Skip to content

How to Find a Career You Genuinely Love

2023-01-12 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali, Grace Lordan · recording, 12:40 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Work and career · mode: List of tips or lessons · tags: Lesson from a book, Evidence-based framing, His medical past

Drawing on his Deep Dive conversation with behavioural scientist Grace Lordan and her book Think Big, Ali gives seven tips for moving towards a career you enjoy: tasks over titles, visualise your Me+, audit your time, invest 13 minutes a day in skills, do not default to going back to university, embrace U-turns, and use a grid-search mindset.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Career anxiety, and the conversation with Grace Lordan behind the seven tips

  • ★★ Ali says a career can be a source of stress: not knowing what you want or whether you will enjoy it is profoundly uncertain, and that feeds career anxiety. — 00:00:00

00:00:40 — Tip 1: task over title; pixel theory

  • ★★★ Grace Lordan says people get attached to a job label or a lifestyle; her Think Big approach asks what tasks a job such as doctor or trader involves day to day and whether you would enjoy them. — 00:00:58 · also in: 7 Life Lessons School Didn’t Teach You
  • ★★ Ali used to think titles like neurosurgeon or plastic surgeon would be cool, until research into careers made him ask what a neurosurgeon's day-to-day job actually involves. — 00:01:27
  • ★★ Ali cites Tim Urban's pixel theory: life is a picture, but we live in an individual pixel of it, so much of our happiness is governed by the day-to-day. — 00:01:27
  • ★★★ To find a career you love, Ali suggests thinking about the day-to-day nature of its tasks rather than the broad, abstract job title. — 00:01:56

00:02:19 — Tip 2: visualise your Me+

  • ★★★ One of Ali's favourite ideas from Think Big is to visualise your Me+, the version of you that you aspire to be, by answering the book's questions about its goal, job title, industry, company and responsibilities. — 00:02:26
  • ★★ Among the Me+ tasks Ali highlighted for himself are disrupting how people think, advising and coaching others, solving problems, teaching, performing for the public, and creating and selling art. — 00:02:55
  • ★★ After defining the big picture of your Me+, Ali says, drill down into the specific tasks you personally enjoy, then take small steps towards that career. — 00:03:24
  • ★★ Grace Lordan says many jobs look exciting because TV glamorises them, law for one, whose day-to-day of six in the morning to eight in the evening people do not know about before they go in. — 00:03:24

00:04:12 — Tip 3: audit your time

  • ★★ Grace Lordan advises auditing your time: during the week, write down what you do and whether you enjoyed it, either with a sense of purpose that it leads somewhere better in five years or with fun in the moment. — 00:04:22
  • ★★ To audit his time, Ali screenshots his calendar and marks each item double plus if it takes him towards his Me+, plus if somewhat, plus-minus if not really, and minus minus if it takes him away. — 00:04:22
  • ★ Grace Lordan (quoted): In Think Big, Grace Lordan calls the minus-minus items in a time audit the time sinkers you actively want to avoid. — 00:04:48
  • ★★ Having built a career he enjoys, Ali says he has basically no minus-minus items on his calendar; at university and as a doctor many were, and he slowly eliminated the things that drained his energy. — 00:04:48

00:05:24 — Tip 4: invest 13 minutes a day; career capital

  • ★★★ Grace Lordan: Treating career steps like compounding investments, Grace Lordan asks for a commitment of 90 minutes a week, 13 minutes a day, on skills for a career you would enjoy, which she says is very possible for most people however pressured. — 00:05:54
  • ★★ If learning to code is part of building towards a career you would enjoy, Ali says you can probably find 13 minutes a day for it; you will not become a pro that way, but the skill compounds over time. — 00:05:54
  • ★★ Cal Newport (quoted): Cal Newport's career capital theory, as Ali sums it up: a career you enjoy does not fall into your lap; you earn it by building career capital, rare and valuable skills. — 00:06:23 · Cal Newport
  • ★ Ali says he recently interviewed Cal Newport. — 00:06:23 · Cal Newport
  • ★★ Ali says that if you genuinely want a career you enjoy, you have to have the skills for the job, so investing 13 minutes a day in developing them is winning. — 00:06:52
  • ★★★ Grace Lordan: For people who do not know what they want to do, Grace Lordan would avoid committing to a four-year degree or an expensive master's and would use the cheap or free resources out there instead. — 00:06:52

00:07:03 — Tip 5: you probably don't need to go back to university

  • ★★★ Ali says university is not completely worthless: he massively benefited from his degree and generally recommends going to university, at least as a backup option. — 00:07:22
  • ★★ Ali says that, at least among people he knows who recruit, an MBA seems to count for less than real entrepreneurial experience. (hedged) — 00:07:22
  • ★★ Especially further into a career, Ali advises against defaulting to a traditional qualification in a field, because you can learn almost anything on the internet and from books and libraries. — 00:07:51

00:08:03 — Tip 6: embrace U-turns; the end of history illusion

  • ★★ Ali decided at 16 that he wanted to be a doctor; ten years later he was not sure medicine was for him. — 00:08:20
  • ★★★ Dan Gilbert (quoted): Psychologist Dan Gilbert reports that change slows with age but far less than we think: at every age from 18 to 68 in his data, people vastly underestimated how much they would change over the next 10 years, the end of history illusion. — 00:08:49
  • ★★★ One of Ali's key takeaways from Grace Lordan: we are weirdly averse to U-turns, but when it comes to careers, U-turns are probably a good thing. (hedged) — 00:09:18
  • ★★ Grace Lordan says a problem in society is believing good leaders never change their minds, which hurt many countries during COVID; future leaders need to be able to say they don't know, got it wrong or changed their mind. — 00:09:39 · COVID-19
  • ★★★ With the grid search mindset from Think Big, Ali says, even without a clear vision of the career you would enjoy you can work out which activities you enjoy and check whether your actions move you closer to that dream career. — 00:10:17

00:10:19 — Tip 7: the grid search mindset; connecting the dots looking back

  • ★★ Ali's teaching career began around age 13 to 15 tutoring at Kumon, a maths study centre, then combined teaching with medicine in his company SixMed. — 00:10:46 · 6med
  • ★★ Ali's teaching has now moved into YouTube, where he does a little teaching, creative work and entrepreneurship, with not much medicine these days. — 00:10:46
  • ★★ Citing what he thinks is a Steve Jobs quote, Ali says it is easy to connect the dots of a career looking back but really hard looking forward. — 00:11:15
  • ★★ If you do not yet enjoy your work, Ali says not to worry: keep thinking big, defining that future and taking small steps towards a career you enjoy, and at some point you will get there. — 00:11:15
  • ★★ Grace Lordan (quoted): Grace Lordan's point, as Ali puts it: career U-turns are not taken randomly but come from small steps in a direction, gathering data, seeing how you feel about it and changing course. — 00:11:45

Threads in this video

Mentioned

Central: Grace Lordan · Me+ · Think Big

Also: People: Cal Newport · Dan Gilbert · Steve Jobs · Tim Urban

Works: Deep Work (book) · So Good They Can't Ignore You

Organizations: 6med · Kumon

Concepts: career capital · COVID-19 · end of history illusion · grid search mindset · pixel theory

Also centred on Grace Lordan: 7 Life Lessons School Didn’t Teach You

Also centred on Think Big: 4 Books You Should Read in 2023

← Previous: Which business would Alex Hormozi start today? #shorts · Next → AI wrote this Short 🤖 #shorts