How to Decide What to Do With Your Life .or. if You're Older What to do With The Rest of it.

If you’re stuck in a job you hate, you’re (unfortunately) not alone. In fact, an astonishing more than 80% of Americans are dissatisfied with their jobs.

Is it causing you a minor stroke or has the potential for a one way ticket to a heart attack!?

I, too, was unhappy in the corporate job I took right after college and the last job I took before retiring. Like many people, I’d put more thought and effort into getting the job than into figuring out if it was something I actually wanted. There’s plenty of research and advice out there on how to write the perfect resume and ace that interview. But when it comes to figuring out what you want to do with your life, the strategies aren’t so clear.

I realized that, although I could predict and pontificate about a career path that might make me happier, I would never actually know until I was into the thick of it. I had an idea that I might like to do something related to entrepreneurship, but I didn't exactly know what that meant. Did I want to join a startup? Start my own? Try to get into venture capital? Join or start a non-profit? Do international development work abroad?

More importantly, I didn’t know how I could figure it out without a huge investment of time, like starting another full-time job with a new company.

But then I had a different idea. I decided to enter a competition to shadow Dave McClure, who runs the accelerator 500 Startups. Being selected as one of the top six finalists gave me the kick I needed to quit my job, fly down to Silicon Valley, and begin what I call a “self-education program” on something they don’t teach you in school, but is arguably the most important thing of all: what I wanted to do with my life.

Over the next few months, I began cold emailing anyone I could think of who I was interested in meeting and learning from. To my surprise, I had a shockingly high response rate. I got to meet with the founders of Airbnb, Square, Kiip, Mint, Color, and many more, and also various investors and professors in the Bay Area. I asked them about their career path, how they’d come to where they were now, and what recommendations they had for figuring out my next move.

And I didn’t stop there. I also volunteered at major conferences, such as DEMO and Founder Showcase, so I could meet more people and attend the talks for free. I checked out various events and talks in the region, and even sat in on classes at Stanford (which the professors were kind enough to let me observe). Finally, to get a full holistic experience, I lived in a co-op in Palo Alto and had an amazing time learning about cooking, co-operative living, and alternative lifestyles.

One of the most important conversations I had was John Krumboltz, an international career expert who teaches career coaching at Stanford. He advocated an idea that stuck with me: testing out the different career experiences I was interested in, in the most low commitment way that I could for each option. I had just been introduced to the entrepreneurial concept of “minimum viable product”—an interesting parallel, I thought—so I decided to apply these same principles to deciding what to do next with my career.

I began “prototyping” the different work experiences that I was considering—dipping my toe in each—so I could figure out which I liked best. Again using my favorite tactic of cold emailing, I reached out to and secured “shadow experiences” with companies including Launchrock (a 500 Startups company), Dojo, Causes (started by Sean Parker), Kiva, the Stanford d.school, and Ashoka (a non-profit that supports entrepreneurship). I spent 1-5 days with each company, not only learning from them, but also helping them out wherever I could. At Causes, I helped produce success reports for clients and sat in on strategy meetings and interviews with potential hires. At Kiva, the CEO Matt Flannery let me follow him around for the day (the literal definition of a shadow) and experience “a day in the life,” complete with accompanying him on his daily walk in the park to clear his head.

So, what did I learn through all of this? I realized that I wanted to pursue my own business, as soon as possible. In one of the classes I sat in on at Stanford, the professor asked the students how they wanted the world to be different when they died. I knew then that not only did I want to be passionate about what I was doing—I wanted others to be, too. I wanted my business to do something that helped other people find and pursue career activities that they were passionate about.

Since then, I was accepted into an incubator called Startup Chile and an academic program called Singularity University (started by the founders of Google and based at NASA), which have helped me to work towards that objective ever since.

But looking back, I’m so happy that I took the time to prototype my different career options—and am grateful for the fact that it was nearly free to do so (much cheaper than say, an MBA, which many people say they take to figure out what to do with their lives). I learned more in those few months than I had in years.

