Loss

1. Stories of losing interest in what was once important or even the center of our life are somewhat common online. Sports, music, certain friends in our lives, genres of fiction, kinds of coffee, or certain media are all things to which our attachment may wax and wane. It’s natural that there is an ebb and flow. But sometimes the waves go out and never come back and we are left standing on the beach wondering where our enthusiasm has gone. It can feel as if a part of our life has vanished.

2. When I was a child, I learned to appreciate money only in so far as it could be used to purchase video games. When learning about opportunities to make money, I always evaluated them in terms of fractions of video games this could allow me to purchase. I was able to complete other things in childhood like practicing music, playing sports with friends, and doing homework, but by far I found the most enjoyment out of playing video games.

   This lasted until my mid twenties when I noticed a considerable decline in my interest in video games. I wanted to enjoy them but every time I sat down to play, I’d become bored or want to do something else (often watching YouTube videos which is just another form of endless scrolling). This decline continued but I still tried to keep games in my life, each time failing to regain the previous enjoyment it brought me. Throughout this time, I was gaining more autonomy over my time. I had more money than I had previously and the distance from previous enjoyment grew. My experience is surely not unique and certain similar things happen to folks with their interests that are not games.

3. There are lots of reasons that arise on first analysis as the cause of such disillusionment. I’ve heard things like, “The games industry is going down hill and losing the luster of it’s glory days.” Or “When we grow up, we naturally move on to other interests.” Or “Stress and life have beaten us down such that we can’t enjoy what was once enjoyable.” Or “to perform a certain flavor of masculinity the childhood obsessions (like video games) must fall by the way side.” It’s hard to know which one of these have merit or which one would explain my experience or the experience of others

Surprises

4. Somewhat surprisingly, in recent years I have regained some interest in playing video games. This is surprising to me because I am now a parent of 2 children who I want to care for and because I work a full time job. Objectively I have less time than ever before to play games. But the 30 minutes I find here and there to play with my older child bring me immense satisfaction.

   As a parent I was worried that by showing interest in video games that my child may obtain an unhealthy obsession and want to play games all the time. All that despite the fact that I feel I have a reasonable attachment to games. Every child is obviously different but so far that has not happened at all with my child. In fact they choose other activities other than video games frequently when given the choice.

5. What’s fascinating to me is that not until I had a marriage to maintain and strengthen, children to care for, and a full time job did my interest return. It may wane again naturally as I continue to age, but why did this moment present itself as as time for video games to resonant with me again?

   At first I thought this was a classic “seeing life through the fresh eyes of our children” situation. But now I’m not so certain. In fact, when I try to share my favorite games of my own childhood, my child often rejects the choice and prefers another game. So it’s not just a matter of nostalgia and sharing media I used to love. I’ve lost direct control over the timing and choice of video games. Since I want to play games with my child, I cannot choose to play games that are hyper violent or otherwise too mature (I know that these would not be suitable media for my child). So just as in childhood I have regained a certain limited notion of what game I can play.

Resonance

6. I think my experience is a concrete example of “Resonance” as described Hartmut Rosa outlines in his book “The uncontrollability of the world.” We resonate with the world and things in it when they appear to speak directly to us. Some ways this manifests is a flow state. When we easily get wrapped up in the activities of exploring relations with those things. What Rosa points out is that, in our modern world, humanity’s penchant for control and observability are precisely the conditions under which things which previously spoke to us in a resonant way go silent. The more effort we expend to control, the less we are able to resonate with the world (and video games which are part of the world).

7. As I entered by mid-twenties I did try to force myself to have similar experiences I had as a child with games. Playing the same kinds of games as I did and expecting the same kind of result. But the conditions in which I played were very different in my twenties relative to my childhood. For one as a child, I did not have much money to purchase all of the games I wanted to play. I had to be selective with what funds I did have (I was quite fortunate to be gift games and money as child). In addition, I had obligations as a child to attend school. I also enjoyed hanging out with my friends (though we did often play video games together) and playing music. So as a child I had relatively little control over the amount of time I could play games.

   As an adult I have many of the freedoms offered to adults in our modernity considering how time and money are spent. And yet ceding some elements of this freedom to important parts of my life like family and work have allow video games to speak to me once again. I often really enjoy just as I did as a child just wandering about and learning about the locations and lore of the game.

8. I don’t know if all of this will continue but it is a welcome thing. And I hope to embrace the next wave of waning interest and recognize if it is time to move on to something else rather than worry about losing something important to me. When we try to make a hobby or something enjoyable at the edge of our life the main focus, we end up squeezing it for enjoyment juice in a way that such peripheral activities could never sustain a steady flow of enjoyment. There are things at the edge of our life that are wonderful. For me, I love watching football on Saturday. Shouldn’t I try to make a world where every day is filled with Saturday quality football? No! And yet this is what I was trying to do to recapture and control my enjoyment of games.

9. It’s not wrong to use what we enjoy as a singal about how to spend our life. It’s clearly valuable data! But we have to be careful. It’s like trying to make a dish with only spices and seasonings. Those things are wonderful but fundamentally they must accompany something else and cannot be the main part of the dish.

Enjoy (or else)

10. Since there are real people who make a living doing exactly what they enjoy, it’s not implausible that something like a hobby can be turned directly into a life’s purpose or main substantive work. It cannot be said that it’s impossible to make a living watching football when there are in fact people who make a living watching football! The thing is we have to differentiate between things that are spices in our life from things that are substantive. And unlike how salt will always be a seasoning to food, different activities can be the substantive part of life to different people but only a spicy to someone else.

11. Even if we don’t set out to make things we enjoy our life’s purpose, our cultural climate emphasizes enjoyment to the point of excess. So it’s no wonder that one may use enjoyment as a proxy to measure activities that have meaning or purpose to us. The imperative to enjoy demands us to find something that brings us happiness and do it. That is the order of things now. It is a consequence of the notion of freedom we now have. The freedom to chose.

    But finding ourselves constrained by important and worth while things in life may lead to the necessary conditions under which things which previously spoke to us but have since gone silent may speak again.

1. Don’t over optimize your path through education

The point of each class you take doesn’t have to be in the pursuit of a singular goal. Consider a practice of taking a nice walk in the woods. This likely isn’t as impactful for your health goals as a hard-core HIIT workout, but none-the-less services a delightful purpose. It can refresh and calm you in a way doing 15 burpees would clearly not. In a relaxed state it makes other things easier, perhaps even you HIIT workout later in the day. So be sure to allow yourself some small percentage of course work based on what you think might be interesting.

It’s also okay if you try a course and notice, “actually this is terrible” either due to complete incongruence with the instructor or the material. That kind of data is incredibly valuable to you. For example, you have a passing interest in Anthropology and you decide to take a course about the origins of man. Each lecture you keep falling asleep because you don’t care about the analysis of the 20 specimens of homo erectus found or how it is speculated that they are related to other early hominids. After reflecting you may find that you really care about cultures and ethnography not bones and DNA! (No doubt there are anthropologist with the exact opposite inclination). The point is once you reflect, you now know more about what you like. It’s even better if you can determine that there is literally no amount of money that could make you want to do something as a job every day. Perhaps no one will ever offer a blank check to work on your favorite anthropological niche since I doubt it is a subject due for extreme investment by venture capital, but we do indeed live in strange times so who knows.

2. Explore ideas to find something you are good at

Part of deciding what you want to do for a job is finding something you are good at. Which of course is horribly ill-defined. Good at!?! What does that even mean? I’ve mentioned no metric or notion of success. Be serious! Okay, I’ll attempt it. Here’s a quick thought experiment. What is a topic that you could talk on confidently. Let’s say someone is throwing a slides party (you know a party where people present slide decks to each other) and for whatever reason (even if it is completely against your nature) you decide to go. You need a topic to talk about for 5 minutes. Usually I think people approach this with the advice that you should allow yourself to pick any topic. And I think there is value but the reality of the business world, is how can you make that topic interesting to other people. This is of course a very difficult task if you don’t know the people at the party or their interests. But suppose you know half of them pretty well and know what their interests are. Take your topic (even underwater basket weaving, or that anime from the 80s that you are basically a world expert in) and try to gear your talk toward making it somewhat interesting to those folks. Exploring different ideas is somewhat easier to do while you are participating in education since you will have access to learning resources during this time that you may not in the future. You’ll also get a chance to meet various folks (some incredibly boring and others very interesting) that will also help you stumble upon new ideas. Among these you may find that thing which you are truly good at.

