Author: William D

Four confused men wearing suits, looking up and down at the stairways in the sky.

Screw passion, how to find what to do

How should I spend my time on this earth? By breaking up a day’s time into work and play, on average we spend 1/3 of our time involved in work. In this article, I explore how we can go about discovering how to choose what to do for work.

Everyone in my field knows of the infamous Steve Jobs commencement speech where he authoritatively inspires the listener with his claim:

“The only way to do great work is to love what you do. […] You have to have alot of passion for what you are doing because it is so hard.”

Its inspiring so if you haven’t heard of the video I recommend you take a look before reading on:

After you’ve heard this a few times, you may naturally begin to wonder “What am I passionate about?”. The lucky ones among us grew up with hobbies and the really lucky ones had the fortune or wisdom to continue doing their passion from a young age. For them its much easier but for most people, “passion” is a vague thing.

Following this passion advice can be terrible. I’ve seen people quit their boring corporate jobs (without deep thinking) to try to turn their hobbies into some kind of career. Here’s some problems with doing this:

  • some of these hobbies are new so they are still novel and have not stood the test of time (less than 5 years). Once the freshness wears off and the innate difficulties of those hobbies arise, they find the struggle no different from sitting at their desk
  • probabilistically speaking, some of these hobbies can only at best lead to the equivalent income of a part time job due to the economics of those industries. A select few can rise to the top and seem to gain short-lived fame and fortune.
  • when a hobby becomes a job, its often that the fun gets sucked out of it. The escape of doing something without pressure and stress becomes a commitment that has to be carried out tediously.

Worst of all, there are misleading Youtube videos designed as clickbait to get your attention which tell you that with enough passion you can turn any hobby into a career. Notice here I use this word career as work that leads to full time income over a long period such that you have money to do normal “life things” like get a mortgage for a house, go on holidays and have kids. If you want to live a nomad lifestyle, quit reading now.

Moving the complete opposite direction to the fiery romantic desire thats associated with passion and we have Mark Manson’s “Most important question of your life”. I’ve put the snippet thats important here:

What you choose to do will be painful whether you are passionate or not so you have to choose something where you want to sustain the pain to achieve success. Why would anyone want pain? Like Jobs said, whatever you do will be difficult, so unless you want to be a serial quitter, its worthwhile accepting that pain and suffering is inevitable.

Now we have passion and pain but I don’t think this is enough. For me, I you must throw in what’s “important”. Whats important to you and whats important for the world. It took me quite some time to figure this out and it it turns out that someone else has has said it better:

[Musk on getting out of college, looking at what he thinks are the important industries, he concludes they are internet, space, finance, energy]

What is important tends to be easier to imagine than what you want to suffer for and more concrete than where your passion lies. Everyone has a different set of circumstances, different upbringing and different priorities. Whats important to me might not be whats important to you. With enough self examination, whats important is personal to each individual.

Here are some examples to explore this a bit more:

  • family orientated – your current and future family is the most important. You need to support the elders in your family or you want to give your future family the best upbringing. Examples can be migrant workers or traditional families.
  • lifestyle – how you spend your free time is the most important. You value your leisure time highly, maybe you want to use it to do non-paid hobbies. Examples can be Tim Ferris or lifestyle bloggers.
  • society – how society works is important so you want the communities you live in to be better for you and for the future. Examples can be Nelson Mandela or those fighting for peace and equality of rights.
  • humanity – the future of the human race is important, you want the future for generations to come to be much better than it is now. Examples can be Elon Musk or those many scientists working on cures for cancer.

What do you care about?

Cheat codes for your life

This post will make more sense if you have played the SIMS game. SIMS is a game where you control your character in a simulated life with different needs and wants that you decide on.

Do you remember the “rosebud” cheat code?

In the good old SIMS that I played, the “rosebud” cheat code let you:

With this cheat code, you can achieve many shortcuts in the game. It doesn’t “complete” the game for you or make you instantly have everything but it speeds up what you want to do in the game. If life were to be treated in as a multiplayer game, then where are the cheat codes?

This blog isn’t a place for me to advertise myself or my views, its an experiment for me to share some of what I’ve learnt that seems to work for me. You might fail with my advice here or disagree with my views and that’s simply because your game is not my game.

