Since college I’ve updated away from the importance of planning out my career, and toward the importance of finding a thing that deeply excites me.
In particular, I’ve noticed that when I have jobs that seem good on paper (e.g. from an EA perspective) but I’m not excited about the day-to-day work of them, I tend to underperform. On the other hand, when I find something that really nerdsnipes me, not only do I tend to use it to do my job better, but I also tend to find an even better job next (with bigger EA impact, even if that application was not initially obvious).
Now obviously, trying to look ahead and plan out a path is a great thing to do. I would expect it to be especially valuable for folks who already know what they want to do (“I love machine learning and I want to make sure the technology is used for good!”) and for folks whose chosen career paths are well worn (“I want to be a policy maker.”).
Unfortunately, I think that overemphasizing career planning can actually undermine the search for excitement. If I believe success comes to a large extent from careful long term planning, then I’m going to be less open to noticing what I like and what I don’t like; less willing to admit that I should abandon the path I’ve been following for 5 years.
That’s why I worry that reading this post in college may actually have done me in particular more harm than good—by helping me put even more moral pressure on myself to get it right, and quick! I suspect that there are a lot of factors here that vary from person to person—perhaps it suited me better to jump industries multiple times than it would have for those more naturally suited to a technical specialty.
Perhaps the version of the above advice I would have benefited from hearing in college is closer to, “Keep noticing what excites you and find ways to do more of that. Don’t hesitate to update or abandon your plans—your failures will not matter very much but your successes can take you places you hadn’t even imagined. Build your momentum before worrying too much about steering. Seek joy, discover your power.”
I think this is broadly fair, and perhaps a reframing of “think more actively about your interests” would be better than just “think more actively about your career” for many readers.
That said, I think for a lot of people, what they’re immediately excited about doesn’t line up well with what might be good for their career, especially if they’re trying to do good. I worry that “keep noticing what excites you and find ways to do more of that” would lead some people down career paths with little impact, whilst also making it hard to transition to high impact roles in the future. I also suspect that many people’s passions are more flexible than they might expect, and that without careful planning, they may narrow down their options unnecessarily.
Thanks for sharing your perspective. FWIW, it somewhat resonates with me, even though I said I think I’d have benefitted from hearing about the orthodox EA perspective on career planning much earlier.
I think the two things are consistent roughly because in my specific case I think most of the benefits would have come from “becoming more agenty” in a quite generic sense as well as correcting some misconceptions I used to have (e.g. roughly “only people who care about getting rich or success by conventional standards think about their ‘careers’, I just want to do maths”).
Strongly agree with your points, although I also don’t think they’re mutually exclusive to the content of this post.
I think some of the most value I got out of university (and high school, to be honest) was the ability to try out a bunch of things at once with relative ease. I have a lot of interests that change and come and go rather quickly, and in the university setting, it was strangely easy to get involved in whatever new thing that caught my attention, whether via a course, a club, meetings with a professor, an internship, a volunteer opportunity, etc. (Though I attended a small liberal arts college, which might have made this process easier.) I learned a lot about what I like, what I don’t like, what I’m good at and what I suck at a lot more quickly than I think I could outside of university, and I think a lot of this became valuable data for deciding on a career, in addition to opening doors to opportunities.
I think a common mistake I see in university students is thinking “I just want to focus on school” for their first three years, trying to secure an internship during the summer of their junior year, and then hoping that’s sufficient to get them a job. I don’t think this is a great idea. At the same time, I think narrowly focusing on identifying and pursuing a high-income, stable career path (or whatever one’s ideal career plan looks like) carries a lot of risk of burnout, poor performance, and misery if you’re unlucky enough to get it wrong. I think I see more students err in the former direction that the latter though, although I imagine EA students probably have a higher tendency to over-optimize their career path.
I guess I somewhat lucked out in that a) my courseload was light enough that it allowed me to get very involved outside of class, and b) a lot of the things I was excited about were also employable skills. I guess if this isn’t the case for someone, the “seek joy” and “plan your career” might come more into conflict, but that wasn’t my experience.
You don’t have to know what you’re going to do in 40 years, but it’s a very good idea to try different internships or summer jobs and make a plan for what kinds of jobs you’ll apply for after uni and how to be a competitive applicant.
