Cal Newport's Top Advice For Young People Starting Their Careers

00:00:00.000 | All right, segment three, the deep life.

00:00:02.200 | Let's go to the deep life academy.

00:00:06.440 | So we're going to do here is we're going to start with a question.

00:00:08.900 | And use this question to motivate a deeper look

00:00:12.540 | at a key idea in the deep life universe.

00:00:16.840 | All right. So our motivating question comes from a non.

00:00:19.400 | How do you go about figuring out the lifestyle you want to have?

00:00:23.960 | And the career you want to pursue, you talk about lifestyle

00:00:28.360 | centric career planning. And while I love your idea,

00:00:31.040 | I am still unable to put it into practice.

00:00:33.000 | I work in IT as a data engineer, and I'm trying to think about what next,

00:00:38.240 | which is where your advice seemed relevant.

00:00:41.240 | Where can I get inspiration from you to help figure out

00:00:44.160 | the type of lifestyle I would like to lead?

00:00:46.600 | All right. This is an opportunity

00:00:50.860 | to open up the deep life academy for the topic of lifestyle

00:00:55.440 | centric career planning.

00:00:57.880 | One of my favorite strategies, probably the piece of advice

00:01:01.140 | I give most often to young people trying to figure out their careers.

00:01:05.120 | So I have three, four lessons,

00:01:10.180 | four brief lessons, lesson number one.

00:01:13.380 | What is lifestyle centric career planning?

00:01:16.080 | So here's the idea.

00:01:18.220 | When making decisions about what career to follow

00:01:22.020 | or what advancement to pursue in your current career,

00:01:25.560 | you should work backwards from a concrete image of your ideal lifestyle

00:01:30.460 | that you hope to be living in the near to intermediate future.

00:01:33.200 | This vision, this concrete image should include details

00:01:36.560 | about the physical environment where you are, the social environment

00:01:41.160 | in which you find yourself, the stress pace, a general atmosphere of your life,

00:01:45.260 | your mental and spiritual life.

00:01:46.720 | What are the details there and what your time outside of work?

00:01:50.640 | Is occupied with, so you're building a concrete image

00:01:54.900 | that has all these things in it,

00:01:57.640 | concrete specific imagery, but does not have specifics

00:02:01.600 | about what exact career you're doing or what exact work you're doing.

00:02:04.740 | So it's all of the elements of your lifestyle.

00:02:06.780 | Save specifics about I work in UX design

00:02:11.240 | at a mid market tech company.

00:02:14.540 | So that's the exercise.

00:02:15.780 | You then use this image to help figure out

00:02:19.380 | what job you want or what career advancement to take,

00:02:21.480 | because now you have a simple question of the things available to me now.

00:02:25.780 | What will most effectively move me closer to achieving this lifestyle?

00:02:31.600 | So you have a clear target for your decisions.

00:02:34.980 | It gets you away from much more vague approaches to making career decisions,

00:02:39.780 | such as a what's my passion?

00:02:42.480 | What's my true calling possible to answer questions

00:02:47.200 | or just what seems most respectable or most stable or, you know, make

00:02:51.940 | my parents happiest?

00:02:54.840 | This is, I think, a much more

00:02:57.340 | effective means of pursuing these questions.

00:03:00.740 | And we'll get we'll get to why in a later lesson.

00:03:02.540 | All right, lesson number two,

00:03:05.340 | and this goes straight to a non particular query.

00:03:09.540 | How do you figure out the answers to those questions?

00:03:13.040 | How do you figure out what your ideal lifestyle is?

00:03:16.340 | What your ideal lifestyle?

00:03:19.180 | Should look like.

00:03:20.140 | Here, you have to trust your gut.

00:03:23.880 | So this is kind of interesting.

00:03:24.940 | I reject the idea that we have a gut instinct about jobs

00:03:30.600 | that is pretty effective, right, this idea that we have a passion.

00:03:34.140 | We're wired for this particular job and we'll know it when we see it

00:03:37.280 | because jobs are weird.

