To access the People Also Viewed box, enter one of your “dream employers” in LinkedIn’s main search box and click on their Company page. Scroll down, and to the right you’ll see a People Also Viewed section listing five related employers that other LinkedIn users looked up. These tend to be direct competitors of your dream employer, or at worst

The “dream employers” approach consists of first adding the employers you have always aspired to work for in your spreadsheet’s L column and then systematically looking up each employer’s peers and adding them in your L column as well.

Open a blank spreadsheet in Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets. In the top row, label your first four columns “List,” “Advocacy,” “Motivation,” and “Posting.” (You may also download a blank preformatted LAMP list from www.2hourjobsearch.com.) That’s really it. Note that in this chapter, we will only be filling in the first column, List (which I will

I’ll close this answer with one more concept from Evans and Burnett’s Designing Your Life: there is no single “best possible life.” There are many great lives to be lived—it’s just a matter of choosing which one(s) to pursue first. Therefore, take the pressure off yourself to get this one “right.” All answers are correct, and all will make you

Think back to what topics you’ve learned the most about over the past year. Your intrinsic desire for improvement is far more important than your existing knowledge in the advocacy-based search 2HJS involves, so pick a subject you’d like to immerse further in and start there, knowing you can always switch focus later if you find that subject isn’t

Assessing passions can be more difficult, however. If you don’t have time to read books on self-assessment, pick up the latest issue of the New York Times and mark the articles you’re most interested in reading. Don’t actually read them—simply flag them and keep looking. After you’ve found a few that have caught your eye, determine what those

For further reading on this topic, I strongly recommend StrengthsFinder 2.0 by Tom Rath. It will help you identify your top five strengths (among a possible thirty-four) and understand how they uniquely interact to make you “you” in an ownable rather than clichéd way.

(Note: If you are struggling to identify any careers of interest, my favorite method for attempting to fast-track that process is the Odyssey Plans exercise from Dave Evans and Bill Burnett’s excellent book, Designing Your Life.)

Of the two, your strengths are certainly easier to assess. What have been your proudest moments professionally up to this point? Why were they so, and what unique skill or blend of skills was required to pull it off? Here’s a more engaging way to consider this question: if your life depended on naming a skill at which you think you’re in the top 1