Steph! It’s been two weeks since the series launch 🚀 and it seems like you’ve really tapped into something here ー that collective agony of how we balance work that feels safe versus pursuing a path to purpose.
Hah! Is that a jab at my lofty promise to write a post every week? 😅 Honestly, I was completely floored by the response. Thank you to everyone that reached out to tell me how much it resonated, and to share their experiences on their own journey. I can’t wait to continue the conversation!
So I want to dive into your “process for purpose” but we got some great questions last week about all the career jumping you’ve done. More specifically, how do you think about tradeoffs and opportunity cost every time you make a change?
Ooo okay this is a juicy place to start! Let me zoom out a bit ー the way I think about my entire process is grounded in these two core beliefs I have about where we are as a world.
1️⃣ The first is that we are accelerating faster 📈 than any other point in human history. Things that will happen in the next 50 years will outpace the last 150, and the future is becoming less and less predictable in pretty much any dimension we use to measure human growth (ie. consumption, intelligence, technology). It’s even more jarring to watch things evolve this quickly on a personal level. I entered college in 2004 and right away, I’m supposed to pick this major that’s going to set me up for life and serve as the foundation of all my future career possibilities. NO PRESSURE. Teenage me rolls the dice on psychology, and a couple of years later, smart phones explode 💥 on the scene. This changes the game (literally!); I go on to spend 5 years making mobile games, participating in an industry that wasn’t even an option a few short years ago. I realized:
Industries are now born or razed to the ground in a matter of years. New possibilities will keep popping up ー we are living in an abundance of opportunity.
This level of unprecedented change means that anyone’s guess on what’s going to happen is just as good as anyone else’s (this past year was proof of that!). No one really knows anything about anything.
So the world is becoming a hotbed of uncertainty, but this actually means more opportunities, not fewer? Hmm... pretty contrary to how we think of jobs as more limited and competitive. What’s your second belief?
2️⃣ The second is that we live forever. Not in a cyborg sense 🤖, but in the early 19th century, global life expectancy was just 36 years old. A hundred years ago in the US, it was 53. Today, the worldwide average is around 72, which is higher than any developed country in 1950. Both of my grandpas, my dear wai gong and ye ye, passed away recently at the ripe old ages of 96 and 105. I can’t stop marveling at what a miracle it was to be able to share so much of our lives together ー these two grew up in the freaking 1920’s! They barely had teeth! In our era of modern nutrition, preventative care and dental checkups, it seems highly likely that many of us will see sunrises well into our 80s, 90s, 120s. What this means to me is:
We’ll probably be working for more years than any other point in time, with careers that span close to a century 🤯. When the end is that far away and fuzzy, hurtling relentlessly towards some vague final goal can’t serve as my be-all end-all. A career experience that is sustainable, that works for me while I’m going through it, is pretty much a necessity.
We have soooo much potential time to fill, more than any generation has ever had to fill. Acknowledging that time and treating it like a treasured resource is going to be a huge advantage.
Oh wow 105 years old, that’s some incredible genes. And I see what you’re saying ー even if we don’t make it to quite that many years, what used to be gradual change over a shorter horizon is now shifting to more dynamic change over a longer horizon.
Yes exactly, well summarized! I find this insanely liberating. It’s like we’re living in the proverbial land o’ plenty; we have more time to take advantage of more opportunities. But where I see a lot of folks process this as stressful rather than exciting, is when they try to make sense of it using familiar strategies predicated on constancy. These more conventional strategies ー executing on a long-term plan, calibrating around a set of optimal qualifications, choosing a role primarily for what comes after, basing growth on approval ー make a lot of sense when careers unfold in predictable ways and you’re able to do some robust tradeoff analysis. And definitely when you’re dealing with truly hard constraints like student loans or visas. But when so much of what is possible is beyond our current imagination, it becomes really tricky to weigh opportunity costs in any kind of meaningful way.
Frankly, it drove me bonkers trying to figure out a master plan for this kind of world 🥴. And when everything is that chaotic, you’re kind of the only one you can turn to for some semblance of surety. I thought hard and decided on a couple of guiding principles to help me navigate a reality wildly in flux:
🔢 Think in terms of prioritizing over choosing. If we’re potentially living 100+ years, we can conceivably do all the things we might ever want to do in a lifetime. I frame every move I make as what I want to do next in life, rather than what I want to do with my life.
🕰️ Allow yourself long stretches of unstructured time. My career is a long game, and I treasure my rest and recovery periods like any athlete after a tough season. These are periods in which I live for me ー I think, dream, play, explore, eat, sleep, walk, read, build new habits, meet tons of people doing different things and spend time with loved ones. I practice getting satisfaction from free time (which is my ultimate goal anyways!).