And whether or not you can take a few months off from work—you can learn like that, too. If you’re not quite sure about your career path, pick a few things you think you’d rather be doing, and then prototype them yourself by setting up experiences where you can try out your different options. Find companies you’d like to work for and individuals whose career paths you admire, and then reach out to them to see if you can shadow with them for an afternoon, a day, or a week. Try informational interviews, volunteering, even internships, and more. And don’t be surprised when they say yes, or even if many of these experiences lead to job offers—without you even asking for them.

One thing that really surprised me during my experience was how easily approachable, open, and helpful most people are. Cold emailing has become perfectly normal, as has saying “I saw you on Twitter and thought you seemed interesting, so I wanted to reach out.” This is the first time in history that people’s career interests and hobbies are listed online and are easily searchable—and it’s an amazing opportunity to create your own network beyond just the people you meet in person.

Take it from me: If you’re trying to decide on your next step, it’s an opportunity you can (and should) take advantage of.

Four Ways To Make That Decision

We've all hit that point where we can't figure out exactly what we really want to do with our lives. It can come when you're 18 or when you're 50, and it's always a difficult process to work through. It's not hopeless, though! Here are a few ways to help you figure it out.

Discovering what you really want to do with your life isn't an easy task for anyone, nor is it something that you can really create a step-by-step guide for. That said, when you're not really sure what you want to do, whether it's a career, a lifestyle, or anything else, a few different exercises might help you pinpoint what it is you truly want. Here are four ways to try to pinpoint what you want from your future.

Think About Where You'll Be in Five Years

The "where do you see yourself in five years?" question riddles everything from job interviews to financial plans, and while it seems cliché, it’s common for a reason: it works. It's one of those annoyingly difficult questions to answer, and in most cases it's pretty much impossible to answer in a concrete way. Thankfully, that's okay, and sometimes just trying to answer the question is all you need.

Considering how common of advice it is, the idea of seeing into the future and picturing where you'll be in five years is a heck of a lot harder to do than you'd think. Plus, the chances you'll actually end up where you see yourself is pretty slim. That said, as Adam Savage points out on the Still Untitled Podcast, the exercise of talking about where you see yourself in five years is still useful. He shares this story:

The thing that you feel like you really want to do is the thing to pursue. You will not end up there, and that reminds me of one of Kurt Vonnegut's off-quoted statements is the punchline to his favorite joke: 'Keep your hat on. We may end up miles from here..."

I remember being 19 and meeting a girlfriend's mom, and she asks me, "What are your going to be doing in five years?" And I named something I thought I'd do. She listened to me give this long explanation, and she said, "You're not going to be doing any of that. You have no idea what you'll be doing in five years. You'll be doing something really cool, but it's not something you can imagine right now." It's one of the greatest things that anyone gave me. She was totally right. Every five years it's the same. I can never imagine where I ended up from where I started.

Savage's point here is pretty simple: it doesn't matter where you think you'll be in five years, but it's still important to think about because it gives you the idea you want to pursue. As far as careers are concerned, Harvard Business Review takes a similar approach and recommends you think about what you want to learn in the next five years:

What capabilities will you have wanted to build in five years? For example, "I can't say exactly what I'm going to be doing in five years, but I hope to have further developed my skills as a strategist and people manager." This is a safe way to answer regardless of your age or career stage. "You don't want to ever give the impression that you're done learning," says Weintraub.

It's a simple idea that's very similar to Savage's approach, but it does so in a way where you're directly concentrating on what you'll need to get to a place you'll be happy in five years. As we've pointed out before, picking a lifestyle to pursue instead of a job title can help you focus in what you're really interested in, and this is one way to do that.

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Go to the profile of Ayodeji Awosika
Ayodeji Awosika

Buy the new book “The Destiny Formula,” on Amazon http://www.amazon.com/Destiny-Formula-Purpose-Strengths-Successful-ebook/dp/B019ZJG6JU/

How to Decide What to Do With Your Life .or. if You're Older What to do With The Rest of it.

