All right, segment three, the deep life. Let's go to the deep life academy. So we're going to do here is we're going to start with a question. And use this question to motivate a deeper look at a key idea in the deep life universe. All right. So our motivating question comes from a non.

How do you go about figuring out the lifestyle you want to have? And the career you want to pursue, you talk about lifestyle centric career planning. And while I love your idea, I am still unable to put it into practice. I work in IT as a data engineer, and I'm trying to think about what next, which is where your advice seemed relevant.

Where can I get inspiration from you to help figure out the type of lifestyle I would like to lead? All right. This is an opportunity to open up the deep life academy for the topic of lifestyle centric career planning. One of my favorite strategies, probably the piece of advice I give most often to young people trying to figure out their careers.

So I have three, four lessons, four brief lessons, lesson number one. What is lifestyle centric career planning? So here's the idea. When making decisions about what career to follow or what advancement to pursue in your current career, you should work backwards from a concrete image of your ideal lifestyle that you hope to be living in the near to intermediate future.

This vision, this concrete image should include details about the physical environment where you are, the social environment in which you find yourself, the stress pace, a general atmosphere of your life, your mental and spiritual life. What are the details there and what your time outside of work? Is occupied with, so you're building a concrete image that has all these things in it, concrete specific imagery, but does not have specifics about what exact career you're doing or what exact work you're doing.

So it's all of the elements of your lifestyle. Save specifics about I work in UX design at a mid market tech company. So that's the exercise. You then use this image to help figure out what job you want or what career advancement to take, because now you have a simple question of the things available to me now.

What will most effectively move me closer to achieving this lifestyle? So you have a clear target for your decisions. It gets you away from much more vague approaches to making career decisions, such as a what's my passion? What's my true calling possible to answer questions or just what seems most respectable or most stable or, you know, make my parents happiest?

This is, I think, a much more effective means of pursuing these questions. And we'll get we'll get to why in a later lesson. All right, lesson number two, and this goes straight to a non particular query. How do you figure out the answers to those questions? How do you figure out what your ideal lifestyle is?

What your ideal lifestyle? Should look like. Here, you have to trust your gut. So this is kind of interesting. I reject the idea that we have a gut instinct about jobs that is pretty effective, right, this idea that we have a passion. We're wired for this particular job and we'll know it when we see it because jobs are weird.

That we don't have a great instinct for what they really mean for our lives. We don't have we don't have good prediction software. We don't have a good sense of what that job actually be like. I don't trust my gut too much about something as vague as a career in UX design versus a career in QA quality insurance.

My mind doesn't know what that means. My gut's not going to give me interesting reactions about this, but I do trust my gut. When I'm thinking about specific concrete aspects of my lifestyle. When I imagine myself, you know, going for a long walk in the morning with my dog and the sun is filtering through and this is and that really resonates, I want to be doing that every day.

Something about that resonates. I trust my gut about that because that's concrete, that specific. Specific concrete. So you need to see what resonates, where do you find examples to test for resonance documentaries, movies, magazine profiles, books, YouTube videos, people that you know and experience in your life, all these different forms of media expose yourself.

Let me watch the thing about Laird Hamilton and his house in Malibu or his house in Hawaii and that we're kind of like outdoor exercise focused lifestyle. Let me watch something about Steve Jobs. And his hard charging style to try to change the world. Let me watch something about a math genius.

Let me watch something about a guy who shapes surfboard. Expose yourself, expose yourself to all sorts of different stories, all sorts of different examples and aspects of life and see what resonates. Trust your trust, your intuition. All right, for lesson number three, let's do a case study. Let's see this in action.

Using our original question asker as our starting point here. Let's go through two possible lifestyles that he might come up with. So we get I want to show you an example of what a good concrete lifestyle looks like and then and then discuss how that could impact decisions he makes about his career.

So let's let's make this tangible with a case study. All right. So Anand is a data engineer, IT guy. Let's let's assume he's early in his career. I'm not sure if that's true, but just for the case of our case study. He has a technical degree working in some sort of data engineering job.

All right. He goes through our exercises here, exposes himself to a lot of media, sees what resonates, come up with a concrete image of his lifestyle that has all details tangible except for the specifics of his job. Let's look at two possible visions he might come up with. Vision number one.

Maybe that the image he creates that resonates is that he's in a house overlooking a sun drenched meadow. It's kind of land here that that evening friends come over. It's like the opening scene in that NBC show Parenthood where there's cafe lights over an old picnic table and some Tibetan prayer flags.

You sort of outside, it's a little bohemian. Enjoying some wine from a local vineyard that someone brought, just just enjoying people's company. Maybe as part of this vision, Anand is imagining sort of in the late afternoon, sort of as his workday is over. And his workday, he imagines he's he's he's looking out through a picture window over the meadow, working generically at a computer screen, but with his tea and it's quiet.

