How to Find a Career You Genuinely Love

A problem that many people have with their

career

is that it can actually be a source of stress because you know, as human beings, we like the idea of ​​certainty, but we don't know what we really want to do with our

career

or if we are really going. to enjoy it, it can actually be deeply uncertain and even if you know what you want to do and what you enjoy, there's really no guarantee that you'll be able to turn that into a successful, well-paying career, which again adds to the stress and that translates In this professional anxiety many of us can feel a lot of worries, apprehensions and doubts about whether we are really on the right path and if we really feel fulfilled in our current jobs.

A while ago I spoke with Behavioral Sciences Professor Grace Lorden, who wrote a book about how to

find

and succeed in a career you really enjoy, so in this video we're going to talk about seven evidence-based careers. Techniques you can use to move further toward a career you truly enjoy, degree assignment advice. I've noticed that a lot of times when I talk to people about careers, they're attached to a label, so they want to be a trader or an investment banker or they want to be a doctor or they're attached to a lifestyle so they want to be able to go on vacation. in particular or buying a particular car and the kind of things that would really make a great trip if you had to do it.

If I were a doctor, if I were a trader, what would be the tasks that I would do on a day-to-day basis and would I ultimately end up enjoying those tasks, so the activities that I'm going to spend my time on? Now there are so many studies from the field of psychology that show that a lot of your success in a career actually comes down to your happiness in that particular job and what Professor Lawton says is that if you focus too much on the job title In fact, you can forget about what day-to-day life really entails.

This may sound super boring and obvious, but I've actually seen a lot of people and I too used to fall into this trap of thinking that like the career title like oh it would be cool to be a neurosurgeon, it would be cool to be a plastic surgeon, but it was just After I started doing some research on these things in my career I realized that instead of worrying about the title, I should be thinking. about what my day job as a neurosurgeon will entail, is actually as glamorous as it potentially sounds and this ties into an idea by Tim Urban called Pixel Theory, which is the idea that life is an image but we live in an individual pixel of that image, so basically what that means is that we could think of our life as if it were a broad brush stroke, a beautiful painting of like, you know, what's our job title, what are we doing, fun, what are we doing?

I mean, okay, like this big kind of high-level thing, but in reality, a lot of your happiness is governed by the day-to-day, like what your calendar looks like on a given day, and therefore , when it comes to

find

ing a job that you really

love

, finding a career that you really

love

, think about that day. The actual nature of the tasks rather than the broad, abstract nature of the job is potentially a way to help with that tip number two: visualize your self, and also, this was actually one of my favorite ideas in the book, the idea that you should Visualize what me plus will look like and me plus is basically you or me, but it's like the plus version of you, the version that you aspire to be and this is the exercise that she has in the book on how you can Visualize what that tu me plus is going to ask and so you can fill out these questions yourself and I've actually written them in the description of the video so you can take a look there if you feel like it, but we're asking you. know the big overall thinking goal for me plus is dot dot what am I job title of Plus what industry will I work in what is the company I'm going to work for could be your own I plus will be running or working in a company which has the following characteristics and you can add what kind of responsibilities you would like your plus role to have and then on the next page we have some examples of what kind of tasks you might want your plus self to perform.

I'm really doing and then I reviewed and highlighted some of the things that are most relevant to me, such as wanting to disrupt the way people think about things, providing advice to others, coaching and developing others, problem solving, upgrading and leveraging relevant knowledge teaching and training performing for the public creating and selling art all these different things that I would like to have in a career where I do these types of activities and really the point here is that on this first page when you are defining this thing I more , you're thinking about what your job title is and what the big picture is of what you're going to do in this career that you really enjoy, but then on the next page you're digging deeper into what are the specific tasks that you personally enjoy doing and a Once you know, you can start taking small steps toward achieving that particular thing and hopefully work toward the career you really, really enjoy.

Jobs that look exciting look exciting because they are glamorized on television. I mean, law is always something that comes to mind and I think I would make a terrible lawyer because the commitment to a day to day life is like six in the morning. at eight in the afternoon is something that you still need today, unfortunately, but people don't know that before they go in and I think when it comes to your journey of thinking big it's about what were the tasks that you would be doing in 10 years How would I spend my Monday morning? How would I spend my Tuesday morning?

