Career Questions Need Life Questions First
and how I got this all backwards
👋 Hello there,
5 years ago (yikes), I wrote ‘The Passion Project’, an essay on experimenting with career paths. It addresses a problem with choosing a career, which is early in our life, we don’t have enough data on what we like to do.
I argue that passion is not found by magic but through experimentation and reflection. Passion in this context, is a tool for getting things done, like an ‘inner drive’.
But now, I think this approach is flawed. Not because career experiments are a bad idea but because the scope can be expanded. Before choosing a ‘career’, a good question is ‘What kind of life do you want?’.
Happy Reading,
Ved
What should I do with my life?
For a decade, I’ve approached this question with a career lens, asking myself:
‘What kind of work do I want to do?’
This made sense. Work is a significant part of our identity.
It shapes our social status & skills. It consumes most of our time and thoughts both in and outside of the office. It is the memes you share with work-friends from ‘corporate humor’ accounts.
You are what you do, right?
But this career lens is flawed. It ignores the life aspects of your career decisions.
Executive Summary:
1. The career lens is useful but flawed to answer 'What should I do with my life?' because it ignores how a job can affect one's overall life satisfaction.
2. Value-based decisions create authenticity in your decision-making. The problem is identifying and staying true to one's values.
3. Observing your values to develop principles is a good exercise, but can result in analysis paralysis.
4. Life experiments can help identify your present values in a short period versus getting lost in reflection and analysis.The Career Lens helps answer career questions but ignores its effect on life
While integral, your life is not work.
Answering career questions without considering life can lead to misaligned priorities. The career lens acts as horse blinds vs glasses to help us see.
The career lens focuses on:
Salary & Financial Security
Working hours
Title & Responsibilities
Learning & Industry
However, we risk missing other factors:
Commute schedules
Energy left for hobbies and ‘maintenance’ tasks
Time away from family & friends
‘Work’ that doesn’t feel like work
While saying this, it is difficult to define a ‘life’ lens. Responsibilities and circumstances evolve. Goals and personality can change many times over the years. But, just because it’s difficult, doesn’t mean we should be tempted by ‘simpler’ options. (e.g. optimizing for optionality)
Is there another option? An option that leads to authentic choices and that considers conflicting wants and needs?
Yes, they are called value-based decisions.
Value-based decisions can lead to authentic lives, but it’s hard to implement
Our values are personal beliefs of what is important, acting as an operating system for our decisions.
Through culture, family, and life experiences, we mold and develop this system over a lifetime. We are not always conscious of our values, but they do influence our decisions. And, when we act in conflict with them, we get a reality check through cognitive dissonance.
Values are authentic by nature.
They play a role in both parts of effective decision-making:
Our ambitions and life goals for ourselves. (‘What do we want and why?)
Our constrained actions and boundary conditions. (‘How do we want to get there and how do we define success?’)
The issue with value-based decisions is that it’s hard to do.
First, defining a life goal based on values is hard. From ego and internal drivers like ambition to mimetic decision-making, our minds are noisy. It’s easier to choose goals driven by emotions like fear and jealousy. The problem with emotions is that they can act in conflict with each other.
Second, finding clarity on your values is easier said than done. One can put a timer and just list them out. However, identifying your values is not a simple homework assignment.
Third, values change over time. Either through life phases or changing circumstances, our values morph and evolve. In other words, we go through software updates as people.
Keeping these limitations in mind, it is still necessary to approach life with clarity and take agency over your life choices. While we can be constrained by circumstance, privilege, and personal ego, using our values gives us a better bedrock for answering ‘What should I do with my life?’
Observing our values through observation and reflection on decisions can help mine our principles
We know values are malleable. So, the question ‘What are my values?’ isn’t helpful.
A better question is:
What values have guided my decisions (or I aligned with) at a certain point in time?
With this in mind, I want to use my values to find my principles.
Unlike values, principles are objective rules to develop consistent behavior. They are our guiding laws. But to find values and principles that are congruent with who we are takes observation and reflection.
With that distinction, we can reflect on three existing sources of experiences to help us identify our values and principles
Our past decisions and reasoning give signals about what we valued in our lives at certain points in time. They may not strike a chord with us anymore or maybe they persist. With reflection, we can take a step back to reflect on some questions:
Would I make the same decision again, without the information I have learned since?
What emotions were blocking me?
Was I acting in line with my values then or even now?Observable Decisions made by others can help us question whether we would make the same choices in similar circumstances. From biographies to close friends/family and even fictional stories, the values that drove their decisions and stories can be observed.
Philosophy is the study of ‘how to live’ and questions values. From hedonism to stoicism, there are a multitude of value systems developed over centuries of writing and thinking. The problem with philosophy is the difficulty of relating to these texts without enough life experience and context on the original texts.
But like ‘finding your passion’, which cannot be found through just analysis, we need ‘life experiments’. Life experiments give us real-time data on whether our goals and conditions align with our values.
Life Experiments help us identify values and principles we are aligned with through real-time reflection
Like the Passion Project proposed career experiments and projects to gain clarity on our ‘passion’, Life Experiments can lead to clarity on our values and principles, through observed decisions in a short period.
How to design a life experiment? By nature, they are short and observable. They vary from career exploration projects to living in a different city or trying a type of lifestyle.(bohemian vs workaholic)
The idea is to observe not just the work aspect (‘Do you like your work?’) but other variables (‘Do you like the free time you get?’ or ‘What do you like/dislike about this situation?’).
Through reflection, you can identify clear pieces you value in terms of engagement and energy.
One reflection exercise can be the ‘Good Time Journal’ from the book ‘Designing Your Life’ by Bill Burnett & Dave Evans. This exercise involves noting down a week’s worth of activities and gauging them in terms of engagement with the activity and the energy-adding/draining nature of the tasks.
This exercise can be used to find not only ‘work you enjoy’ but also a ‘life that you can enjoy’. Through observation and further experiments, you can evolve your observations of values into clear principles that guide your personality as a person.
Closing Thoughts
I’ve had career decisions backward. While I’ve had the assumption to find work that I enjoy and find interesting (‘engagement’), I ignored how integral work is to my life situation and the life energy left for other aspects of my life like health and relationships (‘energy’).
To cut through internal drivers like ambition and emotions, I suggest assessing decisions based on values. But while this is difficult, it is necessary to avoid living an inauthentic life. Or at least, to catch oneself when decisions are not congruent with oneself.
End of the day, our biggest constraint is time. We can dance along to the noise of life or find our rhythm through mini-life projects and reflection.