3. You are your best teacher

Teachers are more like gardeners or farmers than they are like technicians working on cars or computers. The fundamental relationship between student and teacher is defined by the fact that a teacher cannot perform the learning for the student. The student must do it on their own. Teachers then employ many tactics to varying success to construct an environment that promotes student learning. Many excellent teachers are masters at both creating conclusive environments and knowing how to stoke motivation. While having a great teacher is a truly wonderful experience take some of the onus on yourself and ask, “how am I supporting my own learning.” It wonderful when we connect with our teachers, but they’ll never be able to know us as well as we might get to know ourselves. Therefore, we can strive to help lay our own foundation to support our own learning environments with great success. That is, if you know that you will be more motivated to learn about finance if you relate it to your favorite video game with a simulated economy, then start explaining the concepts you are learning in terms of that game. While you are in education, even if you are forced to study a subject you don’t particularly like, try to use the opportunity to hone your understanding of yourself and to learn tricks to help you integrate new information into your worldview.

4. Learning new things will always be required

You will have to continue to learn new things if you hope to lead the good life that you have envisioned for yourself. However, the kinds of learning that you will be doing will look different depending on your choice. Consider that each time you moved between middle and high school, then later to college, you had to adapt to the new environment by learning about new methods of learning that were appropriate to your new environment and new kinds of education.

If you truly hate learning and expect to be perfectly static in your understanding of the world after you leave institutions of academia, then I have bad news. We all always have to adapt to our circumstances. Sometimes it will feel like a burden but other times it will feel invigorating. The key is to maximize the good kinds of learning that you naturally excel at and are naturally energized by. I think deciding on this is a major factor in deciding which path to take. Course work at university can be illuminating in this regard. If taking another comparative literature course of the works of the great Russian novelists sounds worse than other activities you hate, then this is good data! Reconsider your plan to pursue a PhD in comparative literature regardless of how many years you’ve been down that path. If on the other hand you feel like you can tolerate a few more classes and get to the kinds of readings and translations you really are interested in, then perhaps the trade off is worth it. Things can be contradictory so there really isn’t a clear and fool proof way to find out what you really want.

You can never quite predict how things will go. Sometimes something that feels meaningless and unhelpful to your final goal will provide the necessary conditions for one of your great triumphs. Other times you will make a mistake and fail and it will have real consequences which hurt you. In either case you have built a new layer of experience which can help you find out your path.

5. Wear a mask to audition life directions

In order to know how it would feel to choose a certain life direction consider taking on a role by asking, “if I was a person who was going to make the choice to pursue x then how I would behave?” For the first week continue with your normal schedule but when faced with a decision, wear the new shoes that you are auditioning. That is, when you are faced with the decision ask “how would I as a person who has chosen to go to be x (or do x) approach this?” This might manifest as you choosing to do that extra problem on the homework set that is really hard or doing an additional edit on your paper before you turn it in because this is how you view what good work in a certain field is.

Sometimes this might lead to down surprising and maybe not helpful paths. For me, when I decided I wanted to be a serious student of mathematics, I knew I wanted a way to keep all my homework assignments around in case I needed to reference them later (reader I tell you now, I have not once referenced these assignments! So keep that in mind as I proceed). The top student in the cohort I was in, typed all his homework in LaTeX, a type setting system for writing math. I did not yet know how to use this to typeset mathematical writing so I set out to learn this while putting off some homework assignments so that I could not only type up my assignments but also keep a digital copy forever and return to them in case I missed it. I emphasize that at the time this felt like a very important part of being serious.

I pretended to be a serious mathematician and learned how to use a tool people I admired used. I didn’t immediately become better at being a mathematics student but I did learn a skill which I used later in my degree and I gained some confidence about my competency. Overall, I would rate this experience as mostly positive and it gave me good insight in what to focus on. There are many kinds of experiences like this that can help you understand what path is best for you, it certainly doesn’t have to involve learning to type set mathematical equations with a programming language designed decades ago. But you will find out interesting things about yourself, and for me, it was one of the first forays in to programming (or at least programming adjacent disciplines) which made me realize I like programming.

Further thoughts on the purpose of education

Finding a job is a daunting task. This is true for me at least and the sentiment seems wide spread these days. This might be due to a disconnect between an expectation of education and the education itself. The expectation that college will prepare you for a specific set of jobs is reasonable given the anecdotes we’ve all heard. Perhaps you had a friend who majored in just the right subject. They easily landed several internships and immediately on graduated were offered a job in the field they desired. Yet, people are not train cars bound to follow the rail system exactly as it is laid out. After all, there is variance in the way people arrive at any given job. For every story of someone moving directly into the corporate world so too can you find one about a forest hermit that became an actuary after 15 years in the wilderness (I admit I’ve never something exactly like this but I hope my point is made).

Very few take the most direct route from education to career, but our expectation can be influenced by the appearance that there exists a ready made rail way from here to there. Many folks perceive a disconnect between what requirements a job posting has and the specifics of their education. The divergence between topics covered in the academy and job requirements is often further widened in graduate school. But expecting education to lead straight to a job can lead to the classic but very disheartening thought loop upon graduating, “I need experience to get a job, but I need a job to get experience.” Naturally, one may ask, “well why didn’t my education prepare me for entering into industry?”

I believe the core function of universities is not to prepare you for a job. In an extremely cynical sense, higher education’s primary objective is to extract resources from you! Time and money! (You should know that I am a major proponent of higher education and there is only a sliver of truth in this statement). In it’s idealized representation, higher education is an institution built to transfer rich traditions of learning and knowledge to new generations all the while being the core place where the pursuit of extending human knowledge occurs. To have a reasonable model of what higher education really is, we probably need to hold a little bit of each of these extreme visions simultaneously.

But for all points on this spectrum, Universities are not providing a ticket for a train that will take you straight to the job station. A somewhat natural question then is, why isn’t the academy specifically built to prepare one for a job market? This quickly sets us on a path in which one could spend a life time understanding the relationships between the market economy, politics, and the pursuit of knowledge.

It also has a sliding head long into how aristocratic life style choices are propagated to regular folk in our modern era. Consider a Victorian Aristocrat who studied a somewhat niche topic at university who then later took their position ordained by marriage or birth as an Earl or countess. Some of them even kept up their contributions to academic fields all the while performing duties in political and cultural upper crust of Victorian life. In our era, it’s perhaps a somewhat new phenomenon (only new given that human history is rather long so far) that the lower and middle class folk are engaging in the kind of education that centuries ago was meant for the aristocracy (I know there must be well known exceptions where commoners received access to university).

It’s interesting to notice which patterns appear to persist. It’s not the least bit surprising to find that the Presidents of the United States attended certain schools, or that the rich and famous send their children to top universities. After all these facts are commonly mentioned in media and feel like a rigid part of our cultural landscape. So it appears universities still function in some capacity as a way to perpetuate some notions of class and status. Simultaneously, I think it’s fair to say that at no previous time was it possible for so many people to access the fruits of universities. Indeed many people now have access to these top tier universities even if not graced by the circumstance of their birth.

All this to say, it’s no simple matter to find out “what the purpose of universities is.” It’s multifaceted and intertwined with many different systems and has been that way for hundreds of years. But where does that leave us, still there trying to decide if you should continue on the path of academics or branch out. Where does that leave someone who “just wants a job” out of university. To these people our current conversation should turn into an invitation to think strategically about what you want out of university and how it should align with a plan for you to obtain your version of the good life.

In the academy there are communities of researchers all working toward advancing the field. In many of these communities, there is an upper echelon of researchers who steer the community (for better or worse) in specific directions. This kind of steering is not done directly but is performed by their ability to influence the field. This manifests as certain people receiving more praise, funding, citations, etc (often coinciding with merit but sometimes not). This means that in order to understand what problems people care about in a particular academic discipline you have to know a bit more than the material itself. It’s a prerequisite to have a deep understanding of the technical matter that the domain deals with. But once you get there, you can’t expect people to care about the first problem in a novel direction that pops into your head (you could get lucky and immediately happen upon something the whole domain cares about, it could happen, I’m saying don’t count on that sequence of events). You need to take into account the general trends in your field and in particular what the folks at the top seem to care about. Of course, following this advice leads to a new set of problems. One of which is the fact that, in any system, it’s non-trivial to know who is at the top. A whole crop of problems appear when we try to discerned the bidding of others which are at a distance to us.

