How to find a career you love?

Are you looking for a career you love and not just a job? Yes, a career must pay the bills, but that is not enough. You want to spend your time doing something that matters, something you believe in, and something that aligns with your values. Too many of us waste away in jobs that drain us of our vitality. Do we have to resign ourselves to such a life? Probably not. Let's look at two paths you can take to find a career you love.

Ken Robinson, in his fantastic book The Element, tells the story of Gillian, an 8-year-old girl who had problems in school¹. She got bad grades and constantly disrupted the entire class with her fidgeting. The school considered putting her in a special needs class. Gillian's parents took her to see a psychologist, fearful of the life-altering assessment. The psychologist asked her mother a series of questions while watching the little girl intently. Gillian recalls sitting on her hands, in her best dress, trying her utmost not to fidget or cause any more problems.

At the end of the conversation, the psychologist asked Gillian to wait a little longer, he needed to speak to her mother in private. While leaving the room, the psychologist leaned over and turned the radio on. The two adults went outside and secretly watched Gillian through a window. Almost immediately, she jumped off the old leather couch and began to dance to the music. Her movements were improbably graceful for her age. The psychologist smiled and turned to her mother: "You know Ms. Lynne, Gillian isn't sick, she is a dancer. Take her to a dance school." Once she stepped foot into a dance school her life changed forever; she found her element. Today we know that little hyperactive girl as Gillian Lynne, responsible for the choreographies of Cats and Phantom of the Opera.

In 2005, during his Stanford commencement speech, Steve Jobs famously said:

"The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle." - Steve Jobs²

Jobs would have agreed with Ken Robinson's core idea: You need to find your element. Just like Gillian would have been unhappy in a corporate office job, so are millions of people stuck in a job they hate. If you don't love your job, keep looking until you find your passion. This is decent advice for people with deeply innate talents like Gillian. If you have a deep obsessive passion for whatever it may be and it would kill you not to spend your life perfecting it, then you should lean into your passion.

Unfortunately, it can be bad advice for the rest of us. Jobs himself, ironically, did not follow his passion when he started Apple Computers. He was much more in love with Zen Buddhism at the time. Building computers with Steve Wozniak was a side hustle that brought in some money. He often left Wozniak hanging to spend months at a time in a Soto Zen temple in California³. His actions betray his true passion at the time and it wasn't computers.

Most of us don't have particularly useful passions. Most people are passionate about sports, art, or hobby-like activities⁴. By definition, most of us won't become the next Michael Jordan or turn our mild interest in ultimate frisbee into a paying career we love. That path, though successful for less than 1% of people, is a dead-end for the rest of us. If you look at career forums on Reddit you find hundreds of posts by people saying they have no idea what to do with their lives, they don't have any interests at all. A sneaky visit to the psychologist won't magically reveal their dormant talent for theoretical physics or martial arts. At least the chance is so improbably low that it would be bad career advice.

3 steps to a new career

There are only three steps to take charge of your career path.

1. Take the personality career test
2. Unlock your career matches
3. Find a meaningful career

The lucky few who have a deep obsession early in life should follow this passion down the rabbit hole and see where it takes them. But what about the rest of us? I for one didn't have any obsessions or talents when I finished school. Perhaps I had a few tame interests, but nothing a psychologist would get all riled up about after meeting me. So how do most people find a career they love?

Start by discovering who you are. Just because you don't have a deep passion for dancing at age 8 doesn't mean you don't have strengths and weaknesses. We all have a unique personality, intelligence, and set of habits and quirks. We subconsciously respond more to one thing than another. Our interests, as humble as they may be, are not randomly picked by us. Quite the opposite. We don't really decide what we find interesting.

Learn about the science of personality and learn about your own personality. See if you score very low or very high on any specific dimension. Those are your first clues. After that, go out and explore. Expose yourself to as many things as possible. Only by putting yourself in contact with waves of new people, new things to do, new places, and new ideas do you discover yourself. It is almost like every new experience carves away a fragment from the marbled block, revealing your core self. After enough exposure, a dim contour of a person starts to emerge from the chiseled rock⁵.

This was a fancy way of saying: try out many things. You will notice where interests emerge, where you feel curiosity, and where you feel mind-numbing boredom. Certain things will inevitably come easier than others. Pay close attention to things that give you energy and that seem a little easier than the rest. Follow these tiny resonating threads.

Then comes the scary part: commit to one thing. You will likely doubt yourself and other options will seem equally valid. That is fine. Choosing correctly is not the most important thing here. Most important at this stage is to make a choice. Pick one thing and give it everything you have. Give it your attention, effort, and time. If that means going to college, do that and do it well. If that means going to vocational training, do that and do it well. Whatever you pick, put in the effort to get good at it and create something of value.

The initial phase will be hard and difficult. Don't misinterpret this resistance as a sign that you didn't find something you might love to do. For most people, love for a job comes after having put in the months and years to get truly good at something. Growing pains are a feature, not a bug.

Forget passion. Commit to something that resonates with you, even if it's just a little. Work hard on becoming good at it. Focus on the value you create for yourself and for the world. This is the craftsman mindset⁶. And with time and improved skill comes passion. It appears as a byproduct, not as the initial trigger.

Let me nerd out, for just one moment, on the neuroscience behind this idea. Happiness does not come from achieving a goal. That is not how dopamine works.

A fulfilling life comes from making visible progress towards a meaningful goal. Happiness is not static; it is forward motion.

Our brains are wired for goal pursuit. Whenever we get closer to something we value, our brain lets us know we're going the right way. It does that by making us feel positive emotions via dopamine pathways. Dopamine was never about pleasure, it was about motivation and goal pursuit. That's why thinking about the upcoming vacation often provides more happiness than actually being on vacation ^7,8,9.

There is a deep lesson in the history of Apple. Wozniak followed his passion for computer hardware, something he was sensationally good at. He was also extremely lucky to be in the right place at the right time. But for him, with his innate obsession and talent, following his passion was good advice. Jobs did not follow his passion, however. He followed the unpredictable twists and turns of life, but he was also attentive to new opportunities. Once he saw something work, he committed and poured all his effort into becoming great and producing value for the world.

Both of these paths can lead to a fulfilled life and a career you love. Choose your path and don't look back.