Note: I’m about to graduate in like 2 weeks, and one of the most challenging problems I faced was that of finding a career where I thrive. I picked up many life-skills along the journey to finding the ideal career. The following blog is very much a collection of learnings that I gathered, so they might not be applicable to your case, but I’ve made sure to make them as general as possible for all audience to take something with.

The Career Identity

I have a problem with hiring. The thing that I don’t really like about it is the fact that we tend to make our career identity our entire identity, and that too at when we are teenagers and don’t really know how to navigate in the world. We tend to take one of the most important decision(but not THE most important decision) of our lives of what we want to work on when we don’t even know how things work in the first place - as if being a teenager in itself isn’t challenging enough(at least for me, it was). You are dealing with your own issues, and the same time life comes at you at full speed and throws 20 things at you, and you need to somehow make the right decision in all of them? This isn’t ideal, but that’s life.

Making a career(not getting a job, there’s a big difference) is such a convoluted field that any advice you receive is probably of no use in your case - the “gotcha” case of the survivorship bias. There are things you need to figure out on your own, and no amount of advice is going to cut it. I feel with the right approach and being educated about things makes you stand out in a system that doesn’t really care about you.

For me, your career is something from which: you can make money, satisfy your curiosity and provide value to the society. If you are able to find an intersection in all three factions, you are sorted, but let me tell you a hard truth(if you haven’t figured till now), that finding this intersection is REALLY, REALLY, REALLY HARD. One of the first people that come to my mind when I think about people who have find this intersection is Chris Olah - who figured this pretty early, and is someone I look up to for inspiration.

The college experience taught me a lot about life. The “trial period of adulthood” I had in my college prepared me for life in ways I didn’t really imagined. I learned a lot about how to be a good social citizen(I’m a really really really shy person), have good health, how to prioritize my time, how to draw boundaries etcetera. Learning all of these is very complicated, and there’s no way someone could’ve taught me this. I needed to step outside my comfort zone and tackle these on my own. Most importantly, I developed this great habit of having honest one-on-one conversations with myself about things that I want and things I don’t. I carefully weigh in the pros and the cons about things I care deeply about, and usually don’t make a rash decision - and career is certainly one of those important decision. I don’t want to work in specific fields because all of my peers are doing that, but do them because I can find the intersection. Sometimes things work in your favor, and sometimes they don’t, but what you can do is at least take the driver seat in the decisions that are going to impact the next phase of your life.(also, just to point out, I’m a big believer in the fact that you can always change things in your life, so it’s not that you can’t redo things, it’s just being prepared about what life is about to throw at you). Career is said to be one of the three/four biggest decision that one has to take in their life, and letting fate roll a dice on that one is not ideal for me.

The Hard Conversations

Anytime the topic of career is brought up - suddenly the word “passion” rises from the ashes. Many people have different notion of passion, but for me passion is the thing from which you derive creative satisfaction. In the context of career, passion is something from which you can continuously derive creative satisfaction for long periods of time. You need to be able to enjoy learning things(learning is not supposed to be enjoyable, but still bear with me), and not chicken away when things get tough. The hard thing with making a career solely based on your passion is that the age(the age is just a placeholder for lack on experience) in which you take these decisions(for me, it was 16), we are often myopic with how things are going to pan out in the future. Questions like “Will this be relevant 5-10 years down the line?” and more importantly, “Will I still enjoy working in this field 5-10 years from now?” have no clear answers, but an informed, educated “guess” is more valuable than a “YOLO” decision. Learning what you like is another exploration pursuit few people take seriously.

I’m a huge believer that the world around us is a passion project made by people who loved their craft. These “craftsmen” weren’t the chosen ones because they were naturally good at it, but they picked up things along the pursuit of honing their craft. This is generally the advice I like to give to people, is to not think of career as a roadmap, but rather a treasure hunt. No craftsmen were world class experts in one thing, but were adventurous polymaths who were jack of all trades. They didn’t restrict themselves to a particular discipline, but rather allowed themselves the freedom to explore and let curiosity drive them to hone their craft - and that for me is the essence of passion which translates into really well in the context of career. There are these hard conversations you need to have with yourself to understand what you are passionate about?(and whether you can sustain it or not), and then how much depth you are willing to go to quench your curiosity?.