Tip number three: Audit your time now again. This is a pretty simple strategy you can use to move further towards a career you really enjoy and it involves auditing your time. During the week, write down what you are actually doing, what you probably already do, but write down whether you really enjoy doing it or not. Did you give Frosty a sense of purpose that would take you to a better place five years from now? Or did you feel funny at that moment? Ok, so how does this actually work in practice? Okay, so what I'm going to do is take a screenshot of my calendar and then I can use the screenshot to audit how I feel about how I'm spending my time, so if something on my calendar is actually leading me toward me and I can also do a double Plus there, so if something is taking me a little bit towards me and I can also put a plus if something really doesn't help me achieve it. closer to me more then I can write more less and if there is something that is actively taking me away from what I want then I can do less less for that and what Grace says in the book is that once you have figured out what these particular what are these negative points these are the things you want to actively avoid these are the time wasters I'm very lucky because I've built a career for myself that I really enjoy and so I have basically zero negative points on my calendar, but when I was in the College, when I was working as a doctor, a lot of the things on my calendar would have been negative and I have slowly worked to eliminate those things that drain my energy and that don't actually lead me towards a career that I really enjoy tip number four 13 minutes a day, so the other side of the coin here is that we also want to invest in activities that bring us closer to me and, I mean, to the words of this race. which we really enjoy and when it comes to thinking about this, Professor Lorden talks a lot about the idea of ​​compounding, so what people choose to invest in we accept compounding very, very easily, so we accept the idea that, in Actually, you know if we leave money in for a very long period of time it will compound, so we'll probably be fine with our pensions and it's exactly the same here when it comes to your career, like those little things that you're going to do today. and I asked for a commitment of 90 minutes a week, which for most people, regardless of how pressurized you feel, is very possible and when you do the math, this is actually very doable. 90 minutes a week is only 13 minutes a day.

We can all invest 13 minutes. a day trying to invest in skills or abilities that will help us build a career that we really enjoy and, for example, if for you part of building this career that you enjoy is, for example, learning to code, you can probably find 13 minutes a day to learn to code. Yes, you probably can't become an absolute pro in just 13 minutes a day, but it's definitely a skill that develops over time. I also recently had the opportunity to interview Keller Newport, a computer science professor. and he's written a ton of books that include deep work and they're so good that they can't ignore you about these kinds of things like study skills, productivity and he talks a lot about the theory of career capital, basically the idea is that if you want a career that you really enjoy it, it's not just something that's going to fall into your lap, it's something you have to earn and the way you earn it is by developing professional capital and the way you develop professional capital is by developing rare and valuable skills and this relates to this idea that if you really want to create something you enjoy, you have to have the skills for the job and therefore if you can invest these 13 minutes a day in developing your skills, then you will be winning.

On that front, tip number five: You probably don't need to go back to college for people who don't know what they want to do. I would avoid committing to a four-year degree or an expensive master's program and really use the resources available. that are cheap or free because there are so many things we can learn now without ever having set foot in a traditional classroom. I found this point quite surprising given that Professor London is a professor and therefore, at least to some extent, you know, he is biased towards university education, but to be honest, nowadays you know that university does not It is completely useless.

I have benefited greatly from a college degree and I generally recommend that people go to college or whatever, at least it gives you backup options, but especially when people are a little further along in their career, often It's very easy to say oh, I need to do that, so I'm going to go back to UNI. I'm going to get a degree in What I don't know, at least from the people I know who are recruiting for jobs like getting an MBA, people with an MBA are actually looked down upon than people who have actually had some real business experience, so don't necessarily default to thinking: Let me get a traditional qualification in something in particular because you can learn almost anything on the internet and through books and libraries and stuff these days.

Tip number six. Accept U-turns, okay, so at this point we know what tasks we might want to do. on a day-to-day basis to get to this level of me Plus or this career that we really enjoy and we know what kind of skills we need to get there and therefore we are going to develop those skills and combine them over time. but even once you've achieved those things, you may still want to make some changes in your career, since we as humans are generally pretty bad at estimating what our preferences and values ​​will be in the future, e.g. when I was 16 years old.