On the other hand, you can embark on your own direction if you are willing to subsist on small number of citations and not necessarily being the at the center of where the funding comes from. If that sounds appealing to you, to live a life free from caring about what is happening elsewhere in your discipline, then by all means go for it. I myself was quite surprised to find that this path is not what I wanted. Although I painted myself as someone who wanted to do their own thing, I found out through trial and error that I do care about engaging with knowledge systems in a way that resonates with the complex cultural structures that govern them. That’s not to say I don’t think the whole system is wild and often contrary to what I find most interesting, but having had a few experiences where what I work on receives direct feedback in a way that allows me to see where the whole group is headed was very rewarding. So rewarding that I’m often willing for forgo the most interesting thing that occurs to me and focus on something more aligned with what the group is interested in. Your mileage with the strategy will vary!

A set of similar dynamics occur in business (of course there are important differences). Naturally, the feedback that many care about in business can be measured in dollars. That signal is very interesting and if you happen upon a solution to lots of people problems, it might be that you can turn some of those people into customers. That is, They are willing to pay you for your solution to the problem. I say this with one qualification, you can not make everyone happy with your solution. It’s hard to find the right group of people once you have a solution even when it is a good one. In other words, a major challenge that new businesses face is aligning they solution with the expectations of customers (or changing minds so taht customers are created).

At the end of the day, most of the way one succeeds in business or academia is in understanding who cares about what problems and then having the knowledge to solve that problem. There are strategies to be learned from each side that can help you on the other. And simultaneously, there are trends on one side that will not help you or even harm your success in the other. I make no claim that I have even a sliver of understanding and certainly what I have thought about represents only a tiny slice of how these two giant systems have similarity and interact. Yet I’m very thankful for my time spent in graduate school since it has offered me a perspective on the business problems I face which I don’t think I would have without that experience. I’ve also known excellent researchers who embarked into industry first only realize their place was in the academy. While I don’t know if they would agree or not, I do think their experience in business first provided valuable experience in their academic career.

You may notice this post is much shorter than the others in this section. It’s true! I’m trying out shorter form posts which focus on a single idea. These shorter posts are written with the intention that busy folks can consume them in 5 minutes or less (give or take).

That’s not to say that something is deficient in you if you don’t find great joy in digging holes. One reason the child feels so proud is that the hole was important to the overall project. It may be the case that you yourself are not interested in projects that involve digging. It’s okay to find building gardens or planting trees not that interesting or meaningful to you. Indeed as adults, it can be hard to find instances of this kind of task which is laborious and yet energizing. One source of these feelings may come from tragic events, such as a natural disaster in your town or when a relative dies and you need to be responsible for part of the planning to death rites. In these cases, for many people, the energy flows effortlessly. It might indeed be incredibly hard to help repair your town or face the emotional burden of planning for life after the passing of someone dear, but in the context of the thing you are spurred to action. You don’t worry about every single tiny detail because you sense that they truly don’t matter (or you simply don’t have the energy to deal with them).

But we can’t rely on disasters to show us the way for obvious reasons. We need a way to probe into knowing what actions will enliven us without having to experience tragedy. Think about the last thing you did which felt extremely hard. Maybe you ran a marathon. Or maybe you did a really long hike? Perhaps, you hosted a birthday party for a gaggle of five years to celebrate your child’s birthday? Afterwards how did you feel? Tired for sure, but were there other emotions too? When I ask myself these questions, I’m fishing for a specific situation. One where I felt both completely exhausted and yet also energized about life at the same time. These are some of my favorite experiences and I believe they offer great insight into what we should fill our days doing. But sometimes just asking them and answering outright doesn’t produce an improved understanding of our situation. For me at least, I have to reach of other (sometimes silly and contrived) questions or stories to jostle my understanding of self to a state where I can better understanding. And with this improved understanding, I (also you too I hope) can begin to notice if what we will our time with gives us more energy in the long run or less.

Money, jobs and energy

A stranger approaches you on the street and gives you two choices. The first choice, continue your current job with a small raise you’ll be happy with. The second choice, agree to start a new job making 2 million dollars a year. The catch is this, you will not be given the details of the work entailed by option two and you must commit to it for 2 years. Which will you chose?

For many the immediate reaction to such contrived ultimatums is to launch into the contingencies of each of the choices. It really does depend on what the second option entails. For most people there is a huge category of things which they may not like to do but which they may do for a year to make that kind of money. On the other hand everyone has a long list of jobs or actions they absolutely would not do no matter the monetary compensation. I think it is the correct reaction to reject such hypothetical situations as too silly to take seriously. One can’t really know from the premise what one should chose. It’s a pure gamble! Although the expected value of monetary compensation can be computed, that pales in comparison to the factors that really matter. Although the premise is highly artificial, certainly no stranger (except maybe Mr. Beast) would approach you with such a proposition, we each face choices about what we are willing to subject ourselves to everyday. Reflecting on this can give you valuable intuition about what kinds of things you’d like to do and can help guide you toward a career path you’ll be happy with and would gladly chose if offered by some weirdly magical stranger.

I readily admit that it is necessary to consider money when making a choice about your career. But just like the previous example highlights, money is not everything. Ignoring money completely would be a stumbling block in pursuing your version of the good life. There are people who can rely on others to provide their basic needs (assuming also that they accept being reliant on others as a life path). For others, they must find their own way to obtain the basics of life and occasionally sometimes fulfill other desires beyond survival. The problem with pursuing money for money’s sake (especially if you plan to be employed by someone else and not be your own boss) is that you will be spending a great deal of time and maybe more importantly mental energy on your chosen career. The accumulated toll of having your waking hours, and hence significant portions of your energy, spent on something you don’t highly value is what can lead to terrible mental health situations. However, unlike artificial ultimatums, we usually have access to a wide spectrum and are not forced to pick between extremes. One doesn’t have to seek a job that fulfills a mythical ideal of “This is what I was put on Earth to do,” or be relegated to a job of misery. Instead we can find something that satisfies our needs and increases the energy we have to live with. Finding such a situation, as I’m sure many will attest to, is hard. I claim that it is not impossible! But, how to find such a situation? A great place to start is to list what you like doing (and try not to overthink it).

I think it is fair to say that most people would consider liking what you do to some extent as a core component of most meaningful measures of quality of life. A life filled with meaningless or tedium all the time would rank low in many scoring systems. On the other hand, you would likely assign a higher score to a situation where a person gets the chance to engage in things they find fun, meaningful, and energy giving rather than energy taking. This is one reason why finding a course that involves lots of activities you like and minimizes the ones you don’t like (since we can’t fully eliminate what we don’t like) is a way to find the good life. This provides at least a starting point to find what job will make us feel energized rather than drained. And we have to be willing to try some things that might fail why we do. While it’s a great starting point to use what we like as a way to find tasks that energize us, there are pitfalls to watch out for.

It’s important to point out that there are a category of things which are fun to you, but which no matter how much money someone pays you to do it, you’ll never feel good doing that thing for money. Everyone is different in this regard. Imagine you like video games (maybe you don’t even have to imagine!). You enjoy video games maybe more hours in a day than you feel you should. I think most people like this have faced the thought as some point, “Why don’t I try to figure out how to play video games professionally.” What’s more there are really existing jobs that involve playing video games all day. One such job is video game quality tester. In this position you provide value to the game developer by playing their game and taking detailed notes about they game. Such testers are also valued for their ability to identify bugs and know exactly what circumstances led to that bug. But already in the telling of the value of the job, we see a difference in the why the video games are played and more over we also see how playing games for this job is performed in a much different way than you might in a casual manner. Whereas casually you may enjoy open-world games because they allow you to deeply explore the different areas that you want to see and you can pick your classes as you like. But in a tester position you need a more “completionist” outlook. You’ll need to play the game completely and leave no stone unturned and no class untried. Maybe this would excite you or maybe not. But when you start to get paid to do something you often also change the way in which you engage with the activity. So be mindful of that.