Existential crises are the soup du jour.

With the rise of personal development and a generation of people who want more meaning from life, an encore careers, topics like finding your passion and purpose permeate our thinking. The question burns in your mind — you want to figure out what to do with your life or the rest of it, if you're retired.

You have tons of options — maybe even too many.

You want to make a decision, but you don’t want to make the wrong one because, if you do, you’ll feel like you’ve wasted a bunch of time, perhaps time is of the essence and unfortunately,  you don't much left of it 'tempus fugit.'

Paradoxically, continuing to think about what to do with your life without, you know, actually doing anything, wastes time too and a 'decision' is made my default.

It’s a puzzle, wrapped in an enigma, double wrapped in a conundrum, wrapped in a catch 22, stuck between a rock and a hard place, as it were.

No wonder we’re so stressed out all the time.

I’ve been fortunate enough to more or less figure out what I want to do with my life at least for the near future. Here’s everything I know about finding your path.
Be Grateful You Have the Option in the First Place...

When you’re trying to figure out what to do with your life, consider the fact that humans didn’t always have a choice about their circumstances.

If you grew up on a farm in the 18th century, you were going to be a farmer. If your father was a blacksmith, you were to apprentice under him and become one yourself.

If your father was an executioner, you were to apprentice under him and become one yourself. That's still true in some countries, today.

Even when we fast forward to more recent times, we still didn’t have as many opportunities as we do now. A few generations ago, you were likely working at some sort of industrial plant, if you were a man and stayed at home with children, if you were a woman. Moving into the corporatist era, you got one job, worked there for forty years, and got your gold watch with your pension.

Understand that in time pensions were no longer paid and if you didn't save money in your 401K or lost it in the last financial bubble that burst, you were out of luck.

Albeit,  lets gace it -- its hard to finance 80 years of living, with 40 years of paid work.

Now, things are totally different. People switch careers like clothes, they even have encore careers in hopes of leaving a legacy behind.

Naval Ravikant put it best when he said:

    The Internet has massively broadened the possible space of careers. Most people haven’t figured this out yet.

Before you dive into trying to figure out what to do with your life, pause and sit back in awe at the sheer opportunity in front of you.

There’s no need for so much angst in the times we live in, yet there seems to be. Why?

I might have an explanation.
Paradox of choice photo(s)

Stop Doing This to Yourself

What’s your purpose in life?

What’s your passion?

These questions send cortisol grenades throughout your body when you think about them for too long. It’s good that people are trending towards wanting more meaning in their life, and leaving a legacy behind, but we put ourselves under way too much pressure to find our one-true-life-defining-cure-all-magical-fairy-tail-meaninful-fulfilling-purpose-in-life.

On top of that, the idea of “searching” for your passion or purpose seems like progress. It isn’t. The more time you spend thinking and pondering instead of doing, the further away you move from your passion.

People often take this as “don’t think about your future at all,” but it really means stop overthinking things so much.

That’s the double-edged sword of self-help. It’s useful to think about things like passion and meaningful purpose to give you the swift kick in the rear you need to develop them. But this thinking quickly turns into “mental masturbation.” You’re more focused on your fantasies than you are of doing the work because… the work is hard or scary.

It’s easy to think about a new path you want to take in your life. It’s hard to put one foot forward, then the second, and repeat it for however long it takes, or however you'll be with us.

You can’t really decide what to do with your life prior to acting. You’re making an educated guess first. The action crystallizes the vision.

The Formula for Figuring Our What to Do With Your Life

    “Following your genuine intellectual curiosity is a better foundation for a career than following whatever is making money right now.”

Don’t overthink the process.

The beginning steps to figuring out what to do with your life are simple.

Follow your curiosity and find out what you’re good at.

For a detailed step by step process for finding your strengths, read this guide.

Or this book.

Or that book.

A few highlights:

    What did you enjoy doing when you were 14 years old or younger?