And by three, he's done. And he has a riding shed at the corner of the property, maybe by a garden with a deer fence up that he tends that he's working on a novel, speculative fiction novel, not stressed about money, but nothing in this image shows him being, you know, particularly rich.

All right. That's an image with lots of concrete attributes about different aspects of his life. Let's say that's what resonates. What impact might that have on how he advances in his career? As a data engineer? Well, it might tell him I need autonomy, so I'm going to move towards highly valuable project based skills.

So skills where you can do a project applying the skill and it's really valuable, it's really hard one skill. This would then give him going forward a lot of flexibility in where and how he looked. So, for example, he might follow the the the path of a computer the path of Lulu for my book, So Good They Can't Ignore You, where I discuss these things.

Lulu did database design, so this is very similar. She got very good at doing a particular type of database design that was relevant for financial institutions, left her job and did this freelance. Projects took, you know, four or five months. So she constructed a life where she worked half the time and then the other half of the year would go do adventures, do something else.

So maybe a non has this model in place. I got to build up some specific skill where I can take on a few projects a year. I can do them forever. I want to do. I have control over how many I do, but it's lucrative enough that if we live someplace that's not super expensive, can have the house in the meadow because, you know, we don't need to be in suburban D.C.

So you're looking for that type of skills. You're looking for shifting to a position that's more location independent. Let me leave this firm where it's all in person to work for this remote firm. So now I have more arbitrage over where I live. In fact, if I let me find a location, if I live here, it's actually pretty cheap.

And so I don't have to get as high up the income possibility salary with my skills before I make that move. All these things become relevant once you have the vision. Vision number two, so let's assume. Instead of that being the vision. When Ananda's lifestyle centric career planning, he comes up with the following image, he sees himself in a high rise apartment in the city and he's got a cool view of the buildings and the light at night.

He's plugged into the cultural scene of the city. So he seemed like the latest movies and interesting music. He really plugged in, being exposed to the interesting culture. He has an exciting type of professional life where he's leading a team. There's a Steve Jobsian feel to it, that they're getting something new off of the ground.

He's respected in this world of entrepreneurs. There's the sense of like if this goes right, like we might be wealthy. We're making a big play. Getting after it. Very exciting, very plugged in. Maybe a non came from a quieter background and felt bored and wanted the energy. All right.

So if that's your vision, it would lead to different decisions about what to do with your early stage data engineering career. Now you might take on a more aggressive path where you're trying to get into team leadership positions, take on more responsibilities. You're not trying to develop a very bespoke skill that you can then trickle out and as many projects as you want.

You instead want to prove yourself as someone who can get things done. Maybe he moves from his company to a company that's in a bigger city and faster growing where there's startup capital at play so he can meet investors. Meet higher end players, be around more skilled people, the people who are going to get the biggest investment and make the biggest moves to try to get new companies started.

Completely different types of decisions will be made if that's the vision. Same person, different visions, both give you clear images of what to do. Final lesson here, why does lifestyle centric career planning works? Because ultimately the daily reality of your lifestyle is what affects your sense of well-being. The details of your life each day is what is directly acting on your body and your mind from which your affect is generated.

So working backwards from what are the details that I am going to enjoy, they're going to be meaningful to me, they're going to be sustainable to me. Working backwards from that is the most consistent way you have of getting to a place where you actually feel good about your life.

To instead focus on your career in isolation. Forget all that. What job is my passion? How can I be as successful as possible? And to just hope that after you make those decisions, you can get the rest of your life to sort of fit. Get the rest of your life to sort of fix.

You're just rolling the dice. You are very likely to end up in a career path in which things that are really important to you to enjoy and find meaning in your life are difficult or unavailable. You might get lucky, but you probably won't. I was reading a book the other day.

I won't mention the specific book, but the author had moved from the Pacific Northwest to suburban Washington, D.C. and like being outside, outdoor activity, exercise, fresh air, the woods. Like all of this was really important to her. And they moved to the suburban D.C. because this is a better job.

And if I'm just going to put on my blinkers and say, what do I want to do? What's a good job? What's a good opportunity? I can't pass up a good opportunity. So they come to suburban D.C., which is not near any nature. She was miserable. Now, this book wasn't just about that, but I pulled that thread out of it.

I was thinking, man, if you were a lifestyle such a career planning, you would say I could care less that there is a quote unquote good opportunity at a think tank in D.C. What I care about is do I have the opportunities where I am? Do I have the opportunities right now to make my life something?

I really like this really meaningful. And for me, the person speaking in the voice of the person that book is probably staying in the Pacific Northwest and finding the right skill set that allows you to not be stressed about money and have this flexibility. I really think it's the way to go.

Career serves your life because ultimately your daily experience of your life is what dictates how you feel. Life justice, your career planning is the natural consequence of that truism.