Jobs. Most of us need one to pay bills. In exchange, we are expected to give up our time.
Lots of time. Assuming you are not in banking, let’s say 8 hours out of the 14 quality hours you have in a 16 hour waking day. Would not it be nice if you actually enjoyed this time? Or if you found it meaningful, with extrinsic and intrinsic fulfillment.
With COVID and current unemployment rates it seems privileged to think about finding the job you love. Many need to make short-term sacrifices to pay bills. But I believe there is still large value in being thoughtful when thinking through career moves, even if you have to make short-term sacrifices.
People (wise&famous people) will often tell you that all you need to do is to find a job you love, and that success will follow. Cheesy?
[Others will say — you don’t need to work at all, optimize for least hours sacrificed. Open an e-commerce site, do some marketing on the side, start a blog. Tim Ferris’ 4 hour work week and everything along those lines. There are indeed ways to create passive income streams, travel the world, and never have to walk into an office again. But that’s not what we’ll talk about here.]
I know some people with a deep sense of purpose and a clear goal. My friend Alex always wanted to become a doctor. She scored the highest possible score on the MCAT and is now in medical school on a tuition-free scholarship. I envy her a little bit, she works really hard but it seems she has it easier because of her sense of direction.
What if you don’t know what you want to do? How exactly do you find a job you love? Just pursue something you are good at? What if you don’t think you are great at anything specific?
Spoiler: is I can’t answer these questions for you. But I’ll share a framework of how I think about this.
The three things I think you should optimize for when you are thinking about your future job are:
Growth/ Learning
Will the job you are considering provide you with learning opportunities?
Learning can come in different forms. Ordered from most to least meaningful:
- Learning new skills (soft or hard skills)
- Learning something about yourself (what you are good at/ what you enjoy/ what you don’t enjoy)
- Learning about a new business model/ industry
- Learning company-specific details (least valuable from the above)
Learning is important because when you are learning you are increasing your own future value.
Comfort
Comfort is all those things that make you comfortable: the $$$, the nice office, the medical insurance, pleasant coworkers, flexible hours. If you are in tech like me, maybe it’s also lunches and dinners, on tap wine and kombuchas.
There is a basic level of comfort you have to have to be happy. Everything beyond that has diminishing marginal returns (aka additional job perks will not meaningfully increase your overall level of life satisfaction). Comfort is tempting but not intrinsically meaningful.
Purpose
What makes you tick? Purpose is what you are passionate about. It’s often connected to your life story. Many people tie purpose to a significant event in their lives.
Your purpose could be:
- Help cure a disease, alleviate pain for people in pain
- Support justice
- Create equal opportunity for people from diverse backgrounds
- Create something beautiful
It could be anything else too, there is no right or wrong purpose; as long as the purpose is true to you it’s purpose. Purpose fulfills an intrinsic motivation.
When thinking through a job, if possible you want to strive for fulfilling all three — purpose, learning, and comfort; this is not always possible, as a baseline you really need to satisfy 2 of the 3:
purpose and learning
purpose and comfort
learning and comfort
Appendix
Some other points I find helpful in thinking through job opportunities:
The job itself:
- Newness (new things tend to be more exciting and provide more learning opportunities)
- Learning opportunities (Do you expect to learn hard/ soft skills? Will you have opportunities to increase the scope of your responsibilities and the scope of the problems you will be solving? Will you be surrounded by people who you could learn from? Do you have a good feeling about the hiring manager?)
- Mission: are you excited about the product? Are you excited about the mission? Is the mission something you feel excited to share with your friends and something you want to identify with?
- Compensation: how does the compensation compare with other opportunities
- Team [this one is tough, but always follow your gut feeling]
- Exit opportunities
What you enjoy?
Where you want to go longterm?