What inspired me to begin writing these “cheat codes” here? Years of talking to my close friend about how “games” we played influenced who we are but the final kicker was what the Shopify Founder Tobi Lütke said on the Farnam Street podcast:

In this blog, I use the phrase “cheat code” or “cheat codes” to like using “rosebud” in SIMS. This is different from cheating someone out of their side of a deal. Think of it this way, even though most SIMS players know of “rosebud” and have tried many things with the free money it gives, I am sure most of use spent most of our time playing the SIMS as it was without the cheats. We just used the cheat to see what would happen and to get a peek into the results. Described in this way, a cheat code is like a “life hack”.

Most importantly, games are fun, they let you explore the adventure and find out things about the place and the characters. This is the spirit that I hope to live my life in and if its a useful approach to you or just an interesting perspective then you might enjoy some of my first posts:

Enjoy

Reverse engineer your career

Before starting my career and finding my first full time job, I was lucky enough to stumble upon “The Startup of you” by Reid Hoffman. I only chose to Reid it because I liked the idea of LinkedIn plus Reid was part of the infamous Paypal mafia.

paypal mafia

It turns out the book describes how the many aspects in world of work has already changed and most people have not noticed it. One idea in the book is ABZ planning which is I would describe as:

“Plan A is what you’re doing right now. Its your current implementation of your competitive advantage. Within plan A you make minor adjustments as you learn; you iterate regularly.”

The book goes on to extra the attitude toward plan A, for example by prioritising learning, making reversible small bets or maintain an identity separate from specific employers. The “BZ” part is

Plan B is what you pivot to when you need to change goal or change route. Plan z is the fallback position which is a certain, reliable stable plan if all your career plans go to hell. Its the certainty of plan Z that lets you take on the uncertainty and risk in your plan A and plan B”

The “cheat” that I’m going to share was inspired by this ABZ plan but has actually nothing to do with it. My mind works in its own ways and despite eventually doing the ABZ plan, a few months after reading the book, I remembered the ABZ plan as some “A-Z plan”.

I thought to myself, how do I find Z if I am at A? How do I start with the end in mind? Simple – Reid has invented LinkedIn and there is a trove of data out there.

At the time, I wanted to reach the highest level in User Experience which meant leading the design of complex systems in banking.

The steps to this “cheat” are:

1 – Go to LinkedIn and search the highest job title that you want in the industry you want.

linkedin search

2 – Take a look at each of these people to see: each role they took before, at what kind of company and what they did at each role. (Tip: try to also pay attention to the time between roles and the total time it took for each person to progress.)

3 – Repeat this for different people at different companies within that industry. If its unclear about each role, look at the profiles for people who are currently one level before the highest role and so on.

By the end of step 3, you should have a general idea of the “hierarchy of roles” that you have to progress through to reach your final destination “point Z”. For user experience design, it went something like intern, junior, mid-weight, senior, head of, vp, director and C level.

You should some idea of what each role entails as well but how do you find out exactly what you must learn in each role from the start all the way to “point Z”?

4 – Go to LinkedIn jobs and search the highest job title in your industry again.

linkedin job description

5 – This time take a look at all of the job specifications/descriptions. Look through what tasks are in the role and what requirements are necessary to apply.

6 – Work backwards from the “top job description” all the way back to the lowest level while you analyse what skills are required to “level up” in each role.

Now you should have a clear idea of what each “level” in the “career path” is as well as what you have to do in each level to get to the next. By doing this research, you should be able to:

  • Set goals for how long it should take you to reach the role you want
  • Understand how long you should expect to take to progress (note down people who level up quicker and how they did it)
  • Know what skills you have to pick up in your first role

I think doing this kind of research is vital for the fast paced world that we live in today. Previously, a graduate can go to work in a factory or large organisation where they would likely work for a long time. The role itself is likely to have been around for a long time and the levels are already widely known e.g. in accounting you train, you qualify, you become a manager, a director and then make partner.

technology banner

In my case, “user experience design” was not a common job when I was in study (a small and limited amount of these jobs may have only existing in Silicon Valley). Even when I was studying Human Computer Interaction, practitioners in London only began to have “user experience” in their titles for no more than five years.

There was no “career guide” for user experience design which is why I had to find out what real people where doing and what real companies were trying to hire for. When new types jobs are being created every year and old jobs being “eaten” by software, doing this research will lead to interesting lessons about the nature of the workplace.

As an example, in “user experience design”, I found that most of the senior practitioners had started off doing website design on PCs whereas many more of the younger practitioners who had levelled up quickly were specialising in “mobile design”.

I hope this is useful to you and best wishes in your career.