This page summarises a few pivotal articles, namely:
- How to personalise your career path with first principles thinking
- How to pick a career (that actually fits you)
- How high-achieving students think about their careers
- How you can have a fulfilling career
I would recommend reading all of these, but if not, here's a summary and my take.
Let's first debunk the myth that your life is a predetermined path. It used to be that you'd go to university and study something, then get a career in that field, and then spend the next 40 years working in that field. Perhaps you would have a few promotions along the way, but then you would eventually retire. Once you chose your tunnel as a teenager, you were stuck in it.
Today, the career landscape isn't made up of tunnels like this. It's complex and rapidly changing. Doctors are becoming management consultants. Olympic medallists are highly sought after at Harvard Business School. Entrepreneurs are running for parliament.
Most high-achieving students fall into one of 2 categories
The first is the pigeonhole worrier: students who are worried about pigeonholing themselves in a particular function or industry.
The second is the laser-focused: students who fully commit to a particular function or industry and are focused on building expertise in this field.
There's also a less prominent third category, the T-shaped learner: students who build cross-functional perspective and skills by experimenting in a variety of functions and industries.
The pigeonhole worrier
There's still a tendency to see your life as a tunnel that requires a lifelong commitment. This can foster a lot of anxiety when you make decisions such as internship and job choices. Students worry that they are pigeonholing themselves into an industry just because they are interning in a certain field. You worry that you'll lose optionality. In reality, it takes far more than one internship to risk pigeonholing yourself.
Students and young professionals can easily avoid pigeonholing by spinning their experience into a compelling story that focuses on the transferable skills they've developed.
If you have a part-time job as a supermarket bag-packer, you don't need to worry about being pigeonholed in bag-packing. Instead, you can network for positions that require strong soft skills (e.g. sales, customer success, etc.) and focus on your excellent customer service experience.
You can unlock nearly any opportunity with a skill-based mentality.
The laser-focused
On the other end of the spectrum, if you're laser-focused, you might focus on a specific career path with intensity. It's great that these students have a strong hypothesis for what they want out of their career. But there's a tendency to forget that their career aspiration is a hypothesis that requires constant testing and validation. You might develop overconfidence in your narrative and develop career tunnel vision.
Moreover, you miss the opportunity to explore other professional interests and try new things. In my opinion, that is the whole point of university and the early years of your career. Everyone is multi-dimensional with many different interests. You may be doing yourself a disservice by focusing on only one interest and ignoring the rest.
Third, you are putting all your eggs into one basket with no plan B. Suppose you finally achieve whatever your goal was after years of hard work and focus. What happens if you don't love what you do? It's a brutal reality that's far more common than you might think.
Medicine is a common path for students like this: choose the right school subjects, go to medical school, and then be a doctor. However, 20% of medics studying at Imperial still choose to be investment bankers rather than doctors after graduating (source: an Imperial medic), and so there are still always other options to explore.
The T-shaped learner
Instead, I believe you should be a T-shaped learner, exposing yourself to a wide variety of fields. This is much more effective at helping you figure out what you want to do.
I studied both art and economics at A-level and both have led me to explore my interest in investing now, not just economics as you might expect. By developing competency in multiple fields, your brain can form novel connections between them.
What people regret about their careers
I also want to discuss a few data points about people's career regrets. If you choose not to make these same mistakes, hopefully it will lead to a more fulfilling career.
1. Money is not meaningful
Harvard Business Review says that the #1 career regret is taking a job for the money. Despite low pay and high unemployment, artists have higher job satisfaction than most people.
2. Status is not meaningful, but respect is
Being in a top profession is nice but you don't get respect for it. Respect enables us to feel like "a full human being whose presence matters".
3. Making a difference makes a big difference
Those doing what they call "good work" (defined as "work of expert quality that benefits the broader society") consistently exhibit high levels of job satisfaction. Happy people are ten times more likely to be other-oriented than self-centred. This suggests that happiness is a by-product of helping others rather than the result of its pursuit.
4. Use your talents
Using your strengths makes you feel great. The more hours per day adults believe they use their strengths, the more likely they are to report having ample energy, feeling well-rested, being happy, smiling or laughing a lot, learning something interesting, and being treated with respect.
5. Pursue your passion
Elderly individuals who were harmoniously passionate scored higher on various indicators of psychological adjustment, such as life satisfaction, meaning in life, and vitality, while they reported lower levels of negative indicators of psychological adjustment such as anxiety and depression.
A weakness in the "follow your passion" argument: most people's passions are quite difficult to make a living at. What's interesting is that most often it is passion that leads us to "10,000 hours" of deliberate practice and subsequent expertise. So following your passion and working hard may eventually make you great at what you love, and then you can make a big difference.
6. Find flow
Flow is when you're so wrapped up in what you're doing that the world fades away, like when athletes are in "the zone". If you find a job where you're spending most of your time in flow, that's a good fit for you.
7. We all want freedom
Job satisfaction is directly related to "span of autonomy", meaning the amount of each day during which workers feel free to make their own decisions.
8. Stop looking for your soulmate
There is no one perfect job you were meant to do. There are many "yous" with many passions and many talents, and therefore many jobs you could be fulfilled by.
Speak to lots of people
Speaking to lots of people and taking opportunities is so important. The best way to figure out what you want to do is to have a good understanding of what your available options are.
For example, if you only listen to your parents, who happened to have a successful public policy career, they might tell you to go to law school. According to them, law school is one of the recipes for success for public policy, which is part of the broader landscape of careers that impact people on a massive scale.
However, it is very likely that the world has changed. Building a highly successful career in public policy today may require vastly different professional experiences than it did in the 1990s.
The recipes for success in public policy have likely evolved past your parents' outdated advice of attending law school.
Roles are evolving daily. New job types are popping up. Google no longer requires its employees to have gone to university. You don't have to have studied medicine at undergrad to be a doctor. You don't have to study law to be a lawyer. And no one knows the niches of an industry and how it's changing better than people who work in it.
That doesn't mean you should ignore the advice of your parents. You should just ensure that the advice you take is informed by multiple sources.
The most important thing is for the mistakes you make to be your own rather than dictated by an uninformed opinion of one other person.
In summary, speak to lots of well-informed people about their career journey, and experiment with your interests.
Once you know where you're heading, the CV review scores your CV against what banks and consultancies screen for.