A Guide for Choosing Career Path

We all have 24 hour a day. On average, We spent 8 hour for work, 8 hour for sleep, and 8 hour for everything else.

Work takes a third of our life, and half of our waking time. Work plays a significant role in our life.

Our satisfaction in work directly affect our satisfaction in life. And satisfaction in life directly affect our happiness.

Japanese culture have a concept called ikigai which try to explain relationship between work and having a meaningful life.

By finding ikigai, we can have a satisfying and meaningful work, which led us to have a meaningful life.

This article explain my approach on finding my ikigai. Hopefully it can help you find yours.

My approach consist of three parts :

• Understanding yourself
• Understanding the job
• Understanding investment

Understanding Yourself

We play with the toys the God gave us

~Odysseus to Achiless~

Understanding yourself means identifying your strengths and weaknesses. You can do this by identifying which intelligence type you are. According to Science, there are 9 type of intelligence.

This type of intelligence does not necessarily reflect our current skills. You might have a great spatial intelligence and still terrible at drawing.

Instead, this intelligence reflects our aptitude. Aptitude is our natural ability to learn something.

If you ever have problem learning something yet your friend can master it quickly seemingly without much effort, that is called aptitude.

Or when your friend have problem understanding something, when you can instinctively understand it. That is also aptitude.

In my case, my strongest aptitude are logical-mathematical, intra-personal, and linguistic. I can understand advanced math concept quite easily. I have a great sense of understanding of my desire and my feeling. I can put my thought into words effortlessly.

My weakest intelligence are musical, spatial and naturalist. I have a hard time learning to play musical instrument. I am practically tone deaf and cannot distinguish one tone with another.

Aptitude is an increment factor. You still need to put effort to train yourself to be great at something. But having a strong aptitude will help you to improve yourself faster.

So, if you want to be great at something, it is more beneficial for you to focus on your strongest aptitude.

Understanding The Job

Every job, no matter what it is, always have two sides of the coin : the good part and the bad part.

Being an entertainer is fun. You can be famous and meet other famous people. You can travel the world and bring joy to other people. But you also need to work when everyone else is taking holiday. In fact, long holiday will be your busiest time. You also need to appear as joyful even when you are actually sad or angry.

Being an enterpreneur is cool. You can do whatever you like. You don’t take order from anyone. You can get passive income from your bussiness. But you also have to think continuously about your business. If your business failed, you will lost a lot of money. You might need to take huge loan to save your company and use your house as collateral damage.

By identifying the good part and the bad part of a job, you can evaluate whether you can tolerate the bad side. If you can, then it might be a suitable job for you. Otherwise you should find a more tolerable alternative.

Understanding Investment

Choosing a career is very similar to doing an investment. But instead of investing money to get profit, you are investing time and effort to get skill.

Thus, you can use investment guide to help you choose your career. There are 3 most important guide for investment :

• Do Due Diligence
• Invest Gradually
• Diversify

Do Due Diligence

Doing Due Diligence means finding out everything you need to know before investing. In investment, it means finding everything about the business you want to invest on.

In career, it means finding out the opportunities and challenges for the job.

I have a friend who have a specialty in chip engineering. Unfortunately, that job practically does not exist in Indonesia. You have to work overseas to be a a chip engineer. Even worse, you need to have master degree to compete with other chip engineer.

Just like investment, you need to choose a career that will pay off in the future. Having a limited opportunity gives a huge risk for your investment.

Invest Gradually

Invest gradually means you should not invest everything you have in one go. Invest small, then evaluate. If the result is great, invest more. If the result is bad, change your investment target.

In career, you can do this by trying out the job in smaller scale, and evaluate whether you like it or not.

Let say I want to be a teacher. Instead of directly taking a job as a teacher, I can be a volunteer teacher for 1–2 session. If I like the experience, I can try teaching for a month. That way if it turns out I dislike the job, I can just quit instead of stuck there for 1 year due to contract.

Diversify

Diversify means you should not put everything in one basket. In investment, you should put multiple investment in different business. This is important to avoid heavy loss when the business is going bankrupt.

In career, diversify means you should have more than one skill. That way, you have flexibility to change career and have more opportunity to choose.

The most common diversify is by learning management. Learning management is important to improve teamwork, while also opening up an opportunity if you want to switch job into management.

The approach above is my personal approach, and in no way proven by science. It works for me and hopefully it can work for you too.

Hopefully it can help you find your ikigai and have a satisfying work and meaningful life.