Adapt as your focus changes

Another avenue in which using your natural inclination can lead you astray is when you don’t take into account how you change over time. I’m glad that the trend of advice to youths in our culture is moving toward embracing ambiguities (though as far as I can tell the mainstream remains as a force toward making concrete decisions about one’s future). Pressuring a teenager to pick a life path is in some ways absurd. I think arguments that are skeptical of a 16 year old’s ability to choose a career are well trodden. On the other hand, I fear this has led to a situation where people are not encouraged to try something to see how it feels (I’m not talking here about trying things obviously detrimental. Rather things like starting a library of punk rock albums). On a cellular level we are all the ship of Theseus. After a certain amount of time every cell in our body is replaced with new ones. The atoms and molecules which make up our body are swapped out for different ones as times passes. Then we must ask, are we still ourselves after all this change? There are lots of fruitful probes into this philosophical paradox, but we don’t even need to solve it to get benefit. Just like our physical bodies change and remain non-static, so too does our mental and spiritual selves. How we carry out our goal seeking is not static. And yet, we often feel completely devastated to not achieve a goal even when that goal becomes less interesting over time.

For example, I once planned to dedicate a month to learning how to be good at speed running a game (this is where you try to finish a video game as fast as possible. It is an interesting competitive sport to me). I had been consuming some content that made the experience seem interesting. I certainly felt like I would also enjoy it and thought, “Hey, this could be a fun way to spend evenings and I like how it has an easily measurable goal (time to complete the game).” But it turns out after a week or so it wasn’t that interesting to me. Even though this goal didn’t have grand meaning in my life, after all it was just something I thought would be fun to do and a way to relax after work, I still felt bad that I didn’t achieve my goal. However, why should I feel bad? I had an idea about something that would be fun, I tried it and it didn’t resonate. So what! Now to move on to other things and be happy for the knowledge that I’m not so interested after all! Ultimately, there is nothing that can prepare us to make difficult choices about what to spend time on. The best we can hope for is that we get slightly better over time given our experiences. With this in mind, I think choosing whether to go down one career path or another is not a science but an art and one must probe how one feels about the situation and use heuristics rather than pure statistics and data. While this experience took place over a short time frame, I think a similar reaction should hold for something over a longer time frame. Just because you’ve spent every weekend doing oil painting for 7 years doesn’t mean you have to continue to engage with it if you no longer find it enlivening.

But letting go of goals is hard. There is a strand of thinking that is popular now about goal setting which espouses that you should be extreme in how you approach goals. These trends usually compel you to say things like “no one will out work me.” Sometimes this kind of thing is referred to as “rise and grind” mentality. In my somewhat casual and silly example of learning to speed run a video game, what should I do? Should I approach it like a rise and grind type or be gentle to myself. In this case it is easy to see that I should be gentle. Video games don’t matter so much as to disturb my peace. Since this situation is not about my survival it is easy to see this logic play out. The situation becomes much harder when our jobs and careers are on the line. Choices about jobs and careers feel like they are on a completely different level than deciding to stop speeding running video games. Even so, be gentle with yourself about these choices that really do matter. Navigating your changing interests as they relate to your work over time is tricky. Do not assume that just because you like doing an activity now, you will also like doing this activity while being paid for it. Try new things and periodically check-in with yourself about how your current state is affecting your energy for living.

Try different modes of working to get unstuck

When you have to give yourself a pep talk to start your work day, it’s a good sign that you are engaging in many energy draining tasks. For most people, we must engage with undesirable tasks from time to time. We can not expect to have every moment of every day filled with only desirable things. At some point, we are all compelled to engage with things we don’t like. Despite this taking notice of what makes us feel good is productive, especially if those things are related to work and not just pleasure. It’s probably more helpful for you to know that you feel really at peace and calm when the bathroom has been thoroughly cleaned than to know that you really like to eat an ice cream sandwiches (an argument can be made I’ve got this the wrong way). For many I’ve talked to, cleaning toilets is not necessarily fun or enjoyable, but once they begin to clean a part of themselves takes over. They blink and then all of a sudden the bathrooms in the house are clean! You put it off for too long and all it took was one spark of a thought to finally have this task complete. There are many tasks like this. They hang over us and it get harder and harder to start. However, once you find a spark, the deed is almost as good done. This is one example of how sometimes getting the ball rolling is all we need to get energized.

We should try arrange days to have significant chunks of activities that energize us rather than drain us. As I said before, I don’t think for most people it’s possible to configure life so that you never have a period of time where you’re working on something that’s not fun. But I do believe that it is possible for almost everyone to have at least some chunk of their day filled with something enlivening that restores energy than than drain it. But if we don’t know ourselves well enough even deciding how to experiment with tasks to see what you like can feel like a daunting challenge. To this end we’ll discuss some concrete possibilities to try things out to improve your self understanding.

Proposition: Write four concrete tasks that provide value in your given domain (education, finance, service industry, etc.). Now think of two completely different ways to get each of those tasks done. Set aside time to try out each of these different ways. Then take note. Which way left you feeling more energetic?

For example, consider a teacher. Naturally they have multiple facets in their job. They have administrative tasks that involves paperwork and communicating with students, other teachers, and school leaders. bout what standards are going to hit and things like that. Then there are the student facing tasks, the actual instructing. And before they can do instructing they must plan. Afterward, there is likely feedback about the instruction and performance to consider. We’ve already mentioned four board categories of tasks there’s like four categories for teacher.

Now let’s examine different ways that the instruction task could be performed. One way is to deliver a classic lecture. Stand up at the front. Talk for 45 minutes. Answer the occasional student question. The goal is to informing your students in an engaging way. Put in interesting references that students might be surprised by. Offer either key insights or key facts about the topic. A completely different way to organize your instruction time would be to prioritize individualized instruction. In this case you might first give a short lecture. Ten minutes at most. Afterward, pass out a problem set or list of questions which students work through while in the class room. After the lecture part walk around the class answering questions to small groups of students.

These are two different ways approaches to achieving the goal of instructing students about a topic. We might have preconceived notions about which way will leave us more generic but if you have the power consider actually auditioning different modes of doing the same task. Sometimes you have to try stuff out to know how it affects your energy. If neither way feels good, that’s still progress. Come up with other ways to do the tasks you are required to do. Through auditioning different ways to execute your key tasks, you’ll likely end up with more insights into yourself. This is more fuel to power your ship to a place that you want to be.

Be pragmatic (or not)

It’ll quite a bit easier for somebody who really loves a certain kind of work to do more of that work and improve at that work. They will not experience as much friction as others who are lukewarm about doing the work. Think about it from a systems point of view. A person with natural affinity for something will naturally probe deeper into the domain than less enthused others. It’s not a matter of work ethic. Learning to perform better is about advancing down a branching path of questions. All the questions needed to progress will arise more naturally in the one who is more interested. That’s how I think about it at least. This is the pragmatic reason reason why we should how doing things makes us feel energetically. But how are we supposed to react when we notice our current situation is not lifting us up and is instead pushing us down?

There is a strategic game to be played about once you recognize something is not energetic. Some folks have dependents who rely on them. They may not have flexibility to drop work if it means endangering the survival of their loved ones. Others may realize that the time is ripe to drop everything and forge a new way. Identifying what energizes you is a great first step. Sometimes you can take immediate grand action. But often the pragmatic choice is to try small things out in a way that doesn’t require life altering changes. One reason to avoid giant changes all at once is because it is truly difficult to know yourself well. Anytime one has what feels like a deep insight, I think it is important to take it with a slight grain of salt. Sudden thoughts may not lead us where we want to go. On the other hand, if we always ignore nagging feelings and write them off as not worthy, undesirable situations can build up for years. Sometimes the right choice really is to just to just go for it and break a bunch of bridges.

This line of reasoning does have some dangerous element to it. They lead to important life decisions. Just because a blog like this one told you that it might be okay to do something, I urge you to not do it until you check in with the people in your life that are really important to you. Before doing anything life altering make sure to talk to someone whose opinion you value (and choose someone who cares about your well being). But tell them you are committed to trying things out and if they don’t agree with your decision ask them to give you their advice (you can take it or leave it after all).

Finally, you see the show, it was fun, but maybe not your favorite thing ever. Maybe Dragons really are cooler after all.

The problem here is that the child doesn’t have a grasp of what is most important or valuable to themselves. Instead of jumping in a figuring out which parts of the park are most interesting and intriguing to them, they spend precious hours reviewing the reviews of others. Sure now they know that they like wizard magic less than dragons, but they may have found that out just by jumping onto the first ride that attracted them.

