How to Find a Career You Genuinely Love

The issue with many people's careers is that they can actually be a source of stress because, as humans, we like a sense of certainty, but it can be extremely uncertain to not know what we want to do with our careers or whether we will truly enjoy them. Even if you do know what you want to do and what you enjoy, there is no guarantee that you will be able to turn that into a successful and well-paying career, which further adds to the stress. This leads to career anxiety, which is a condition in which many people experience a lot of worries, apprehensions, and self-doubts about whether we're on the right path and whether we're genuinely fulfilled in our current jobs.

A while back, I had a conversation with Grace Lorden, a behavioural science professor who wrote a book about how to find and succeed in a career you truly enjoy. In this passage, we'll discuss seven evidence-based strategies that you can use to get closer to a career you truly enjoy.

Tip one task above the heading. When I chat to people about their job goals, I've found that they frequently have a label linked to their desire to be a trader, investment banker, doctor, or lifestyle expert to be able to take a certain trip or purchase a specific vehicle, and sort of think big journey is really considering what I would be doing on a daily basis if I were a doctor or a trader, and whether or not I would end up enjoying those tasks.

As a result, the activities that I'm going to spend my time in now Numerous psychological studies demonstrate that a large portion of one's professional success truly depends on how happy one is in their current position. Professor Lorden argues that if one obsesses over a job's title, one may actually forget about what the day-to-day of the thing actually entails.

Now, this may sound really dull and obvious, but I've seen a lot of people, and I used to fall into the same trap of thinking that, for example, it would be cool to be a neurosurgeon or a plastic surgeon. It wasn't until I started researching this career stuff that I realised, "Hold on, instead of worrying about the title, I should actually be thinking about what my day-to-day job involves as a neurosurgeon? Is it actually as glamorous as the belief that life is a picture, but we only live in a single pixel of that picture.

This simply means that we may consider our lives to be magnificent paintings with broad brushstrokes, similar to what our work title is. For pleasure, what are we doing? What are our children doing about this big, high-level thing, but in reality, a lot of your happiness is controlled by the day-to-day, such as how your calendar looks on a particular day. Therefore, when it comes to finding a career that you truly love, consider the day-to-day aspects of the work rather than the broad, abstract aspects of the one possible solution.

Tip number two is to visualise your me plus. This was actually one of my favourite ideas from the book. It suggests that you visualise what your me plus will look like. Me plus is essentially me or you, but it's like the plus version of you, or the version you aspire to be. This is the exercise she has in the book on how to visualise what your me plus will be doing. You can complete these questions for yourself, but we want to know what my overarching big thinking objective is. Positives dot dot dot What am I? Additionally, what is the job title, industry, and firm that I will be working for? It may be your own company. plus will be operating or working for a company that possesses the following attributes, and you can add what kind of duties you would like your Mi+ role to have.

The next page shows some examples of the tasks you might want your Mi+ to perform in real life, and I've gone through and highlighted some of the things that are most pertinent to me, such as I want to be influencing people's perspectives by giving others advice and consultation mentoring and problem-solving skills development updating and drawing from pertinent knowledge, teaching, training, performing for the public, creating, and selling art, among other things that I will enjoy.

The main idea here is that, when you're defining this me plus thing on the first page, you're kind of thinking about what your job title is and what kind of broad overview you're going to be doing in this career that you truly enjoy, but on the next page, you're kind of digging deeper into what are the specific tasks that you personally enjoy doing, and once you know that, you can start taking small steps towards achieving that particular thing and hopefully work towards the career that you actually enjoy.

A lot of the jobs that seem exciting on TV are glamorised, so I think I would be a terrible lawyer because the commitment to a day that is like 6:00 in the morning to 8:00 in the evening 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 big journey, it's about what would be the things I would be doing in ten years How would I spend my Monday morning? How would I spend my Tuesday morning?

Tip number three: Audit your time. This is a fairly easy technique that you can use to get closer to a career you truly enjoy. It entails recording your weekly activities, which you most likely already do, and whether or not you truly enjoy doing them. Did you feel like you had a purpose and that it will help you in five years, or did you just enjoy yourself in the moment?

Well, so how does this work in practice? Okay, so I'm going to take a screenshot of my calendar and use it to audit how I feel about how I'm spending my time. If something on my calendar is truly moving me closer to myself, I can put a double plus on it; if something is moving me somewhat closer to myself, I can put a plus; if something isn't really moving me closer to me, I can write a plus minus; and if something is actively moving me away from what I want, I can do minus for that.

According to Grace in the book, once you've figured out what these in particular, what these negative things are the time-synners that you intentionally wish to stay away from. I consider myself fortunate to have established a career that I truly enjoy, and as a result, I essentially have zero negative things on my calendar. However, during my time at university and as a doctor, many of the things on my calendar would have been negative. I have gradually worked to sort of get rid of those things that drain my energy and don't actually help me pursue a career that I truly enjoy.

Tip number four thirteen minutes a day. On the other hand, we also want to be investing in things that bring us closer to ourselves and to this career that we truly enjoy. Professor Lorden also discusses the concept of compounding a lot, so when people decide to invest, they readily accept the idea that, well, if we leave money in it for a long time, it will compound and we will likely be okay with our pensions. The same is true when it comes to your career, such as those little things you do today, and I ask that you commit to 90 minutes a week, which is what most.

