Figuring out what to do with my “career”

Published 2024-10-14

I recently quit my job to take some time to rethink what I want out of my “career” — if I even want one. Here is a jumbled list of thoughts I’ve considered adopting to guide my search. Warning: It really is a jumble of unorganized ramblings, but hopefully something here will resonate with you.

Life resume. Ask myself: “If I were to spend X years of my life on this project, will it change my life resume?”, if not, I move on to find another story / quest that I would be proud to have in my life resume.

Novelty ties into this. If it’s something that is very different from whatever I have done before, I would be more interested in having it in my life resume. E.g. startups, different domains like renewable energy.

Curiosity is a must, but is usually not enough. My curiosity fizzles out after a few days, or months if I’m lucky. I need other factors listed in this post to help supplement this finicky aspect of work. (Ref: Paul graham’s how to do great work)

Story / impossible goal. I find having an impossible goal or that feeling where I’m a protagonist in a quest, to be one of my strongest motivators — it was good enough to make me focus on neuroscience for 2 years, and even quitting my job.

Past fizzle. But, this motivation factor too also fizzles out. Back then the story I sold to myself was: In the limited time that I’m conscious, I’ll dedicate most of it to learning about consciousness (later reduced to brains in general, and then C-elegans). The story lost its novelty after (1) spending 1 year of master’s on it and (2) doubting current approaches’ usefulness, but at the same time feeling that the non-modeling work required to bridge the gap is not that interesting to me.
Against inevitability. There’s an argument against trying hard to invest something new that goes: even if you don’t do it, someone else will eventually do it. E.g. If I haven’t worked on product X at google back then, someone else would have taken my spot and would most likely have made product X happen — and if not them, a future attempt would succeed. This story-based mindset could be an antidote to this line of thinking. It matters to me the identity of the people who were part of the effort. It mattered to me, for instance, that I was part of this google brain paper. This point is somewhat tied to the life resume point.
Another way of rephrasing the same point: What matters more maybe is that the stories written in the annals of history or remembered by people you care about actually involve you. You want to weave these disparate memories that could have been bound to other people’s lives to instead be bound to yours, and that they altogether form your life story.

Piggybacking on someone else’s story. Sometimes I can get inspired by someone else’s ambition, and find it meaningful to play the role of a very capable assistant to someone who truly believes in their mission.

Working environment. Or maybe the story / the product doesn’t matter. As long as I have highly capable and friendly colleagues to work with, and an institution that incentivizes all of us to work together well, I will find it meaningful to build anything with them — this has been my primary motivation most of my career.

Within reach. At some point I’ll just have to stop ruminating and take action— brainstorm a list of options that are within reach (e.g. google search, ask friends about their startup ideas), apply to all of them, and simply pick the “best” one. Rinse and repeat.

What’s next? Over the next few months, I’ll just focus on tackling my bucket list (e.g. go outdoor bouldering a lot more) while executing the “within reach” strategy. In parallel, I’ll compile a list of possible futures through introspection, internet searches, and convos w/ friends, then simply apply to the top K by new year.

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