When we don’t know what we value, we risk wasting time or chasing things based on our perceptions of what other’s find valuable. Often what is needed instead is to find what truly excites us independent of the preferences of others. This chapter is about avoiding that trap and learning to recognize what matters to you as an individual. The analogies and writing prompts in the rest of this chapter have helped me come to a better understanding of myself and I hope they will be helpful for others.

Understanding what you value is hard

Feeling confident about your choices requires a deep level of self-understanding, but defining your personal values is not as straightforward as it seems. Have you ever bought an outfit you loved in the store, only for it to sit in your closet unworn? It looks super cool in the context of the store but now you can’t figure out how to pair it with clothing you already own or the color is not quite right. Sure you’d wear it before going naked into the world, but the initial spark that made you want to buy it has faded and never returned. This is but one example pointing to how fickle our preferences, priorities, and values can be. Over time, sometimes in subtle ways and sometimes drastically, our whole being changes and so too does our understanding of our value system. This fluidity can make it feel like nailing down what truly matters is impossible.

In light of this, I don’t think it is particularly helpful to nail down a rigid set of rules which exactly define what is valuable to you. You don’t need to have a Moses moment and carry down the stone etched commandments from the mountain which will stand the test of generations, instead you need a working framework to thing about what you value that is flexible to change overtime as you yourself change. There is no guarantee we’ll ever “completely” understand our values no matter how much time or effort we expend in introspection. But what if we start by finding the next step or action toward a future you are hopeful for? When choosing between pretty good alternatives, the worst case is palatable. We may discover that we like dragons more than wizards at amusements parks.

Proposition: Favor your creative inner voice to define “value”

Like so many other concepts, the word “value” is incredibly overloaded. Name an academic discipline or arena of human interaction and you’ll find a concept of value which has it’s own distinct flavor. In many of these arenas, in particular economic and political arenas, pragmatism hangs over the definition of value. But when defining what kinds of things are valuable for ourselves, it is useful or maybe even necessarily to suspend our inner pragmatist and favor creativity. One great way to start is to imagine you ideal scenario. Resist the whispers from pragmatism about “that’s not how the world works,” as we want to enable the full power of creativity.

In the next two paragraphs, I outline scenarios to generate questions which can help you articulate your vision of value by considering what an ideal world might look like. After spending about 10 minutes writing answers to the questions, reread what you have written about your perfect world. I can almost guarantee that part of you will cringe at the writing and perhaps another part will begin a critique showing why many aspects of your perfect world cannot work and cannot come to pass. Yes, some ideas may seem naive but that is okay. This exercise isn’t about practicality. It’s about identifying what you hope for, which is an expression of your value system.

Within all of us is a vision of how things ought to be. We get glimpses of this vision when we observe something happening and think “this isn’t right.” We can use these observations and our reactions to help us understand our own vision of a world which just feels right. Think about recent events in your life which left you noticing the gap between your ideals and reality. Using these answer the following questions. What does a righteous world look like? What would it definitely not look like (sometimes this is easier)?

For me at least, much of what comes to mind when I observe the gap of ideal and reality is when I notice apparent unfair or unjust phenomena. This leads to another set of questions. If you were all powerful, how would the resources of the world be distributed? Given a particular answer to the previous question, would you like to live as a random sampled human from this new world you have generated? In this world how would people interact with each other? What do interpersonal relationships look like?

Reflecting on your answers and thoughts based on this question will start to reveal your value system without you having to explicit state things like “I value fairness.” There is nothing wrong with stating things like that, but the tricky part is what does fairness mean in all situations? Or what does fairness mean in some truly awful situations. We take measurements of our own value system by thinking and writing about realizations of our hope for the best world. Some may find these measurements are more helpful for making choices that align with our value than statements like “I value {input some good thing}.”

Proposition: use your own building blocks

When talking with others about our visions we often use commonly shared building blocks that we pick up from the shared world around us or the shared media that we’ve both consumed. It is often quite satisfying to meet new people which use the same kind of references as ourselves when describing things important to us. But we need to be careful about the ways in which using these references can steer our articulation of what is valuable in ways that aren’t true to ourselves. Suppose you want to espouse some virtue like courage and you refer to some figure heroically going to into battle. But is the subtext of war what you want to be the foundation for your vision of courage? Maybe there is some other context perhaps even unique to you with which you want to convey the notion of courage.

If symbolism from popular media can steer us away from an authentic expression then why does media appear so often in statements about value? That’s likely a topic I’m not at all qualified to talk about but I’ll try to unravel it a bit and what I have to say is not particularly original (which is somewhat ironic given that this section is about not using the symbols of others) or ground breaking. At it’s core we use images and shared symbols to better relate to one another. Consider the situation when a question like “What are you going to do with your life?” is asked. The questioner is usually fishing for a short answer. They may even expect an answer like of expect you to say, “oh you know I’m becoming a scientist” or “I’m in an entrepreneur I’m going to start a business” They may not really be ready for you to dive head long into a philosophical consideration of what you want to do next. The symbols of engineer, scientist and entrepreneur are potent in our culture but they come rebuilt with a set of understandings which may not align with what you value. Scientists discover new things. You may enjoy the experience of learning, but do you value the pursuit of novel findings over the pursuit of learning in general? Similar situations arise when we think about the stereotypes for engineer and entrepreneur.

As we already discussed, it’s a hard problem to know what you authentically value. When I started to try to articulate these issues for myself, I began to realize that I had not intentionally expressed by value system to myself in my own words. Even in my internal monologue I often referenced the lives of people who came before or media I was interested in. Since I wanted to become a mathematician at the time, my mind held images of mathematicians I respected at my university as well as those from films and from the internet I had seen. It’s not that I valued and desired the life of these people so much that their life was my goal and represented my value system. I did not aim to recreate their configuration of life. What I mean is that these are people and images and symbols with which I formed my own vision. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this but I think it behooves one to add their own raw ingredients to their conception of the desired life. For me since I wasn’t writing things or doing creative art at the time, I didn’t really have a hand rolled lexicon or set of symbols or images that could help me add my own twist to the way that my desired life was constructed.

There are many ways to start to build up unique construction blocks for expressing your ideal life. Try to phrase your value system without using historical figures, bits of media, or tropes to define your value system.

Thought experiment: Medieval Village Isekai

I was really fortunate to attend graduate school along side some really interesting and intelligent folks. Because we got along quite well we often engaged in what I viewed as very intriguing conversations. Many of my conversations from that time stayed with me. One that I have returned to when thinking about ways to find what I value is about being spontaneously transported to a medieval village and having to use our current understanding of math to either prove valuable to the king or avoid being accused of witchcraft. I’ve adjusted my telling of the situation a bit to facilitate our current aim.

Suppose that for whatever reason you are transported back in time to a medieval village. This village is special (and also decidedly non-historical) in the sense that the ruler of the village values men and women equally, doesn’t discriminate on the basis or race, and values above all certain knowledge. What kind of knowledge? That’s the amazing part, the ruler values exactly that knowledge related to your desired domain that you want to pursue as a career. Historically, the traveling prophets and potion sellers steer very clean of this village since this village operates on a strict principle: Anyone claiming expertise in a field must prove it or face execution.

What kind of domain would you be willing to put your life on the line in this kind of way? What kinds of strategies would you employ to convince the villagers, their council and their ruler to let you live? Finally, assuming you have a plan to convince them that you are what you say you are (and I think this is the most important part) how do you feel about yourself? I don’t think it is the wrong reaction to say, “Oh you know I’m not really that interested to put my life on the life to pursue knowledge of this discipline.” This situation is extreme. I hope that no one ever has to explain their value while having the threat of violence brought upon them. However, I think feeling confident enough about your direction to commit to it in this silly hypothetical gives interesting signal. This is one way to tell if you are primarily intrinsically or extrinsically motivated by the pursuit of knowledge in this discipline. If you hesitate a little before committing to something in this hypothetical it might mean you are more extrinsically motivated. If this is the case, another question arises. Are there other domains for which you are intrinsically motivated? Sometimes taking an idea to the extreme can uncover more about how you feel authentically.

Writing Prompts

For each of the prompts below consider writing for 15 minutes continuously to answer them. The next day, read and reflect on what you wrote. Ideas may stick out on your second reading as not worthwhile. Throw those out. Other ideas may need more refinement, consider writing about them instead. Other words you wrote may bring up questions. Call a friend and ask to talk about it.

• Using a single sentence describe what value means to you?

• Without using media or historical references describe a person who lives a life you would value.

