What Should You Do With Your Life?
First, put money aside for a moment. Having “enough” is definitely important, but starting with money is the wrong approach (I was a trader for five years and earned a fair — not crazy — amount of money, but was definitely not very happy doing it, especially given the stress and opportunity cost).
While everyone is different, the “What should you do with your life?” answer lies somewhere near the intersection of your honest answers to these questions:
- What are you fascinated by? What’s interesting and makes you come alive? What can you enjoyably lose yourself in?
- What are you already good at, or happily willing to invest countless hours and other resources towards learning? Think long term — assume you’ll be working hard to keep learning and developing throughout your entire life.
- What is useful and valuable? This usually means you will earn money, because someone pays, but not always. Of course, “value” and “payment” can come in many forms. And also, value generated does not always translate into money earned.
- What is within your value system (and I suppose to some extent society’s, which is (sometimes loosely) tied to laws and regulations)? If you believe in your heart that something is wrong, even if it’s technically legal, look elsewhere — your conscience is probably correct.
If you are terrific at something, and you really enjoy doing it, and someone will pay you money to do it, and it’s within your value system, you are well on your way to career happiness.
If you don’t yet know all these things, invest in yourself by reading, trying things, having conversations and generally doing as much as you can to learn and find out what works for you.
Take some intelligent risks. As long as you consider the worst case scenarios and avoid the terrible ones, a few failures are just fine.
Remember, there are a thousand different ways to be a lawyer, or an artist, or a teacher, so don’t assume early on that you know and understand the entire range of possibilities in a given field well enough to make an informed decision. Also, consider inventing new ones!
Good luck!
Nothing here is original to me, except spelling and grammatical errors — this is just a short summary of what I’ve learned from countless others’ books articles and speeches.
FYI, my startup is here.
