A year ago, I left YC and felt a bit lost about what to do next.[1] A lot of people were pretty sure they knew what I should do. But...I didn't and most of their suggestions didn’t excite me.
As I thought through my possible paths, I realized that I didn't have a useful framework for making a decision. My gut wasn't helpful since too many things seemed interesting. I started asking friends for advice, and Henrik Werdelin gave me the structure I needed to figure out what I should try next.
As I worked through his advice and its implications, something odd happened - a whole lot of my friends started hitting the same confusing decision point through which I’d just gone. Maybe we're all going through natural career evolutions, maybe these are early onset midlife crises, and maybe a few years of inescapable existential dread about a never ending pandemic is just screwing up all our preconceived notions about how our lives should/need to work.
Whatever the case, I keep having the same conversation, so writing it out seems useful.[2]
The 1st, and most important thing to keep in mind is that no career decision is perfect, no decision without risk. Oh, and no one actually cares what you do. This is especially hard for high achievers to internalize, harder still for people who have succeeded publicly. Maybe this is hardest of all for people who feel as if nothing they've done has matched their self perception and internal expectations.
The next thing to do is to start making lists. In particular, three lists:
The 1st list is an amalgam of all the qualities you want in your next role and what you get from having that role. This is expansive by design. For instance:
Work with people who are actually funny
Easy commute
Do not work weekends
Earn at least x
Coworkers are the same in person as on social media
Build on personal expertise
Creates interesting future options
Other stuff
It is ok to have items on here that are intensely personal and maybe unexpected. Perhaps you want less risk or ambition than you've shown in the past. Maybe you know that you’ll never be happy with a boss. Write it all out.
List two is all the jobs that you think sound interesting. Try to go way beyond your existing set of experiences to things you always thought were interesting but never seriously explored. You're going to throw most of this out, but that's ok. You could write:
Get a PhD is American History
Run for office
Join a government agency
Start a software company
Be a baker
Hedge fund - work at or start
Start a nonprofit
Obviously this list will be informed by what you know and what you want. Some of it will be impractical. That's ok.
The final list is made up of people you know and with whom you'd actually work. Sometimes this list is long and sometimes it is short. There's no right answer here.
Once you have these lists, you start cross referencing them to see what mix of qualities, roles and people seem like the best trade.
There's no science here. You could decide that salary is the most important criteria of all and use that as the single lens. Usually, the balance is more nuanced. What helped me most was forcing myself to list all the options, interests, and criteria. I'd never done that and it required me to think more deeply about what I did and did not want.
This process took me some time, and I ended up choosing a set of what I enjoyed in a way that capitalized some unfair advantages I'd built in my career. I had come to an answer, but I was still too scared to try it. At that point, another friend, Omri Dahan, gave me the final piece I needed. He pointed out that I was still trying to optimize for long term perfection, and suggested that I should, instead, take a risk for six months. I hadn’t internalized the idea that very few career decisions are permanent. I thought I was choosing the job I’d have for the rest of my life, but I wasn’t. I was choosing the next thing to learn about and try. I was fortunate to be able to run that experiment. Eight months later, it's become clear to me that I made the right choice from the perspective of how much I've been able to learn and build. Perhaps more important to me, the problem set keeps getting more complex and interesting. Still, though, I know this is just another experiment that I’ll run it until it no longer makes sense.
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[1] I'll note that "what to do" and "job" here aren't necessarily the right terms. I'm using them as stand ins for the the thing you do that isn't family/personal life. Some people will go through this exercise and decide that there's nothing for them outside of personal/family life. I'm happy for them, but my wiring needs to have a balance of family and work.
[2] By writing from personal experience, I know that this process won't work for everyone and every situation. But if you find it useful, great!