Your Career Is Just One-Eighth of Your Life

We should be chefs when it comes to career-path-carving (a.k.a. reason from first principles). This is because of the following: (1) it takes up a significant chunk of our lives, (2) it plays a big role in determining the quality of our lives, (3) it serves as our primary mode of impact-making, and (4) it also serves as our primary identity.

A chef ... See more

Thinking about our career, we might think in abstractions like “a job.” But really a career is made up of a bunch of different things like a salary, an identity, relationships, status, a sense of meaning, and so on. It is often easier to find a fit if you unbundle these things, and think about the parts that matter to you individually. Do you actua... See more

“One is emphasizing that you have 80,000 working hours in the course of your life. It’s incredibly important to work out how best to spend them, and what you’re doing at the moment—20-year-old Will—is just kind of drifting and thinking. [You’re] not spending very much time thinking about this kind of macro optimization. You might be thinking about

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Anything meaningful takes five years to do, whether that’s getting a company off the ground or mastering a skill.If we start working at 20, that’s 60 productive years — or 12 five-year blocks to do new things, then move on.Instead of living one life or career, why not live a dozen instead?This ebb and flow of interest and desire feels natural to me... See more