I decided I wanted to be a doctor 10 years later. I thought I wasn't really sure this medicine thing was for me and this relates to an idea in psychology called the end of history illusion and this is psychologist Dan Gilbert explaining the end of history. illusion, we asked thousands of people, we asked half of them to predict how much their values ​​would change in the next 10 years and the other to tell us how much their values ​​had changed in the last 10 years and this allowed us to do it. a really interesting type of analysis because it allowed us to compare the predictions of people who were, say, 18 years old with the reports of people who were 28 and do that type of analysis over the lifespan, this is what we found first, You're right, change. it slows down as we get older, but secondly, you're wrong because it doesn't slow down as much as we think at every age between 18 and 68 in our data set, people grossly underestimated how much change they would experience in the next 10 years.

Call this the illusion of the end of History, so, firstly, we are pretty bad at predicting how things are going to change for us, but secondly, we are also strangely averse to the idea of ​​a U-turn, there is the idea that if you change your mind. that means you're not being consistent and you're not being like Integrity or whatever people used to describe this, but one of my key takeaways from the conversation with Professor London is that when it comes to careers, changes inIn fact, it's probably a good thing: one of the problems with today's society is that we think that good citizens and good leaders should never change their minds, and I think secretly that was to the detriment of many countries because sometimes Someone had a hard time coming out of the closet. and I say: look, actually, this is not the right strategy.

I'm going to change now. I'm going to change my mind. So if you were to think about the leaders of the future, really, their ability to stand up and say. I don't know if I was wrong or if I changed my mind, those three things are really at the forefront of my mind because when you navigate through uncertainty sometimes you make mistakes and that's okay, but it's the deliberate part that you sat down and deliberately now changed your mind. opinion and tip number seven, the grid search mentality and this is again something she talks about in the book where the idea is that even if you don't have a clear vision of exactly what kind of career you would really enjoy What you can do It's almost using this grid search technique to figure out what activities you enjoy and then seeing if the actions you're taking are getting you closer to this kind of dream career.

For example, if I had done this a few years ago, I might have written that the things I enjoy are, I think, teaching, medicine, creative things, and entrepreneurial things, based on my history of the last few years, and for me , for example, I guess The teaching career started around age 13, 14, 15 when I was teaching Kumon at this math study center which then went on to combine teaching with medicine for my company Six Med and then at 23 years old, I started teaching directly to medical students and doing these presentations and I like to use my creative skills and make nice Powerpoints and things like that and now that's transitioning to this YouTube stuff where I can teach a little bit of creative stuff, a bit of entrepreneurship, there's not a lot of medicine there these days, but Hey, you know it's totally okay to change your mind and now it's pretty easy to connect the dots looking back and saying, Oh yeah, I found a career that I really enjoy.

I love this YouTube thing. I love talking about things and it's easy to connect things. points and I think, oh yeah, I really liked teaching when I was 12, but I think this is a quote from Steve Jobs, something that says it's very easy to connect the dots looking back, but it's very difficult to connect the dots looking forward. Go ahead and So, if you are in a position where you are still not fully enjoying what you do, your job, your career, then don't worry, as long as you continue to think big. Define that future for yourself and then by taking small steps to work on this career that you enjoy, at some point you will get there and then you will discover that, oh shit, this is not a destination in the first place because trying to find a career that you enjoy is as a long-term process. but you'll be able to connect the dots looking back and all along this winding path with U-turns and it will all have made sense in hindsight and, as Professor London says, this isn't really about taking random U-turns.

It's about taking small steps in a particular direction. Collect data, see how you feel about the data you've collected, and then use it to change course. They get new data, update their decision making based on the data, and are willing to move on. backward or they are willing to go left and they are willing to go right and they always have that openness to a change of direction. If you like this video, you might want to watch the full episode with Professor Gray getting slaughtered in my deep dive. podcast that will be linked there, that podcast along with all the other episodes I've done is available on any type of podcast platform including Apple, Google and Spotify, all that fun stuff anyway, thanks so much for watching please, leave a like. in the YouTube algorithm video if you liked the video so far and I hope to see you in the next one, bye.