5/21/2023 0 Comments How do you choose what work to do?Whether you're young and just starting your working life, or later in life and deciding if you should start a new line of work, it's important to take the decision very seriously and think about it in depth. Just picking the first line of work you think of and leaping into it can cause all sorts of long-lasting problems that can be solved with better preparation.
Live for yourself Do work you enjoy. I don't mean enjoy the money you get at the end of it or the sum total of all the pros and cons - I mean do you enjoy the actual work? If you do work you don't actually enjoy doing you'll find yourself in the archetypal mind-numbing life where every day you just want the clock to run out, you find excuses to avoid the work or pass it off or goof off to end the boredom, and then when you're free you have to spend your free time in recovery from the misery of the day. It's not uncommon for someone to end up in an unending cycle of being miserable at work and pursuing empty gratification to recover with their free time. It's a death march that will take you all the way to being old, worn out and having achieved nothing with your work. Remember that your work will typically take up nearly half of your waking hours for the healthiest years of your life. Do you want to commit so much of your life to something that makes you unhappy? Do work that you can do well. It's important not to take jobs where you lack the skill to do it well. This ties in with enjoying the work, as trying to do a job that is much too difficult for your skill level will result in not enjoying it very much unless you are able to take your own pace in the job (very rare) or spend a lot of your free time studying to catch up (I wont say this is fundamentally bad, but you need to account for the extra time spent in deciding if the income is good enough.) Think about the skills you currently have and enjoy and look for jobs that match them well, or else you will set yourself up for problems even if you can convince someone you're more skilled than you are. Do work that's compatible with your life goals. If you genuinely enjoy a job that requires you to work 80 hours a week, then you go ahead and do it. If you think it's worth the investment you can make doing the job into the achievement of your life. If you have other goals in life, however, it's important to think seriously about whether they're compatible with a line of work before committing to it. What do you want to create in the world? Do you want to invent things or write books or raise children or create any of the other wonderful things that are possible with your life? Can you do these things while doing the job? If not, does the job at least help you learn relevant skills to your goals? Doing good in the world We all live far better lives thanks to the role of society and humanity in the world than if we were isolated and unable to trade and work with other people. So it makes sense to want to make the world even better, and your work is a massive part of your life so it’s ideal if your work can do this. There are at least two good ways of looking at this. Doing work that makes a difference. This isn’t just working for charities. One problem with choosing to work with charities is that a lot of charity work is not very highly skilled so if you have aspirations to being highly skilled you might be better looking at the alternatives. There are many other roles that help make the world a better such as like researchers, energy or environmental engineering, human rights or environmental law, doctors, police officers, full-time mothers or farmers. Doing work that pays very well, and using the earnings to make a difference. Lawyers, investment bankers, CEOs and other potentially extremely well paid jobs can make the world a better place. But even when they don’t really make the world better in any way they can still earn a lot of money which they can put towards good causes. As long as the work doesn’t actively make the world worse then this can even do more good than directly doing work that makes a difference. It also has the benefit that you can target the donations to the most effective causes, giving you flexibility and allowing you to choose each time you donate which cause will do the most good for the amount of money you put into it. Note that I don’t advocate self-sacrifice. You shouldn’t throw all of your disposable income into charities or do work that makes a big difference which you don’t like. Your life is important too; growing and being happy is important. Even if you consider the good you do for the world more important than your happiness (which you shouldn’t but I wont try to convince you of that here) then reinvesting in yourself over time allows you to make the world better faster in the future by being able to produce more and have more impact. Optimal income It’s easy to overlook that sometimes a very well paid job comes with significant costs. For example it may require commuting, living in an expensive city or country, maintaining an expensive lifestyle, committing an excessive amount of your time or tolerating an unreasonable level of stress. A job with a six digit income can be much less attractive when you take all this into account. What matters more than your income is your effective buying power: how much income you have left after paying all the essential living costs to get that income, then adjusted by how much other things will cost in the city and/or country you need to live in for the work. Entrenched careers It's important to be wary of the kind of over-invested career which can be awkward to leave. Jobs that rely very much on parochial skills, maintaining relationships, or requiring approval from an authority can leave you in a position where if you leave the job you have very little comparable prospects and might have to start from the bottom again. This is especially problematic if you find out during the career that there’s something bad about it or find that you don’t enjoy it any more, then you can be stuck either being unhappy with your work or leaving and losing a lot of income potential. If you have dependencies such as family or financial commitments like property you may not be able to support these any more if you then choose a much lower income. I think academics, career politicians, and influencers all run this risk when they choose their work. If you are determined to take this risk it’s important to be self-aware about it and plan ahead for the eventuality that you may want to leave the career behind some day. Work which depends predominantly on transferable skills like programming, mathematics, communication skills, engineering or many others is less subject to this risk. A closing question There’s another question that accompanies this subject: Which cause is a good one? What is a good impact to have? That’s not a question I want to go into here, but it’s important that you seriously think about it and work out your own answer before committing a large part of your life to it. Categories:
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