• In the context of the Medieval Village Isekai, write an outline of a plan to convince the village you are a true expert in a field you are interested in.

Give yourself grace

Sometimes despite good intentions or simply because life is chaotic, we end up at the end of an allotted set of time to do something and we are completely unprepared for this period to end. This was me when it came to the end of my undergraduate study. Perhaps it’s a little hyperbolic to say that I was entirely unprepared but let me explain what I mean. When in my junior year I thought, “well I might go to graduate school for mathematics.” I made a critical mistake. I did not also ask my professors and find an advisor who could help me in this transition. This meant I was flying blind while figuring out which graduate schools to apply to and the best way to fill out graduate school applications. I should have simply contacted a mentor or frankly anyone in my department. I do not doubt at all that any one of them would have at least sent a brief response back with some of the important things to do to prepare. There are some standard things to prepare and think about. For example, they may have asked if I had studied for the GRE or if I had found a summer internship so that I could begin a research program.

I didn’t do any of these things so naturally I did not receive many positive responses to my applications. In a very real way, this situation was entirely my “fault.” But phrasing it this way seems overly harsh. In the years since, I have come to understand that it’s not always possible to rely on being perfectly prepared because as finite humans we simply don’t know everything. Hindsight is especially good at pointing out where we went wrong and yet retroactively punishing ourselves for our mistakes is rarely what is needed. Instead, when approaching this kind of situation we should do our best to accept the consequences and begin building our solution. It’s better to address what you can as the opportunities present themselves. If yesterday you didn’t know you should do something like apply to summer internships, don’t be mad at your yesterday self. Use the spark of energy to find out if any institutions are still taking applications.

Failure can open new directions

Although I received many “We regret to inform you…” style emails, I’m incredibly grateful that the university that I had attended for undergraduate studies did offer me a spot in their graduate school. For various cultural and historical reasons, it is not common for someone to pursue a PhD at the same institution where they obtained an undergraduate degree. I was also happy to still be in the same town as my then-girlfriend now wife who was pursuing a master’s degree at the time. By staying at the University we attended together our relationship didn’t experience the challenges of long distance. While grateful for the opportunity to continue my education, I was a bit bummed that I was not offered an assistantship to teach or do research. Not only are they good opportunities to begin gaining teaching and research experience, they also cover tuition and provide a stipend. But, fortunately I started to take things more seriously and after half a year a spot became available and I was able to teach undergraduate students.

By continuing to accept the opportunities we are given we can gain more opportunities to build experience toward what we want to achieve. Just because the first opportunity that you were really excited about falls through, doesn’t mean there won’t be other opportunities that you can be excited about. This is not to say that you’ll feel right as rain the whole time. As far as I know, it’s basically impossible not to feel some pain during episodes of failure. Often times a lot of pain! But I encourage you to keep going. It’s much easier to draw opportunities to yourself if you continue to seek them out.

This discussion on failure started with me describing a gap in my knowledge which I later felt responsible for. The way to move forward from this particular kind of situation was to get more information. But I either didn’t have the courage or didn’t know what to ask. This is where someone who has stood in a place similar to yourself can really help you. If you don’t already have a mentor or someone doing the thing you want to do in your sphere, there is no time like the present to go ahead and meet them and ask them questions. But often when breaking into a new area that we don’t have much experience with, even knowing what to ask is a challenge.

Ask questions about the specifics

Once you have identified a candidate person who may have knowledge that will help you may have trouble coming up with the right questions. Asking questions of others is a bit like fishing and your questions are the bait you chose. The quality of the prompt or question is related to the quality of answer. There are of course those out there who will offer great advice that is exactly what you need with minimal prompting or precise question asking. But don’t count on having this experience all time. In fact, good question asking is an excellent skill and will be beneficial in many areas of your life if master.

But returning to what to ask someone, to decide what to ask let’s rephrase our stated goal. We want to get into this or that life path but we don’t know how and we need specific direction in the immediate term to help us on our way. So think of specific things that someone can really dig into.

The problem with general questions is that you likely have lots of additional context floating around in your head which informs the statement of the question. But other people can’t see this context. This may materialize in you asking a question and then receiving an unsatisfactory answer. When you ask something like, “what’s it like to live your life?” You inherently have lots of ideas that are important to you. Maybe you’re interested in the details like what their hour by hour routine looks like. Maybe you are more interested in how many times they get to take a walk in the woods in a given week. Or maybe you are primarily wanting to know how much they get compensated or how drained at the end of the day they feel. We cannot expect the person answering the question to know the details of what we want to know unless we try to express it. At the same time a question should balance an overly long context with a statement of specifically what you are curious about. Although it would be great if we could prepare entire books for each other to make ourselves better known to each other, in reality people are generally very low on time and our requests need to be brief.

I think it is better to start with the specifics than to start questioning in generality. For example, “What is your favorite work related activity you perform regularly? In a given week, how much time do you get to spend doing that?” is likely more informative than, “how do you feel about your job?” It might indeed be really interesting to understand how someone feels about their job, but you are less likely to get an answer that will help you understand what having a certain profession means for you in that case. Use what you know about yourself to generate specific questions. Suppose you know that you meetings are a drain on your energy. Then you might like a situation where there is not a need for dozens of meetings each week. This is something we can directly ask, “how often do you sit in meetings and do you feel like it is important?” In this case you might even get the person to engage in their own self reflection on how their time is spent.

Strategies for asking questions

Don’t worry about trying to learn every detail about the profession, job, or environment. Just start with something concrete. This will be your first stepping stone not your only data you will ever collect. Also don’t fret too much about finding the perfect question. Any question that is on topic and specific will get the ball rolling. If after you receive your answer you still feel like you don’t know what to think (a common occurrence, don’t worry) then reflect on the answer you did get. Ask yourself, “what about this answer doesn’t really tell me what I want to know. Given this answer can I ask another question that feels like it is the thing I really want to know?” Use this feedback loop to fine-tune your exploration.

While refining your question asking skills, you may notice you have lots of questions about yourself. “Will I like this kind of job?” “Will I be able to handle this kind of stressful situation that comes up?” Unless the person you are asking your questions from is a close friend or family member you cannot hope they know you well enough to answer. But there is a strategy to asking questions that can help. If your primary question is about yourself, translate it in terms of your helper. Instead of “Will I be able to handle such and such stressful situation that people in this line of work face?” Ask, “I believe that working as a [insert your desired career or job or field] involves this specific situation. Do you find that stressful? If so, how do you deal with it? If not, do you ever have trouble dealing with other situations?” People generally like to talk about themselves and so will be more likely to give you a helpful answer in these kinds of situations.

Even if someone answers in a way that doesn’t feel particularly useful now the connection one makes is often worth more than the answer itself. You probably can’t expect to turn every request for help into a relationship that builds you community, but just asking people what they think about topics they find important is a surprisingly effective way to network. You can also ask them to suggest to you other people to talk with about the domain you are trying to break into.

Asking questions during a difficult time in your life requires some care. It’s important that you try not to encode your anxiety into your questions or overly bemoan your situation to those you are requesting help from. Think about it from their point of view. How would you respond to two emails asking basically the same thing where one is postured as a request from someone inches from destruction and the other in a more casual way. This is not to say your emotions are invalid or that you shouldn’t feel a heightened sense of importance to these requests. I offer this advice from a pragmatic point of view and do not suggest it is easy to not be very anxious about the future. I certainly was back then. In fact, there are many things I’m current anxious about right now! Thankfully, overall, my anxiety has decreased in part because I have improved at asking from help (I still need work).

Be kind to potential helpers

When asking for help from others, a reality that you need to prepare for is slight or moderate admonishment. Certain people have a compulsion to start their response to this kind of request like, “well you really should have started sooner”. They may even realize this isn’t quite helpful, and yet, they can’t help themselves. Sometimes even when we take responsibility for our mistakes in good faith, those who can help us will react with negativity or in a way we deem unhelpful. Let it be. If such a thing happens to you, take it as a sign that now is not the right time to get advice or assistance from that person. Certainly maintain politeness and thank them for their input but quickly put it out of your mind and focus on the other feedback and advice you are getting.