    Take personality tests — they are scientifically useless, but they’re a good guide to start.

    Cross-reference your strengths and personality with careers and paths.

I found my passion for writing and artistic work in general almost five years ago, and when I was a kid,  then got socialized, got into computer science because it was more marketable, but I didn’t realize it the first time I wrote a blog post or painted a painting or did a drawing. No. I wrote one post and enjoyed that. Then a second, third, fourth, etc. Again, No. I painted one painting or drew a picture and enjoyed that. Then a second, third, fourth, etc.

I realized around post or art work 100+ or so that I really found it. Doing the work, experiencing the up and downs, and still wanting to move forward after the downs helped me realize it was meant to be.

    “Your first 100 blog posts will mostly suck.

    Your first 100 podcasts will mostly suck too.

    Your first 100 talks will not be perfect.

    Your first 100 videos will be nightmares

     Your first 100 paintings will mostly suck, too.

      Your first 100 drawings or charatures will not be as perfect as you'd like.

     Your first 100 sculptures will be nightmares.

 — Cammi Pham

The recipe here — gauge your interest in something and do it poorly for a while.

Sucking at something doesn’t feel good. Uncertainty doesn’t feel good. But therein lies freedom. Mentally, we want guarantees, certainty, safety, a sense of ease.

We don’t want to give it everything we have at failure, because there’s nowhere to go from that point — it’s scary as hell.

When you're down, the only way to go is up.

I wish I had the answer to make you feel better about all of that but I don’t.

You will have to suck it up. Keep a stiff upper lip.

Find What You Love and Let it Kill You, jump in the water is fine, either sink or swim.

The tone of this post isn’t super positive, is it?

I love what I do, a lot. But it’s far from easy.

If there’s one thing to take away from this piece it’s this — most of the good things in your life will come from discomfort. You'd have to work hard pay your dues, if it's worth it, you'll succeed. Winners never quit and quitters never win.

“silhouette on man on mountain” by Guillaume Briard on Unsplash

I haven’t even spent much of this time answering the question “what should I do with my life?” because that’s the least important part of the equation.

I could read your mind, scan through your life’s database, and create a custom-tailored plan for you to follow, but it still wouldn’t matter if you weren’t willing to be uncomfortable. Get out of your comfort zone.

You, more or less, know what do to with your life. You’re just not doing it because you’re scared.

Here’s the thing, though. If you find something you love, you have to be open to pain.

That’s what love is. Fear breeds courage, you can't have one with out the other.

When you get married, you’re essentially giving your heart to someone else and trusting they won’t break it. We all know this deal doesn’t always work out, yet we take it anyway because the positive outweighs the negative.

It’s the same when it comes to a real life path or a real vocation or avocation.

Settling for any old career or life is equivalent to dating someone you know you’ll never marry. It feels okay, but you’re missing out on a feeling that’s orders of magnitude better.

If finding this true love is so important, why do we often choose the opposite?

Escape Society’s Box

“Understand this: The world wants to assign you a role in life. And once you accept that role you are doomed.” — Robert Greene

I don’t personally care what you do with your life. I only care about how you come to that decision.

Choose what you want to do, don’t let someone else choose it for you. If you’re obsessed with numbers and you genuinely want to be an accountant, be an accountant or at least a bookkeepper. Don’t be one because you think it’s what you’re supposed to do.

I ran into a friend the other day. He asked me how things were going. I told him they were great. I asked him about his life, specifically his work.

“I hate it.”

“Why are you doing it, then?”

He shrugged his shoulders. Most of us aren’t in dire straits. We’re living a metaphorical shoulder shrug.

Before you have any type of passion in life, you’ll have to unlearn all the rules about life, careers, success, status, and all the other societal lessons that were forced on you, when you became socialized.

That’s one of the biggest problems — the “live a meaningful fulfilling life” narrative is incongruent with the “fit into society’s box” one... the missfit.

If society had its way, you’d continue to do things you hate to buy things you don’t want to impress people you don’t like. People get caught in this situation all the time.

