This transcript has been edited for clarity and checked against the available source transcript and recording. Filler, false starts, and obvious transcription errors have been corrected without changing the speaker’s meaning.
Intro#
James: Here’s a question for you. If I gave you a bunch of jigsaw pieces and asked you to complete the puzzle, what’s the first thing you would do? Chances are, you’d grab the box and look at the image you’re trying to create. You’d connect the jigsaw pieces in such a way that they look like what’s on the box.
Now, here’s a thought: a jigsaw is much like your life, right? Except most of us are given these jigsaw pieces without knowing what the picture looks like. We haven’t developed a clear plan. So, in today’s episode of Graduate Theory, we’re going to talk about career planning, why it’s so important and some different approaches you can take.
I’m hoping this will change your life and career for the better.
Career Planning#
James: First, I want to look at the common traits I see in people who have previously come on the podcast. A lot of these high achievers have a high degree of initiative and drive, as well as passion for what they want to do.
But that comes with a clear aim, right? They have this level of initiative and drive, but they’re aiming at a clear target. They have a clear vision and a certain amount of clarity about exactly what they want to do. This allows them to take initiative in effective ways.
Reflecting on this, I realised that, at least for myself, I don’t think I have a really detailed plan for my life, the things I’m doing and how it all aligns. That led me to discover this idea of career and life planning.
Why Career Plan?#
James: Why do you actually need a plan? Why is it helpful? The first reason is that it’s going to make decision-making a lot easier. Imagine you’ve finished university, you’ve been working for a couple of years and you’re presented with the opportunity to do a master’s degree at a university.
You’re in two minds about whether to pursue the master’s degree or continue working in your career and doing your current job. Which one should you choose? It’s a tough decision, right? Perhaps both options are good. How are we going to decide?
The key is understanding where we want to go in the future and what we want our lifestyle to look like. We can then choose which option will get us closer to our desired lifestyle. Without that desired lifestyle in place, what happens in these situations?
This is just one example. Do you become a consultant or not? Do you join a startup, or do you stay in corporate? Any number of these questions can be answered much more easily if you have a desired end state in mind. If you know what you want your lifestyle to look like and that vision excites you, it’s much easier to choose between the options.
The second reason this is a good approach concerns comparison with others. One thing I think we face a lot as young people—and that I certainly face all the time—is trying not to compare ourselves to other people.
I try not to compare myself to people around my age who have done cooler stuff than me, and there are certainly plenty of them. There will always be people who have done more than you have. But one way to minimise this, or clear the clutter around comparing yourself to others, is to be clear about your vision for your own life. Then it doesn’t actually matter what other people do. If I’m pursuing the things I want to do for reasons I’ve selected, what other people are doing and achieving matters much less to me.
If someone else is achieving more than me, that’s fine, because I’m pursuing the things I want to do. That’s the end of it. There’s no real need to compare yourself to others. I think having a career plan in place will certainly help with this comparison trap.
The third reason is the idea of getting lost. This comes from a guy called Clayton Christensen, a business leader and thought leader who released a bunch of books. One of them is called How Will You Measure Your Life?
How will you actually decide what you want to do? The book is tangentially related to the topic we’re discussing today. Christensen described how everyone in his business class at Harvard graduated and went off to do amazing things. Ten years later, he looked around to see where people were.
Many had gone down the corporate route, but then gone too far and almost lost their way. They had gone so deep into their careers that some had become divorced or no longer had a good family environment. Their careers had come at the cost of many other things.
His point is that pursuing these things isn’t necessarily bad. But you can pursue them and lose track of where you are in the grand scheme of things. Perhaps having a good family and a good family life was something you really wanted, but you got so lost in your career that you lost track of how that part of your life was going.
One way to fix this problem, or at least reduce the risk of it occurring, is to have a clear plan for what you want your lifestyle to look like and stick to it closely. Once you have the plan, don’t deviate from it. That can help prevent situations where you end up somewhere you didn’t expect or want to be.
Career Planning Examples#
James: One thing I noticed is that, when we look at the school system and how we’re taught to think about what we want to do when we’re older, it’s often, “Do you want to be an engineer, a lawyer or a teacher?”
A bunch of career paths are laid out for you, and the idea is that you choose whichever seems best at the time. “I guess I enjoy math, so I’ll be an engineer,” or, “I guess I enjoy reading and writing, so perhaps I’ll do law.” Whatever it is, that’s usually the extent of it. There’s no real planning beyond that.
One key switch we can make is to think about the end state first, then answer those questions. We can ask, “What do I want my life to look like?” and then, “Which career path would best help me create that life?” This is a fundamental shift and something I think is quite beneficial.
I’ve found three notable places where this approach appears, though it certainly gets mentioned in many more. These are three I’ve come across recently that I found really interesting.
The first is The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. It’s a fantastic book, and I highly recommend reading it. Habit number two is called “Begin with the End in Mind.” The cornerstone of this habit is that, when starting a new project or undertaking, you should understand what you want to do or what the goal looks like, then reverse-engineer it and work out what you need to do and when. This can be applied to small-scale things or, in this case, large-scale things like your entire life or career. I’ve just read the book, and it contains some really good thoughts.