Also be understanding of those that you want help from. They are likely busy folks. Something that can happens to people who are generally perceived as nice is they end up with many requests since they are known as a person who helps out. This can sometimes mean they end up taking on too much work (or an amount of work they can’t realistically complete). And yet they really don’t like telling other people no, so they will say yes but they may not make progress on your request for a really long time. Be gentle with this kind of person, and in some cases just note to yourself that even though they agreed to do something for you, for whatever reason they cannot or will not have time. If that is the case you can start making plans to get what you need from another source. For me, I wouldn’t bring this to a direct confrontation unless it was a matter of life and death. If you really need that a reference letter and they haven’t gotten back to you and delayed twice, it might be better to find another option.

The kind of responses to a question depend on the format and style of the question asked. Read a bit about how to message someone to ask for help. It’s a real skill and needs to be nurtured. This is not a recommendation to spend days crafting each email, rather, consider doing two drafts at least and asking someone in your friend group or family for feedback. Ask them to critique the tone and emotional level setting before sending. If this is one of the first times you are communicating with this person, you want to set a good tone and make a good impression. Cast your net wide and don’t strive to only contact people who can be your perfect mentor. It’s okay if some do not respond at all and it’s okay if they don’t have perfect advice for you.

Do not also try to make yourself seem farther along than you are just because you are embarrassed by the late hour of your request. This one is really hard for me, because I feel a heavy blanket of shame when things are getting close to the end of their time and I have not yet completed what I need to. Again you must prepare for the possibility of someone on the other end of your communication being not understanding about the situation. Receiving such a response will likely be painful, however, making progress toward resolution always makes me feel a bit better regardless of how poor someone else takes the bad news.

Finally, don’t give yourself grand ultimatums in situations like this. It will only serve to give you anxiety and distract you from either making a concrete plan to get out of the predicament or to take action steps toward your goal. By ultimatum I mean, “If I don’t stay up all night filling out these applications then I have no hope.” Maybe an all-nighter will help but you are in a time crunch and cramming a bunch of stuff into one day is not sustainable over the course of a few months. Be sure to work at a relatively normal pace and track your progress.

Writing Prompts

For each of the prompts below consider writing for 15 minutes continuously to answer them. The next day, read and reflect on what you wrote. Ideas may stick out on your second reading as not worthwhile. Throw those out. Other ideas may need more refinement, consider writing about them instead. Other words you wrote may bring up questions. Call a friend and ask to talk about it.

• Who are folks who can help you discover your way?

• What would you like to ask an expert or high valued member of your perspective field?

• What do you want them to help you with?

I think often the first things that come to mind when the phrase the good life is considered are the kinds of things that would make perfect vacations. Staying a wonderful beach side resort if you are into that or an idyllic mountainside cabin that is cozy and filled with many friends and family. Whatever your version of the perfect vacation is, is that the good life? But what about your desire to achieve inner peace or write a book? Does those co-exist with your endless, perfect vacation? It’s interesting consider these images along side those actions in your past that have led to feelings of calm and accomplishment. For me at least, none of these memories are associated with my vacations. While it’s true I’ve had the great fortune to go on some awesome vacations, when I think about the possibility of defining my good life only in the context of vacation, it scares me a bit. Much of meaning in my life is derived from events that deeply challenged me. Parenting is incredibly challenging and yet I adore my children. Working through my PhD was labor intensive and made me question my intelligence and will power. Yet, I am thankful for having gone through these challenges. I am grateful for the opportunities they have provided me.

Beyond perpetual vacation

Would it really be an ideal life to be on perpetual vacation? Maybe! I would be lying if I said that not a single part of me yearns for an endless beach resort stay! But, I know that there are things that I would like to achieve. I also know that a life of pure leisure would not be good environment for my continued learning and growth into the person I desire to become. Not having to worry about basic needs is an important aspect to live a calm life. Having all of your desires fulfilled all of the time is detrimental to growth and the pursuit of clarity about life.

If a perpetual vacation is on the one extreme, what is on the other extreme? Endless hours spent working on meaningless tasks. The stack of tasks ever growing. Each one draining more energy than the last. An meaningless drudge for eternity with no indication that you’ve done anything to improve the world. This is what I conjure when thinking of the opposite. I wonder what you consider to be the worst case scenario of a life not spent well. Instead, surely there is some middle ground which can represent something we consider a good life and something that gives us meaning and something that we can hope to achieve.

Don’t count on a golden ticket

What about unlikely but technically feasible outcomes such as winning a lottery. I think we should categorically rule out things like having to luckily bump into a billion dollars to achieve the life we want. Is it possible for this to happen to you? Absolutely it is. But should this be counted on as a way for you to achieve the good life? Absolutely not! We’ll have to wait way too long and all the while our lives will be passing us by. I propose it is better instead to spend that time building a sense of your good life that you can achieve.

But what is the good life if it is not the idyllic endless vacation? Well, that’s what we will explore defining because it is unique to each person and is deeply informed by our experiences, our temperament, and what resources we can hope to muster.

Qualifying the good life in terms of what we hope we can achieve is not going to constraint possibilities to only the mundane options. Creativity is often sharpest when interesting sets of rules are adhered to. There are parallels in the art world where some arts either intentionally or unintentionally restrict what mediums or colors they use to achieve their art. This restriction gives them freedom in a way that a completely blank page does not. This concept has utility in our current discussion of the good life. If the only way that you will feel happy is if you become a billionaire or become a pop star more popular than Taylor Swift then you might be spending a lot of your energy being overly optimistic about what is achievable in a single lifetime.

People who end up like Jeff Bezos or Taylor Swift are beneficiaries of a long string of happenstance that, combined with some of their innate features, ended in one possible extreme. If we took an exact copy of Taylor Swift at a young age and set her on a slightly different life trajectory, it is likely that things would not have ended up exactly the same. You might be tempted to say, “well this is all good, but it seems rather depressing since you are essentially saying achievement is all about chance.” This is a fair point. In any given moment it’s hard to say if an event is lucky or not since we don’t know how it will affect our trajectory. What may seem beneficial now may be detrimental tomorrow. Understanding how random things affect us is more than determining if buying a particular lottery ticket will transform us into a billionaire. The string of events leading to our current place in time are only part of the story and final judgment about a lucky or unlucky life should be saved until later.

Consider for example, someone who wanted to be an astronaut as a child and took steps to achieve this dream in young adulthood. This person may have studied certain kinds of engineering. Maybe they joined the military or became a commercial pilot in the pursuit of trying to achieve their space dream. Suppose at the end of their 30s they have yet to visit space. Did they miss their lucky break? Are they experiencing misfortune? Do they consider themselves a failure? All of these things are not very straightforward to answer. If a simple answer must be given then it depends on specifics!

Balance ambition and flexibility

When we set out on a journey, it’s really helpful to set a goal. Different people are more or less ambitious and set more or less aspirational goals. Regardless of how lofty (or not) the goal, it’s important to check in periodically if the goal is still aligned with our future selves. Returning to our astronaut example, a natural question arises. Should we hold ourselves accountable to the goals of our child-selves? For me, a pilot who wanted to be an astronaut as a child is not a failure. Since their stated goal was to be an astronaut, it can literally be said that they failed. But, consider the life they built for themselves. Maybe they relish the ability to fly planes for a living. Maybe they enjoy the travel benefits this awards them and their loved ones. Perhaps they do bemoan the lack of space travel in the way they dreamed as a child. But this reveals one of the keys to finding the good life: Be able to pivot based on where you find yourself. This person tried hard to become an astronaut and pursued meaningful work. They ended up with exciting and meaningful prospects even if different than initially imagined.

Being flexible and following your passion will open many doors for you. Once you open a few doors, it is likely that many more will open for you. There are many ways to you widen the number of doors available to you. Pursuing higher education is definitely one of them. This is why I still think it is beneficial for people to pursue higher education despite the well noted challenges. Taking on large amounts of debt is indeed risky. University is not a series of preparation courses for an industry job. Finding a job later you obtain a degree is daunting. These challenges are well documented. However, Universities are a unique place. They give you access to a large number of possibility doors many of which lead to the doors of your good life later down the line. Even if you pursue a career in a field different than the one you study, all those experiences of deeply studying a subject have an enriching effect to how your process problems and formulate their solutions. This process the is basis for success in almost every discipline. Allow yourself to be flexible to pivot to those areas you find meaningful.

A quick aside, yes it’s absolutely possible for people to succeed wildly without any higher education. I know many such people in my personal life and several who have reached a level of achievement I don’t expect I will match. This further supports our claim that the journey to success is inherently personal!