You want to write books, but you’re already a software, systems engineer or like me a information system secudity officer. .Or., you’re 18 years old, you want to write books but you’re dead broke and your parents or society told you to go to school to become a software engineer or some such.

Careers and money are both of germane importance and unimportant. Of germane importance in that you need them to survive. Unimportant in that the typical reasons we chase both involve useless status that doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of life. Follow your passion and the money will come.

Now that we’ve unraveled some mental layers, let’s talk about the most important aspect of figuring out what to do with your life.

You’ll Never “Figure Out” What to do With Your Life

Your life isn’t a multiple choice test. It’s essay format. It’s open book. A take home test.

You’re allowed to change your mind. You should change your mind.

If you have the same goals, objectives, tastes, and desires fives years from now, it could be a sign of stagnation.

Right now I write. I’m also interested in technology, investing, marketing, and a bunch of other interests that weave into what I’m currently doing. I work on my craft, read, learn about the latest trends in the world, and keep my eye out for new opportunities.

Your problem isn’t figuring out what to do with your life. It’s a lack of action.

If you’re curious about wanting to write, then start writing — physically place your fingers on a keyboard repeatedly.

COMMENTS

Want to start a non-profit? Go volunteer.

Want to code? Take a class or boot camp.

Jim Rohn had a saying along the lines of “I’d rather try something than think about it because even if I’m wrong…I’ll find out faster.”

I don’t have the magic recipe to get you to act. I try. I write these posts, respond to emails, have conversations. But ultimately, you’re in the driver’s seat here.

Someone just replied to an email I wrote three months ago telling me they wrote their first blog post.

That. That kind of action right there is the whole key to “figuring out what to do with your life.”

Buy the new book “The Destiny Formula,” on Amazon http://www.amazon.com/Destiny-Formula-Purpose-Strengths-Successful-ebook/dp/B019ZJG6JU/

“Following your genuine intellectual curiosity is a better foundation for a career than following whatever is making money right now.”

And it will drive you through hard times!

I have found this to be true over and over again. When I am going after something which interests me, which I am passionate about, and that has a purpose in my life I can power through anything. I even forget to eat and sleep.

Especially compared to a fad or some money-making formula. Good word today !

Sample Comments:
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Go to the profile of mario savioni
mario savioni
Oct 3
Be Grateful You Have the Option in the First Place

So true.
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Go to the profile of Stuart Davis
Stuart Davis
Oct 6

Great Job!

“I wish I had the answer to make you feel better about all of that but I don’t. You will have to suck it up”

Truth my friend. As we say in the military: “Embrace the suck”

Our life is a book where the story will only end in death.
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Go to the profile of Purple Paradox
Purple Paradox
Oct 6

Well done. I was a miserable software engineer. Now I’m a, not so great but quite happy, writer.
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Go to the profile of Chris Carvalho
Chris Carvalho
Oct 4

Great post…take control…and more thoughts on what to do with your life… https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/crowdsourcing-life-advice-25-thoughts-guide-you-avoid-chris-carvalho/
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Go to the profile of Aurore Durpoix
Aurore Durpoix
Oct 5

“You, more or less, know what do to with your life. You’re just not doing it because you’re scared.”
Thank for writing this article and specialy this sentence that I knew already (it is like that).. but I needed to read it.. hard but true.
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Go to the profile of Chinonye Obiora
Chinonye Obiora
Oct 5

Great article. Thank you for sharing.
Conversation with us.
Go to the profile of Tom Blair
Tom Blair
Oct 3
If society had its way, you’d continue to do things you hate to buy things you don’t want to impress people you don’t like. People get caught in this situation all the time.

Insert “Fight Club” scene here.. HA
Go to the profile

Oct 3

I love fight club and consider it a philosophy book lol
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Go to the profile of Stacy Vickers
Stacy Vickers
Oct 4

What a great article! I am sharing it with my daughter in her senior year of high school, too. Thank you.