Since college I’ve updated away from the importance of planning out my career, and toward the importance of finding a thing that deeply excites me.
In particular, I’ve noticed that when I have jobs that seem good on paper (e.g. from an EA perspective) but I’m not excited about the day-to-day work of them, I tend to underperform. On the other hand, when I find something that really nerdsnipes me, not only do I tend to use it to do my job better, but I also tend to find an even better job next (with bigger EA impact, even if that application was not initially obvious).
Now obviously, trying to look ahead and plan out a path is a great thing to do. I would expect it to be especially valuable for folks who already know what they want to do (“I love machine learning and I want to make sure the technology is used for good!”) and for folks whose chosen career paths are well worn (“I want to be a policy maker.”).
Unfortunately, I think that overemphasizing career planning can actually undermine the search for excitement. If I believe success comes to a large extent from careful long term planning, then I’m going to be less open to noticing what I like and what I don’t like; less willing to admit that I should abandon the path I’ve been following for 5 years.
That’s why I worry that reading this post in college may actually have done me in particular more harm than good—by helping me put even more moral pressure on myself to get it right, and quick! I suspect that there are a lot of factors here that vary from person to person—perhaps it suited me better to jump industries multiple times than it would have for those more naturally suited to a technical specialty.
Perhaps the version of the above advice I would have benefited from hearing in college is closer to, “Keep noticing what excites you and find ways to do more of that. Don’t hesitate to update or abandon your plans—your failures will not matter very much but your successes can take you places you hadn’t even imagined. Build your momentum before worrying too much about steering. Seek joy, discover your power.”
Thanks Timothy!
I think this is broadly fair, and perhaps a reframing of “think more actively about your interests” would be better than just “think more actively about your career” for many readers.
That said, I think for a lot of people, what they’re immediately excited about doesn’t line up well with what might be good for their career, especially if they’re trying to do good. I worry that “keep noticing what excites you and find ways to do more of that” would lead some people down career paths with little impact, whilst also making it hard to transition to high impact roles in the future. I also suspect that many people’s passions are more flexible than they might expect, and that without careful planning, they may narrow down their options unnecessarily.
Thanks for sharing your perspective. FWIW, it somewhat resonates with me, even though I said I think I’d have benefitted from hearing about the orthodox EA perspective on career planning much earlier.
I think the two things are consistent roughly because in my specific case I think most of the benefits would have come from “becoming more agenty” in a quite generic sense as well as correcting some misconceptions I used to have (e.g. roughly “only people who care about getting rich or success by conventional standards think about their ‘careers’, I just want to do maths”).
Strongly agree with your points, although I also don’t think they’re mutually exclusive to the content of this post.
I think some of the most value I got out of university (and high school, to be honest) was the ability to try out a bunch of things at once with relative ease. I have a lot of interests that change and come and go rather quickly, and in the university setting, it was strangely easy to get involved in whatever new thing that caught my attention, whether via a course, a club, meetings with a professor, an internship, a volunteer opportunity, etc. (Though I attended a small liberal arts college, which might have made this process easier.) I learned a lot about what I like, what I don’t like, what I’m good at and what I suck at a lot more quickly than I think I could outside of university, and I think a lot of this became valuable data for deciding on a career, in addition to opening doors to opportunities.
I think a common mistake I see in university students is thinking “I just want to focus on school” for their first three years, trying to secure an internship during the summer of their junior year, and then hoping that’s sufficient to get them a job. I don’t think this is a great idea. At the same time, I think narrowly focusing on identifying and pursuing a high-income, stable career path (or whatever one’s ideal career plan looks like) carries a lot of risk of burnout, poor performance, and misery if you’re unlucky enough to get it wrong. I think I see more students err in the former direction that the latter though, although I imagine EA students probably have a higher tendency to over-optimize their career path.
I guess I somewhat lucked out in that a) my courseload was light enough that it allowed me to get very involved outside of class, and b) a lot of the things I was excited about were also employable skills. I guess if this isn’t the case for someone, the “seek joy” and “plan your career” might come more into conflict, but that wasn’t my experience.
You don’t have to know what you’re going to do in 40 years, but it’s a very good idea to try different internships or summer jobs and make a plan for what kinds of jobs you’ll apply for after uni and how to be a competitive applicant.