🚫 Don’t let people who say no shape how you feel about an opportunity. If nobody really knows what’s going to happen, everybody sees the future unfolding in a slightly different way ー folks are just aligned to your view of the future or they’re not. It’s not personal! When I’m interested in something, I rely less on getting cleared by gatekeepers and more on my willingness to try another way forward.
🤹 Lean into being a dilettante. One of my favorite professors at school, Robert Sapolsky (a behavioral biologist who spent years living with baboons) believed that we’re nearing the point where we’re running out of discoveries that can be instrumented by experts at the top of their field. That really stuck with me. It means a lot of new innovations are going to be complex, collaborative, and uncovered at the intersection of seemingly unrelated fields. If you’re already traversing these intersections, it’s waaay easier to apply thinking from one field to another to spot or even create these opportunities. Cultivating numerous passions is a real path to delivering tremendous value and impact.
Even when I’m feeling my most small, practicing these principles helps bolster my fearlessness. Instead of thinking in terms of tradeoffs, I leave some space for what’s invisible to me — where open doors reveal other unexpected open doors for my passions to translate to real work. It makes me able to do what I love with the confidence that this is the best time to revel in your purpose like almost no other time in our existence as a species.
That is a bold statement! Let me digest this. There’s a lot to unlearn in terms of how we traditionally see careers as more linear, as this incremental accumulation of skills and expertise in a field that makes you good enough to eventually take on greater challenges.
I don’t think that’s necessarily wrong, it’s more that I don’t think we know ahead of time anymore what combination of skills and expertise will lead to taking on what types of challenges. So it seems pretty pointless for me to worry too much about getting the exact recipe right.
I acknowledge the boldness 😂, so while you’re digesting, let me briefly ground this thinking in how it played out in my own weird and winding journey.
The year is 2008! I graduate from college with said psych degree. I have no clue what I want to do, but I love watching animated movies. To learn how they’re made, I join DreamWorks as a production assistant on Madagascar 2 and am flabbergasted by the way art and technology come together to tell such incredible stories. The place is an Excel mecca, so I pick up VBA to write macros that help with artist staffing and budgeting.
Smart phones start blowing up! As a big time gamer, it is beyond exciting to have game development suddenly become accessible to anyone. My friend and I try making them on the side, which slowly grows into a full-time company. We make game after game before we have a hit. I realize that game design is mostly applied psychology and can really drive long-term engagement and behavioral change.
Hillary announces her run for presidency. It’s the only place I want to be! I had seen Obama’s app in 2012 (rallying supporters to talk to voters) and hypothesize it’d be even more effective with game mechanics that provide a fun foundation for building habits around new behavior. I get to build this exact app while learning how to be a product powerhouse ー our team collectively ships 55 products in less than 500 days.
Heartbroken after Hillary, I travel, write, work in food. Netflix starts an animation studio, and I’m one of the few people who’s worked in product as well as animation production and knows how to build software for convoluted non-technical industries. I turn my learnings from my decade-old Excel prototypes into a product strategy for the soon-to-be largest animation studio in the world.
Thinking about this boggles my mind; I could never have designed this journey for myself! At the same time, it felt almost... impossible to make a mistake. I know that sounds nuts, and it’s not like I never felt lost or there weren’t tons of people who said no to me on the way. But I gave myself the chance to ramble down a path of my choosing and trusted my unique vantage point to spot interesting forks in the road. I’ve enjoyed every minute of it ー even though none of it was planned, all of it was intentional.
In hindsight, it looks like you made all these right moves. But you actually had no idea where things would go when you jumped in. I think everything you’re saying are things that a lot of people feel on some level, but it’s fascinating to see how you’ve layered them to find resolve, to see potential in uncertainty, and to create a practice around how you handle all of it.
You hit it on the head! I’ll say this again and again but I truly believe we don’t find our purpose, we build it. It’s the relationship you invest in between yourself and the world, it’s your mode of operating, your point of view, your internal compass to navigate this batshit crazy environment. If the world continues to erode all of our well-known paths, then off-the-path will become the only path. And the more time we invest on that path, the greater the chance we’re able to identify opportunities only we can see, and solve problems in a way only we know how. Doesn’t that make trying this path, one paved with meaning, seem like the only sure bet??
I got totally carried away with excitement here and would really love to hear what you think! I hope this provides a little more context for my exercises ー next time I’ll dive into a real one, I promise! 🤞
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Oh Steph this is a timeless article! True in 2021 and still true now, when I can soon train an agent to be a mini-voice of Steph in my ear. 💚 (Or can just text you)! Thank you for writing this