we often are at least to some extent for how things play out. This shouldn’t undermine our self-esteem, but rather gives us the opportunity to reflect on what we could do differently in the future. As explained here, it is pain + reflection that will allow us to progress.
Protect and invest in your most important asset - you
Don’t reduce your asset to increase your income. If you have the privilege, you owe it to yourself to make yourself a priority. We want to be healthy, happy and productive in the long-run. Therefore, we should minimise activities and habits that reduce our potential long-term fulfillment, for short-term gains. This could include sacrificing our health and sleep for short-term success through overworking, or eating unhealthily for short-term pleasure and convenience. On the flipside, when choosing between different opportunities, think about which ones will pay off most in the long-run. This could be because you learned a new skill, met inspiring people, stepped out of your comfort zone, or sometimes because it was fun and will give you a good story to tell :)

I hope you found the principles helpful. If so please share them with a friend!

All the best,

Caroline

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The meandering road towards a meaningful career

How to approach your career more intentionally, stand out, and play the long-term game

My top 12 career principles (not ranked)

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