00:03:40.140 | That we don't have a great instinct for what they really mean for our lives.

00:03:43.280 | We don't have we don't have good prediction software.

00:03:46.300 | We don't have a good sense of what that job actually be like.

00:03:48.840 | I don't trust my gut too much about something as vague

00:03:52.600 | as a career in UX design versus a career in QA quality insurance.

00:03:57.600 | My mind doesn't know what that means.

00:03:59.200 | My gut's not going to give me interesting reactions about this,

00:04:01.440 | but I do trust my gut.

00:04:02.900 | When I'm thinking about specific concrete aspects of my lifestyle.

00:04:08.900 | When I imagine myself, you know, going for a long walk

00:04:15.200 | in the morning with my dog and the sun is filtering through and this is

00:04:19.340 | and that really resonates, I want to be doing that every day.

00:04:21.800 | Something about that resonates.

00:04:22.600 | I trust my gut about that because that's concrete, that specific.

00:04:25.300 | Specific concrete.

00:04:27.780 | So you need to see what resonates, where do you find examples

00:04:31.700 | to test for resonance documentaries, movies, magazine profiles, books,

00:04:36.780 | YouTube videos, people that you know and experience in your life,

00:04:39.740 | all these different forms of media expose yourself.

00:04:43.140 | Let me watch the thing about Laird Hamilton and his house in

00:04:45.920 | Malibu or his house in Hawaii

00:04:49.140 | and that we're kind of like outdoor exercise focused lifestyle.

00:04:51.520 | Let me watch something about Steve Jobs.

00:04:53.780 | And his hard charging style to try to change the world.

00:04:58.640 | Let me watch something about a math genius.

00:05:00.020 | Let me watch something about a guy who shapes surfboard.

00:05:01.920 | Expose yourself, expose yourself to all sorts of different stories,

00:05:04.520 | all sorts of different examples and aspects of life and see what resonates.

00:05:09.020 | Trust your trust, your intuition.

00:05:11.120 | All right, for lesson number three, let's do a case study.

00:05:13.160 | Let's see this in action.

00:05:14.360 | Using our original question asker as our starting point here.

00:05:21.260 | Let's go through two

00:05:24.260 | possible lifestyles that he might come up with.

00:05:27.960 | So we get I want to show you an example of what a good concrete lifestyle looks like

00:05:32.520 | and then and then discuss how that could impact decisions he makes about his career.

00:05:36.560 | So let's let's make this tangible with a case study.

00:05:39.020 | All right. So Anand is a data engineer, IT guy.

00:05:44.160 | Let's let's assume he's early in his career.

00:05:45.820 | I'm not sure if that's true, but just for the case of our case study.

00:05:47.960 | He has a technical degree working in some sort of data engineering job.

00:05:52.760 | All right. He goes through our exercises here, exposes himself to a lot of media,

00:05:57.620 | sees what resonates, come up with a concrete image of his lifestyle

00:06:00.320 | that has all details tangible except for the specifics of his job.

00:06:03.320 | Let's look at two possible visions he might come up with.

00:06:06.320 | Vision number one.

00:06:07.320 | Maybe that the image he creates that resonates is that he's in a house

00:06:12.920 | overlooking a sun drenched meadow.

00:06:17.920 | It's kind of land here

00:06:20.520 | that that evening friends come over.

00:06:24.320 | It's like the opening scene in that NBC show Parenthood where there's

00:06:28.760 | cafe lights over an old picnic table and some Tibetan prayer flags.

00:06:34.820 | You sort of outside, it's a little bohemian.

00:06:36.860 | Enjoying some wine from a local vineyard that someone brought,

00:06:40.920 | just just enjoying people's company.

00:06:43.220 | Maybe as part of this vision, Anand is imagining

00:06:47.020 | sort of in the late afternoon, sort of as his workday is over.

00:06:50.120 | And his workday, he imagines he's he's

00:06:52.120 | he's looking out through a picture window over the meadow,

00:06:57.020 | working generically at a computer screen, but with his tea and it's quiet.

