This is an excerpt from my latest book Dear Hannah: 70 Methods I Used and Abused to Change Who I Am.
One Way to Figure out What to Do with Your Life
Date: May 30, 2006
Age: 24
Location: Austin, TX
Subject: Sort Opportunities by Interest
Hi Hannah, I don’t think you need to worry about me. It’s like when I was in Japan, spending 24 hours outside. Sometimes I just do things that make me look like a homeless bum, but I always find a way back to center.
I’ve been in Austin for four weeks now, and I have no work and no friends here — no anchor at all. I’ve been sleeping at random hours, and at 4 a.m. the other day, I ambled off like a zombie to the 24-hour Whataburger and ate pancakes and sausage. The cashiers are starting to recognize me, but so are the bums that frequent the place at that hour.
I’m going broke, and I think that’s the real reason my unemployment drought is coming to an end. I just woke up one day and it hit me, “I need a job, I need a job, I need a job.” I’ve always needed a job, but I’ve never heard my inner-voice demand it so loudly before. As I started visualizing myself running out of money, packing up, and driving back home to San Diego, the thought just killed me. I told myself, “Forget your hang-ups Phil, you’re going to find a job.” So I went to craigslist and pulled up the jobs board.
As I started reading through the job openings, an all-too-familiar haze came over me. How often in the past year have I performed this ritual? The process is like a mirror for my state of mind. If I’m manic, then I’ll bookmark 50 jobs posts that are all over the place, from digging up fence posts to being a junior analyst intern at a hedge fund. If I’m depressed, then everything I see will look like trash, I’ll find no job that makes sense to me, and I’ll feel unemployable. This time I felt both patterns. I forced myself to round up 30 or so job posts simply because I needed something, but again all the jobs looked worthless to me. “Great, back to square one,” I thought.
But I told myself, “You need a job… now!” So I closed my eyes, and randomly pointed my finger at my computer screen. “Hmm, outreach coordinator at a non-profit, that doesn’t interest me.” So I closed my eyes again and picked another one. “Hmm, data entry. Also not interesting to me.” And then when I closed my eyes a third time, I thought, “Wait this is stupid. If I’m rejecting jobs because they don’t interest me, why not focus all of my attention on interest? What if I’ve never been happy at work because I’ve been systematically undervaluing the one variable that probably matters the most to me?”
So I went through the list and sorted them by interest. To make this easier, I followed sorting algorithms I remembered from computer science. I started with two jobs at random, and asked myself a simple question: “Which is more interesting?” I then moved the more interesting job above the less interesting one, regardless of whether they both looked like crappy jobs. Then I took another random job, and compared it to a random job on the sorted list, asking the same question, moving it until it found its stable spot. Five minutes later, the whole list of jobs was sorted. I then stepped back, satisfied with the exercise, and told myself, “Okay, let’s see what’s on top and apply to it!”
The job was for a video game tester at Aspyr, starting pay at $7.50/hr. This made me scratch my head. Was I really going to accept a wage that low? And video game testing? Wouldn’t I find that repetitive? Isn’t that nearly the same as data entry? Am I really going to apply to a frivolous job like this??
But then I thought, What if there’s a reason for all this? I left the Bay Area for lower cost-of-living, precisely so money wouldn’t force me to take on a traditional software job. What if video game testing indirectly takes me down the road to a fulfilling career? I’ve always loved video games. My first business was eXscape, an online magazine for video gamers; my first job was at Gamespot; and my latest start-up, Leetster, was a social-network for video gamers. Plus, I heard that you can jump from video game testing to video game design, and that may ultimately become my dream job. I’ve always either gone all tech (boring, but pays well), or all liberal arts (really fun, but pays squat). My instincts could be taking me toward a perfect blend.
So, I cleaned up my resume and applied for the job. This is the first time in months I’ve actually applied to a job in earnest, and I feel like I’ve finally broken the craigslist curse. But more importantly, I’m filled with hope about my future and work. I’m not even worried about rejection because the second job posting on my list is for a software developer at an educational start-up, and I can construct the same kind of interesting dream career path narrative that I have about video games. Which makes me think, if I ever get to that point again where I feel stuck and hate all the work options in front of me, I’ll just go to the jobs board and sort by interest. I’ll never be unemployed again. If I run this script enough times, it should eventually lead me to the Holy Grail: work that I love.
- Phil
I took the video game testing job — and eventually moved into video game design — but the method gave me a false sense of closure. Just because I sorted these jobs into a list doesn’t mean I should love whatever’s on top. I couldn’t face the harsh truth that maybe there were just no jobs on craigslist that actually interested me.
Other letters from Dear Hannah about finding work that you love:
• How to Really Pursue One’s Passion
• Creativity and the Power of “Letting Go”
› One Way to Figure out What to Do with Your Life
• How I Found Work that I Love
• How I Got out of My Funk and Got Back to Work
This is an excerpt from my latest book Dear Hannah: 70 Methods I Used and Abused to Change Who I Am.
Before Philip wrote his first line of code, he tried to re-program his mind. For his 14th birthday, Hannah gave him Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, which kicked off a life-long obsession with self-improvement. Follow Philip over 82 letters as he re-tells his journey from winning ThinkQuest, to quitting Stanford, to dealing with dating, happiness, and direction, to eventually making it as an indie iOS app developer. Dear Hannah is either a cautionary tale about self-improvement, or it is a filter for the 10% of self-help that may actually change your life.
PHILIP DHINGRA is a President’s Scholar from Stanford University, where he received his B.A. in Mathematical and Computational Sciences. In addition to authoring books on life change, he develops best-selling iOS apps including Nebulous Notes and The Creative Whack Pack (a collaboration with creativity pioneer Roger von Oech). Philip divides his time between Austin, Texas, and San Francisco, California.