All things are created twice: once in the mind and once in reality. Things aren’t created in reality until they’ve first been thought of. Facebook, for example, was once a thought and then became a reality. The desk I’m using was once a thought; someone decided to make it, and now they’ve made it. The same applies to this laptop: someone decided to make an M1 Mac, and now it has come into existence.
To apply that idea to career planning, the life and career you want cannot be realised unless you first understand and think about exactly what you want. I think this is a crucial step, and that was a great analogy and a great way to put it.
The second place I found this was in Jordan Peterson’s Self-Authoring Program. If you’re not familiar with Jordan Peterson, he’s a really famous psychologist. He’s often in the media for controversial political things, but that’s beside the point today. Psychology is where he’s really good, and he certainly has a lot of good content around this. One of his stellar programs is called the Self-Authoring Program.
In this program, you create your personal heaven and your personal hell. Your personal heaven is an ideal state: what you really want your life to look like. It begins with the end in mind. You also create a personal hell: what you really don’t want your life to look like and what would be a horrible experience for you. These are unique to you and aren’t necessarily universal.
Imagine these as two poles, with you somewhere in the middle. We want to get you closer to heaven and further from hell. There are two opposing forces: the heaven state pulls you towards it, while the hell state pushes you away. It’s an interesting approach. It combines beginning with the end in mind with perhaps beginning with the reverse end in mind—a bad state.
Another similar thought comes from Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s second-in-command guy. He often says to think about how you wouldn’t do something and then do the opposite—the thing you do want to do. It’s often easier to think about what you don’t want than what you do want.
That’s the second approach, which I think is really cool. The third place I’ve seen this is in Cal Newport. Cal Newport is someone I really admire and respect. He’s an author and a professor, among other things. He calls this approach to career planning “lifestyle-centric career planning.” You begin with a certain lifestyle in mind—what you want your life to look like—and then plan your career from there. This makes things much easier for a number of reasons.
Those are three different approaches I’ve seen. This kind of clarity is also common among many guests I’ve had on the podcast. These three sources are all incredibly well respected, and they all say the same thing. There are many more I don’t have time to go through that also say it. Many successful people have this in common: they know exactly what they want and have a lot of clarity about what they want to do.
Critiques#
James: There are some critiques of creating a plan. Overall, I think it’s quite a good approach, but one way to look at it is left-to-right versus right-to-left planning. On the right-hand side, you have the end state, and on the left, you have the current state.
Right-to-left planning means starting with the end and reverse-engineering your way back to where you are now. Left-to-right planning means starting where you are now and then working towards the end state on the right. I think that allows for more serendipity in your career: you haven’t necessarily planned your next career move in great detail.
Still, with both right-to-left and left-to-right planning, there is a right-hand side—the plan. I think the plan is important whether you take a more serendipitous approach to your career or reverse-engineer things quite tightly. It’s hard to reverse-engineer things in great detail far in advance, which is one problem with the approach. Even so, I think you must always have a plan.
At least for myself, I’m seeing that having a plan in place will be incredibly useful. Having a desired lifestyle state that you want to reach will be extremely effective.
Creating the Plan#
James: How do you actually create your lifestyle plan? There are two different methods I’ve come across that I’ll be using. The first comes from this book, and that is to create a mission statement—something for you that acts like your own constitution.
We’ve all heard of the American Constitution, a document that’s very strictly followed. We want to do something like that for ourselves. How would a mission statement best represent you? What would yours look like? You could also think about how the organisation where you work might have a mission statement, slogan or broader mission. What is your mission? What are you setting out to achieve? What values do you have? What do you want people to say about you? These are great questions to answer.
It’s important to be creative with this. It doesn’t necessarily have to be written. You can make a song or a vision board—whatever works. The point is to create an ideal state in our minds and then try to stick to it.
The second method is one I’ve seen on LinkedIn and in a number of other approaches. Recently, previous podcast guest Adam Geha recommended answering a bunch of questions and writing out your answers in detail. The questions fall into four categories: do, be, have and give. What things do you do? What things do you have? Who are you—what do people know you for? Then, what do you give back to the community? Perhaps it’s financial. How are you involved, and what do you do there?
That is super cool. You can gain clarity by answering these questions. If you want a full list, I have one in the newsletter for this episode. You can find a list of good questions and techniques there to help you get started.
Conclusion#
James: I think this is a super-cool idea and something I’ll be getting started on. Things like this take a lot of time; you can’t just sit down and write it in 10 minutes. At least, I’ve found it hard while trying to write mine. It certainly gets difficult.
I hope this helps, because some of this is what I’m going through and actively looking at right now. Yesterday, at the time of recording, I was doing a lot of this work. I think it’s super interesting and fundamental.
At least for myself, I’d flirted with these kinds of ideas before. I’d thought, “That’s probably a good idea,” but hadn’t actually done it. From what I’ve seen, this is likely one of the best activities you can do to gain real clarity about exactly what you want your life to look like. It can really help you make career decisions and set you on a path you’re both excited about and interested in pursuing.
Outro#
James: Hopefully this episode helped everyone. If you enjoyed it, please go to the newsletter. The link is in the episode description, where you can read more and find some of those leading questions.
Thanks so much for listening to today’s episode. If you enjoyed it, please consider subscribing wherever you are. Without further ado, we’ll see you in next week’s episode. Thanks.