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Richard Scarry Prepared Us Poorly

I am a typical late-20s cubicle-working dude. I make enough money to support the life I have and save a little bit each month like all those financial-advice columns say. However, I’m wildly unsatisfied with my work. And truth be told, I’m not particularly great at it. I’m by no means a “bad employee.” I show up on time, get stuff done, actively avoid talking about people, etc. But I’m a mediocre, possibly even below-average, worker. Naturally, I know that I need to find a new job, but I’m having trouble systemically deciding “what I want to do.” I read a few career-change books: useless. I wandered through career-change Medium posts: even more useless. I even attended one of those evening seminars on finding the right career: useless and 70 bucks evaporated. Can you give me some actually useful ideas? — Arlington, Va.

Who among us has not been in the type of job so unsatisfying it prompts an existential crisis? I’ve had two of them in my first 13 years in the full-time work force, so rest assured you are not some implacable freak, Arlington. There are some people who have this magical power to let their job pay the bills without dictating their happiness, but I am not one of them. From the sound of it, neither are you.

So how does an ambitious person who sucks at boundaries between work and life figure out a career path? I’ve always been too cheap to drop $70 on a seminar in part because I’ve had the same allergic reaction to the blogs and books that you have. Those things, and so much of society at large, tend to treat jobs as if we live in a Richard Scarry book: Each town has a firefighter and a doctor and a construction worker and a teacher; pick your life from that list. But the oceans are rising, robots are coming for all of us and entire industries are dying out, so making decisions based on a 1970s preschooler’s understanding of the world seems ill-advised.

The best advice I ever received on how to figure out what to do with my life was this: Ignore job titles and company names — everything except the daily tasks you want to do and the skills you want to build. Make a list of the parts of your current and past jobs that you’ve liked the most, and the least. Think of the last project you heard about that made you wildly jealous. Think about what parts of your life do make you feel satisfied and why, and then think about what kinds of jobs use those same skills. Talk to friends and trusted colleagues and mentors about what you’re best at and listen to their assessments. Then talk to even more people about which combinations of skills line up with which types of jobs.