Finding many good alternatives

Studying one subject deeply is well and good, but what do people who don’t know what to do? Or those who have studied deeply and now do not like their chosen subject? There are many people who look up one day in college and think, “gosh, why am I here? I’m not sure if I like the major I’ve chosen” And there are also folks in graduate school who midway through a PhD think “oh no! I’m not sure I really like this discipline and I feel like I’ve sunk too many resources to start over.” To be sure, each of these cases is very challenging and there are no easy solutions to these problems. That being said, any progress toward defining your own values or your own version of the good life will be tremendously helpful for getting yourself unstuck from such situations. It’s very tempting to become completely mired in your self pity when these thoughts come up. At least that was my experience. But I think the solution to these feelings is to make progress on building a vision of a future you want to live in and that you think is realistic for you to achieve. If the good life involves being flexible and putting yourself in a position where many options will be acceptable it is important to define a heading to the space of doors where the possibilities resonate with you.

In order to find a space where you can be confident that there are many good options, use your current experience and your unique circumstances. Is your 2nd cousin a touring guitarist who knows lots of musicians? If so how can you leverage that to expand your possibilities even if you yourself don’t want to be a musician. Did you learn a second language as a child? What opportunities does this afford you now? Did you specialize and compete as archer in junior high? What about this experience can help you now. The point is to be creative.

Death and reflection

Use this creativity as you explore what the good life means to you. I encourage you not to simply write down the perpetual vacation version of the good life, but to consider the following scenario. Have you ever attended a funeral where there were an incredible amount of people who have lovely things to say about the deceased person? Even the despite the immense sadness of having a loved one pass, I am deeply moved to see such intense humanity presented by those that assemble to remember the life of someone they felt had great value. Why else would all those people show up? Well maybe there are other reasons but most people show up to such an occasion as a sign that they feel the recently deceased person held great value and lived a life that is worth respecting and revering.

I like to use this as a macabre guide. How can I live a life such that if I would want to attend my own funeral and pay respects to someone who I feel lived a life well lived. While it’s certainly possible that this can happen if someone lives at a beach resort for the rest of their lives, but more often than not, I would say that you would not attend the funeral of someone who only lived a life of luxury and did nothing else.

Writing prompts

For each of the prompts below consider writing for 15 minutes continuously to answer them. The next day, read and reflect on what you wrote. Ideas may stick out on your second reading as not worthwhile. Throw those out. Other ideas may need more refinement, consider writing about them instead. Other words you wrote may bring up questions. Call a friend and ask to talk about it.

• What does the good life mean to you?

• Does achievement of specific goals invigorate or cause you anxiety?

• How is someone you respect and think has lived the good life? Why is their life good?

The ideas presented in this book will guide to understanding what you find valuable and then using this information will help you form a conception of your own good life which enriches the world in a way consistent with your value system. This good life you will articulate will also be one that is reasonable to achieve. The statement of the good life you desire for yourself will become the foundation upon which you can rest your decisions about what to do after your schooling years.

A defining feature of the end of your life spent in school is that you are compelled to make a sharp transition to something new. Usually, there is no option to continue the status quo. You might consider starting a different degree, however wasn’t the pursuit of your first degree intended to help you achieve your next step? But the pressure to make the best choice can often make it difficult to make a decision in the first place. Moreover, what are we supposed to do when we don’t even know what a possible next step looks like? When stuck in a difficult situation like this, self reflection can lead to clarity about your desires which in turn will help you make progress on your difficult choices you have to make. The process of finding yourself will help you start down a path to a life which you desire and the journey to your destination will be a reward unto itself. That’s the sales pitch of this book at least!

My Perspective

One day about two years from the end of my Ph.D. work, I looked up from reading a research paper and a thought struck like a flash of lightning. “I don’t know what I want to do after I graduate.” I couldn’t even find good way to articulate the struggle I was having when discussing with my peers. However, though these discussions, it became clear that many of them were also facing similar feelings of uncertainty. Since then I’ve talked with more graduate and undergraduate students who are feeling uncertainty about their next step. This is to be expected. It is hard! There are no guide books or clear road maps that are guaranteed to take us from the steps of the graduation stage to our first job or our first faculty position.

The main choices I considered for my next step were to leave academia and join industry or to continue toward the goal of a faculty position. As I delved into the details of what each life path would entail, it became clear that this choice involves balancing what I desire for myself and what each of these paths can offer to a life. First I observed the post doctorate works around me. They led lives that I wasn’t sure I wanted for myself. That is not to say I didn’t think what they were doing was interesting or that they appeared to live miserable lives. In fact, I thought most of what they were doing was quite valuable. When I asked them how they were feeling some of them said they deeply enjoyed their research and liked their current lifestyle. The insight I gained about myself was that I am not energized or enlivened by the tasks that filled the days of a post doc. Of course, I knew no life can be lived without some drudgery. Similarly, when I thought about life as an employee in a corporation, there were more than handful of things I was worried about weighing me down. To make sense of these things requires us to find resonance between our desires and our options.

After wrestling with the problem for a few years, I made the choice to pursue a life outside academia, but it is very important that you know that this book is not about trying to convince you to make the same decision as me. In fact, I hope that I will present a framework that will help you make a decision that is best for you.

What’s inside the chapters?

This book presents some thought experiments, suggested actions, and ideas which you can use to help you deepen your understanding about how you will feel given certain choices. But there is no teacher like experience, so it is also encouraged that you to try things out when good opportunities present themselves. I made the choice to leave academia and pursue a career in software and believe this is a better alignment between my desires than if I had pursued a career in academia. However, it is a core belief of mine that a good life is possible either in industry or academia for most people and I want to help you achieve your vision regardless if our decisions or opinions differ. It is my desire that after engaging with this book you will great a deeper understanding of yourself and that this deepened understanding will allow you more confidence in choosing your next step.

For a list of the available chapters see the section for this book.

Who is this book for?

My experience as a student throughout my 20s and as a person who has transitioned to working jobs in a corporate environment will inform how I see the world. I expect that much of what is discussed in these pages will be most relevant to those who are making choices between continuing their education after an undergraduate degree or those who are making a choice to pursue a faculty position or break into one of the industries required specialized thought work. I don’t claim to know all the possibilities but I think I claim to have a framework that will help you navigate these kinds of decisions.

While I am more confident about helping those facing issues I myself faced, I think the framework presented for decision making might be helpful in situations I haven’t encountered myself. Some of the chapters deal directly with specific comparisons of “Academia vs Industry.” However, I think many characteristics of the comparison of these two systems are likely helpful for other systems. Certainly, the feelings of being overwhelmed by a difficult decision are not unique to students trying to find their next step.

How to use this book

This book is structured into chapters each of which can be easily consumed during a single day. One way I envision this book being used is that you read one chapter a day. Some of the sections will have thought experiments or writing topics which you can engage with. I expect that you will get the most out of this book if you engage with these tasks, but there is still value in reading and not doing the tasks.

The chapters are presented in an order that I think makes sense but if you are mostly interested in one over another you should be able to read them in any order and obtain the benefit.

I do not claim whatsoever that by reading this book you’ll have your entire life figured out. Absolutely not! Only you can do the work to find a life path you are happy with. However, if you are like the way I was at the end of my degree, you may feel stuck. It might not be obvious at all how to make a choice that feels so gargantuan. This book will help you chip away at this seemingly large task and give you concrete objectives which will set you on a path toward solving your large problem of choosing what to do next.

Many popular viewpoints today veer toward cynicism. While caution and realism have their place, I believe faith in a positive outcome is necessary to make meaningful changes in our lives. If you start with the assumption that a fulfilling path is possible, you’ll be more motivated to find it. I encourage you to read these pages with an open mind, ready to envision how your life can go wonderfully right.

Good luck

Regardless if you read this book or not, I wish you luck in your way finding to the good life. I faced and still continue to face anxiety and uncertainty in many important parts of my life. However, I know that each time I have spent serious effort understanding new parts of myself, I have become more at peace. I hope this same for you.

Making the right choice can feel like an impossible task. Even little choices when framed as affecting your whole life can start the anxiety spiral spinning. Although I benefited from thinking through many of the thought exercises and ideas presented here, your lived experience will be the best guide to balancing the various parameters you have access to. The random happenstances that seem unrelated and by chance we sometimes come to notice how these affect us. I wish you luck and insight to notice how it all fits together for your puzzle.