All right. What's our next question here? So we have a follow-up question from Olivia as well, and she took advantage of the new question survey because we get to answer two questions from her back to back. Yes. If you're early in filling in that survey, you're much more likely to get your question answered than a few months from now.

So yeah, good advertisement for filling out the question survey. So in her book, and she says, "In your book, So Good They Can't Ignore You, you give the following as a reason for leaving a job. It presents few opportunities to distinguish yourself by developing relevant skills that are rare and valuable." She worries that in her job as a product designer, she's repeating the same work instead of getting better.

She studied literature in college, and as we talked about, she did a part-time master's and well, she's doing a part-time master's in economics right now. These feel much more challenging, like something that you can truly develop expertise in. At the same time, she gets paid a lot as a product designer in tech, so maybe the skill is valuable.

How can she decide if the first disqualifier applies to her career? So just to put this in context, Olivia is referring to, in my book, So Good They Can't Ignore You, I lean heavily on this idea that stop worrying about if you have the exact right job for you, or that you have a passion that has to be matched to your career, and if you don't exactly match it, then you're going to be miserable.

I argue that many different professional pursuits can be the foundation for a working life that's a great source of satisfaction. But I did give three disqualifiers. Here's three things that tell you that this might not be a job you should stay in. So the first was what Olivia mentioned.

You don't really have options to build up skills that can then be used as leverage to shape your career going forward. That was disqualifier number one. I believe disqualifier number two was it conflicted with values. So you're working for Philip Morris, and the idea of so many people getting sick from smoking is against your values.

And then three, I think, was you don't like the people. These people are just, I can't stand them. I don't mind being an investment banker from a values perspective. I am going to have lots of options because I'll make a lot of money, lots of options if I get really good.

But you know what? I can't take these people I work with at Goldman. So that'd be number three. All right. So she's asking, do I think that first disqualifier applies to her job as a product designer in tech? She's worried. Is this something I can keep getting better and getting options, or is it something that I'm just going to eventually have to move on from?

What I would suggest in this situation is, and this is a evolution from the way I talked about this back in So Good They Can't Ignore You. So it's been 10 years since that book came out. So this is a bit of an evolution. I would lean a little bit heavier on a lifestyle centric career planning approach to this question, as opposed to remaining more narrowly focused on just the aspects of the career.

So in lifestyle centric career planning, you have your vision for what you want your daily experience what you want your life to be like in all different aspects, not just professionally. And then you can work backwards and figure out how your work can help get you to that lifestyle.

So if you have this lifestyle fix, the question then becomes, does this technology product design career that I'm in, do I see a way to use this to grow in this? Do I see a trajectory here that is going to support this lifestyle I have, this vision I have of my lifestyle?

All right. And in answering that question, you probably want to look for role models, case studies and examples, people at your company or other companies, freelancers, people on their own, but people within the same orbit of general skills that have done interesting things with it. This will elaborate your understanding of what is possible with this job.

As you get good, what are the different options of what you can do with this? You mentioned in your elaboration, I'm looking at it now, you say some pretty stark things like only people in their twenties can be a product designer while their mind is fresh. There are no product designers in their thirties.

Your only chance, your only option is to become a manager. But then even then you can only do that during your forties. That's probably not true. I mean, I think you probably need to be more systematic at learning what the different possibilities are for this general constellation of skills and not just, okay, within the company you work for and you know, what's the promotion chain here, but for product designers in generally people who work in different industries on product design, people who'd go out on their own people who do freelance.

Is there people who do this for this type of company and they do it six months out of 12 and make a pretty good living at it and using that they can live somewhere that's kind of cheap but exotic and interesting on a farm somewhere. I don't know. You got to get out there.

You got to get the information and then figure out seeing all these different options. Do I see a way of deploying any of these to get to my image of ideal lifestyle? And if yes, go for it. If no, then yeah, you can say this disqualifier applies. So that's my evolution.

Let's use lifestyle more and be a little bit less narrowly focused on just what is this job? What am I going to get from this job? We're going to go for this job because ultimately what does that matter if it's not serving the life that you're actually aiming to achieve?

That comes back to when you talk about being a reporter for your own job, essentially, you talk about that a lot. Yeah. Act as if you're a reporter and figure out what the steps are to do X, Y, Z. Yeah. Like you're writing a book or an article about how people get here in my career.

Go talk to people, look up people's resumes online, read profiles of people in your industry. Yeah, you got to be like, I'm going to write a book about product design and the career possibilities of product design. So it's a research mindset. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)