00:07:00.920 | And by three, he's done.

00:07:02.720 | And he has a riding shed at the corner of the property, maybe by a garden

00:07:07.120 | with a deer fence up that he tends that he's working on a novel,

00:07:09.920 | speculative fiction novel, not stressed about money,

00:07:13.920 | but nothing in this image shows him being, you know, particularly rich.

00:07:18.820 | All right.

00:07:20.420 | That's an image with lots of concrete attributes

00:07:23.820 | about different aspects of his life.

00:07:25.320 | Let's say that's what resonates.

00:07:26.520 | What impact might that have on how he advances in his career?

00:07:31.320 | As a data engineer?

00:07:32.920 | Well, it might tell him I need autonomy,

00:07:37.820 | so I'm going to move towards highly valuable project based skills.

00:07:41.520 | So skills where you can do a project

00:07:45.320 | applying the skill and it's really valuable, it's really hard one skill.

00:07:48.720 | This would then give him going forward

00:07:51.420 | a lot of flexibility in where and how he looked.

00:07:55.020 | So, for example, he might follow the the the path of a computer

00:08:00.720 | the path of Lulu for my book,

00:08:04.120 | So Good They Can't Ignore You, where I discuss these things.

00:08:06.320 | Lulu did database design, so this is very similar.

00:08:09.320 | She got very good at doing a particular type of database design

00:08:12.820 | that was relevant for financial institutions,

00:08:15.020 | left her job and did this freelance.

00:08:18.020 | Projects took, you know, four or five months.

00:08:22.220 | So she constructed a life where she worked half the time

00:08:28.820 | and then the other half of the year would go do adventures, do something else.

00:08:32.720 | So maybe a non has this model in place.

00:08:36.220 | I got to build up some specific skill where I can take on a few projects a year.

00:08:39.120 | I can do them forever. I want to do.

00:08:42.020 | I have control over how many I do, but it's lucrative enough

00:08:44.620 | that if we live someplace that's not super expensive, can have the house

00:08:47.720 | in the meadow because, you know, we don't need to be in suburban D.C.

00:08:51.320 | So you're looking for that type of skills.

00:08:54.720 | You're looking for shifting to a position that's more location independent.

00:08:58.520 | Let me leave this firm where it's all in person to work for this remote firm.

00:09:01.820 | So now I have more arbitrage over where I live.

00:09:05.120 | In fact, if I let me find a location, if I live here, it's actually pretty cheap.

00:09:08.920 | And so I don't have to get as high up the income

00:09:13.620 | possibility salary with my skills before I make that move.

00:09:16.020 | All these things become relevant once you have the vision.

00:09:18.320 | Vision number two, so let's assume.

00:09:23.720 | Instead of that being the vision.

00:09:26.220 | When Ananda's lifestyle centric career planning, he comes up with the following

00:09:29.720 | image, he sees himself in a high rise apartment in the city

00:09:35.020 | and he's got a cool view of the buildings and the light at night.

00:09:38.720 | He's plugged into the cultural scene of the city.

00:09:41.220 | So he seemed like the latest movies and interesting music.

00:09:45.120 | He really plugged in, being exposed to the interesting culture.

00:09:49.220 | He has an exciting type of professional life where he's leading a team.

00:09:52.820 | There's a Steve Jobsian feel to it, that they're getting something new

00:09:55.920 | off of the ground.

00:09:57.720 | He's respected in this world of entrepreneurs.

00:10:00.020 | There's the sense of like if this goes right, like we might be wealthy.

00:10:03.920 | We're making a big play.

00:10:06.920 | Getting after it. Very exciting, very plugged in.

00:10:09.520 | Maybe a non came from a quieter background and felt bored

00:10:13.520 | and wanted the energy.

00:10:14.820 | All right. So if that's your vision, it would lead to different decisions

00:10:17.920 | about what to do with your early stage data engineering career.