No matter how stressed you are, it is absolutely conceivable, and when you do the maths, it is actually rather feasible. 90 minutes a week is only 13 minutes a day, and we can all try to invest 13 minutes a day in skills or abilities that will help us develop a career that we truly enjoy. For instance, if learning to code is a part of your plan to build towards a career you enjoy, you can probably find 13 minutes a day to learn how to code. Sure, you can't become a complete pro in just 13 minutes a day, but it's undoubtedly a skill that compounds over time.

More recently, I also had the opportunity to interview Cal Newport, a computer science professor who has written several books, including Deep Work and So Good They Can't Ignore You About This Sort of Study Skills Productivity Type Stuff. He talks a lot about Career Capital Theory, which basically states that if you want a career that you truly enjoy, it's not something that will just fall into your lap; you have to earn it.The way you earn it is by developing career capital, and the way you develop career capital is by developing rare and valuable skill, actually possess the necessary skills for the job, so if you can devote 13 minutes a day to honing your skills, you're going to win on that front.

Tip number five. For those who are unsure of their career path, I would advise against enrolling in a costly master's program or a four-year degree and instead encourage them to use the free or inexpensive resources available because there are a lot of things that we can learn today without ever having to enter a traditional classroom. This point surprised me a little bit because Professor Lord is a university professor, so it's at least University education is somewhat biassed, but to be honest, I've benefited greatly from a university degree these days, and I generally do advise people to attend college, university, or whatever it is because at least it gives you backup options.

However, when people are a little further along in their careers, it's often very easy to say, "Oh, I need to do the thing, so I'm going back to UNI." I'm going to earn a degree in the subject I don't know, at least from acquaintances who are hiring for positions like getting into the NBA actually viewed less favourably than those who have had some actual entrepreneurial experience, so don't automatically assume that you should let me obtain a traditional degree in that specific field because you can now learn nearly anything online, in books, libraries, and other places.

Tip number six We now know what we might want to do on a daily basis to reach this level of me Plus or this career that we truly enjoy, and we know what skills we'll need to get there. As a result, we're going to build those skills and compound them over time, but even after you've mastered those things, you might still want to make some changes to your career. For instance, when I was sixteen, I decided that I wanted to become a doctor. Ten years later, I wasn't sure that this was the right path for me. This is related to a psychology concept known as the "end of history illusion," which psychologist Dan Gilbert explains. We asked thousands of people to predict how much their values would change over the next ten years, and we asked the other half to tell us how much their values had changed over that time.

First, you're correct that change slows down as we age, but second, you're mistaken because it doesn't slow down nearly as much as we think at every age from 18 to 68 in our data set. People greatly underestimated how much change they would experience over the next 10 years; we call this the end of history illusion. This allowed us to do a really interesting kind of analysis because it allowed us to compare the predictions of people, say, who were 18 years old with the reports of people who were 28, but second, we're strangely opposed to the idea of a U-turn. There's this notion that if you change your mind, it means you're not being consistent and you're not being like Integrity, whatever the term is.

However, one of my main conclusions from the discussion with Professor Lorden is that, in terms of careers, u-turns are actually probably a good thing. One of the issues in society today is that we believe that good leaders and good citizens should never change their minds, which I believe was detrimental to many nations because it took a lot for some leaders to admit that something wasn't right. The ability of future leaders to stand up and say, "I don't know I got it wrong or I've changed my mind," is really at the forefront of my mind because, when navigating through uncertainty, mistakes are inevitable. However, the deliberate part is when you sit down and consciously change your mind.

Tip number seven is the grid search mindset, which she discusses in the book. The idea here is that even if you don't quite have a clear vision for exactly what kind of change you're going to make, If I had done this a few years ago, for instance, I might have written that the things that I enjoy are teaching, medicine, creative stuff, and entrepreneurship stuff based on kind of my history over the last several years.

For example, I guess my career of teaching started around the age of 13-14-15 when I was teaching Kumon at this math study centre, and then I could have used this grid search technique to figure out what activities you enjoy and see if the actions you're taking are moving you, but it's okay to change your mind and it's easy enough now to connect the dots looking back and saying, 'Oh yeah, I found a career that I really enjoy'. using my creative skills to make nice power points and stuff like that. Now, that's transitioned into this YouTube stuff where I get to do a little bit of teaching, a little bit of creative stuff and a

It's famously easy to connect the dots looking back, but it's really hard to connect the dots looking forward. So, if you're in a position where you're not yet fully enjoying what you're doing for work or your career, don't worry as long as you're continuing to—I suppose—think big. It's easy to connect the dots and think, "Oh yeah, I was really into teaching back when I was like 12 years old." Once you have defined your own future and are taking little measures to pursue a career that you enjoy, you will eventually arrive at that time and realise that, first of all, this is not

As Professor Lorden explains, this isn't really about making u-turns at random; rather, it's about taking small steps in a specific direction. A destination because trying to find a career you enjoy is like a long-term process, but you'll be able to connect the dots looking back and everything along the circuitous path with u-turns will have made sense in hindsight. They collect information, assess their feelings about it, and use it to alter their course. They receive new information, update their decisions based on it, and are always open to changing their minds. They are willing to go backwards, to the left, or to the right direction.