As per my limited experience, you can basically go to any field with these two learnings in your arsenal. If you able to convince the right stakeholders about these two, I can guarantee that there’s no organization in the world that is going to reject you(unless you are affected by the aftermath of a global pandemic, honestly, for which even I don’t know what to do). Anything unrelated to these two comes under the umbrella of “skill issue” and that is much easier to overcome. The hard pill to swallow is that no amount of Ted Talks, Podcasts, YouTube videos are going make things easier for you. You need to have these hard conversations with yourself, and honestly, my recommendation is that if you have to swallow a frog, do it first thing in the morning. I’ve learned that if you don’t solve these two learnings early in your career, you’ll often end up in places where you’ll feel like an imposter.

The Hard Steps

If you’ve related to Grant Sanderson’s Harvey Mudd speech, you’ll find some loopholes in the previous paragraph. Grant mentioned that passions are very self-centered, and as we grow up, we need to align our passion with what society needs help with, this is because our passions are tied to our individual interests, and they tend to change over time, and that’s really not a strong foundation to make a career. Finding that blend of things you are passionate about, and the things which of utility in society, is very very hard thing. All of the outlier craftsmen throughout the course of mankind were remarkable because they were able to bridge this gap. They stuck with problems they cared about for a long time, had incredible work ethic to make progress and could go to great depths to solve problems they cared very deeply about.

With hard conversations out of the way, we’ll shift our focus to the hard steps you need to take in order to be an excellent craftsman. Again, no amount of superficial learning here is going to cut it, but actually taking these hard steps. For me, crafting a “Pièce de résistance” is a direct outcome of how much effort you put in, and much you care about the problem(it creates this loop where if you care more about the problem, you put in more effort). The hard steps you need to take for that is to develop high agency and an incredible work ethic. The hard thing about taking these steps is that these are not quantifiable and there is no gold standard to measure your progress against. You only learn about these steps by actually taking these steps(which is difficult to put into words). One of the quotes by Terry Tao that I really like that fits well with this idea is that “Progress is obtained naturally and cumulatively as a consequence of hard work, directed by intuition, literature, and a bit of luck”

Agency, for me is the measure of what depths you can go to solve the problem at hand without limiting yourself. It is the act of taking ownership and responsibility of the problem, and caring deeply enough about it to go to any depths to solve it. This is not something that can be taught, but is something that an individual needs to cultivate. On the other hand, work ethic is something that fuels agency. It is easier said that done with these two “hard” steps, and as long as the problem you are solving is of utility to society and you’ve taken these hard steps to solve it, there’s no organization in this whole world who can undermine this “talent”(this, for me is the actual talent, none of the naturally genius trait people have romanticized). Another great consequence of taking these hard steps is that even if they sort of “fail” in the short term, they increase the surface area of your luck for the next voyage. If you approach problems from the lens of satisfying your curiosity, overall, it is a win-win situation. When you take this approach, there are no “easy” or “hard” things, but rather “steps” you need to take to complete your journey(remember the treasure hunt analogy!). You always push the limits of your domain along the voyage, and try to never be in the comfort zone. The more journeys you take, the better sailor you become.

The Alignment Problem

After figuring out all of this, then comes the hard alignment problem. Remember that the system where your skills are to be valued, isn’t really your friend, and you basically need to play the system’s game and convince the right stakeholders just how much they can benefit from your career “Ikigai”. They get their problem solved ; you get your creative satisfaction, money, learnings, and a relief from the ever bugging state of “Hey I don’t think this is where I thrive” ; a win-win situation for both parties. Since there is almost zero chance of society ever running out of problems, the system is always on the lookout for people to solve problems. If you are able to convince the system the work that you do is important, and you have your career Ikigai in the right place, you’ll be in the exclusive list of people who are blessed to be satisfied with their career, and can focus on other challenges that life throws at them.

People care about other people who are trying to solve problems, and however limited they are by the rules of the system, as long as the foundation is laid deeply by passion, excellence and the ability to take the hard steps, they are going to respect your work and from that point onwards, things like making enough money becomes least of your concern. You’ll actually be surprised just how much easier the career path gets once you have these pieces figured out and things like “Interview” are just the games you play to disambiguate your skills to the system.

Footnote

Being someone who has been in the constant state of anxiety about my career, having clarity about what I want from a career by the time I graduate is really a blessing. I’ve really come a long way from being someone who once was really scared about getting any opportunities to someone who is in a position to make calculated decisions on where I can see my career thriving. I’m always open to take the hard path, and always on the lookout for places where the problems are much bigger than my imagination.