00:10:20.920 | Now you might take on a more aggressive path

00:10:23.320 | where you're trying to get into team leadership positions,

00:10:25.820 | take on more responsibilities.

00:10:27.520 | You're not trying to develop a very bespoke skill

00:10:30.920 | that you can then trickle out and as many projects as you want.

00:10:34.120 | You instead want to prove yourself as someone who can get things done.

00:10:37.920 | Maybe he moves from his company to a company that's in a bigger city

00:10:41.820 | and faster growing where there's startup capital at play

00:10:45.020 | so he can meet investors.

00:10:47.520 | Meet higher end players, be around more skilled people,

00:10:50.820 | the people who are going to get the biggest investment

00:10:52.320 | and make the biggest moves to try to get new companies started.

00:10:56.320 | Completely different types of decisions will be made if that's the vision.

00:11:00.420 | Same person, different visions, both give you clear images of what to do.

00:11:05.620 | Final lesson here, why does lifestyle centric career planning works?

00:11:13.320 | Because ultimately the daily reality of your lifestyle

00:11:17.420 | is what affects your sense of well-being.

00:11:20.320 | The details of your life each day is what is directly acting on your body

00:11:25.420 | and your mind from which your affect is generated.

00:11:28.220 | So working backwards from what are the details that I am going to enjoy,

00:11:33.720 | they're going to be meaningful to me, they're going to be sustainable to me.

00:11:35.920 | Working backwards from that is the most consistent way you have

00:11:38.920 | of getting to a place where you actually feel good about your life.

00:11:43.120 | To instead focus on your career in isolation.

00:11:47.220 | Forget all that.

00:11:50.520 | What job is my passion?

00:11:51.920 | How can I be as successful as possible?

00:11:54.220 | And to just hope that after you make those decisions,

00:11:58.620 | you can get the rest of your life to sort of fit.

00:12:00.620 | Get the rest of your life to sort of fix.

00:12:02.720 | You're just rolling the dice.

00:12:05.020 | You are very likely to end up in a career path

00:12:10.020 | in which things that are really important to you to enjoy

00:12:13.220 | and find meaning in your life are difficult or unavailable.

00:12:16.120 | You might get lucky, but you probably won't.

00:12:20.020 | I was reading a book the other day.

00:12:21.920 | I won't mention the specific book, but the author had moved

00:12:27.120 | from the Pacific Northwest to suburban Washington, D.C.

00:12:30.720 | and like being outside, outdoor activity, exercise, fresh air, the woods.

00:12:36.220 | Like all of this was really important to her.

00:12:38.320 | And they moved to the suburban D.C.

00:12:41.420 | because this is a better job.

00:12:43.820 | And if I'm just going to put on my blinkers and say,

00:12:47.420 | what do I want to do? What's a good job?

00:12:49.420 | What's a good opportunity? I can't pass up a good opportunity.

00:12:51.220 | So they come to suburban D.C., which is not near any nature.

00:12:54.420 | She was miserable.

00:12:56.820 | Now, this book wasn't just about that, but I pulled that thread out of it.

00:12:59.720 | I was thinking, man, if you were a lifestyle

00:13:02.120 | such a career planning, you would say I could care less

00:13:04.920 | that there is a quote unquote good opportunity

00:13:08.320 | at a think tank in D.C.

00:13:10.820 | What I care about is do I have the opportunities where I am?

00:13:15.920 | Do I have the opportunities right now to make my life something?

00:13:17.920 | I really like this really meaningful.

00:13:19.120 | And for me, the person speaking in the voice of the person that book

00:13:22.220 | is probably staying in the Pacific Northwest and finding the right skill set

00:13:25.320 | that allows you to not be stressed about money and have this flexibility.

00:13:28.220 | I really think it's the way to go.

00:13:30.020 | Career serves your life because ultimately your daily experience

00:13:35.020 | of your life is what dictates how you feel.

00:13:37.620 | Life justice, your career planning is the natural consequence of that truism.

00:13:43.920 | [Music]

Cal Newport's Top Advice For Young People Starting Their Careers

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