How should you choose your career?

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Work is an important part of life. A person who starts working at 25, retires at 65 and works about 2,000 hours a year in the United States will spend 80,000 hours in their lifetime.

But work is more than just the time spent. It provides us with the money we use to live, friends and colleagues who have built a community around us, and for many of us, it is an identity.

I have written a lot about how to make progress in your career, but first choose how to choose your job. Today, I want to share some ideas that I would benefit from when I first started:

Money is not everything… It is delusion to think that the most important thing in life is to be rich. Wealth is better than poverty, but wealth does not magically perfect your life.
…But this is definitely not something! At least where I went to school, almost everyone went bankrupt (or pretend they were). In such an environment, the main characters you choose work like a badge of personality. In the outside world, different career choices are very different, rebirth and difficulty vary, which can lead to sudden transitions when you enter “real life”.
College is about proving your abilities; this is not a substitute for vocational training. Most higher education is a signal. This doesn’t mean you haven’t learned anything useful, but just showing cleverness and seriousness (and submissiveness) is probably the biggest reason college students tend to get better jobs. This means that harder majors are more valuable than easier majors, and a broad range of knowledge may be more useful than a high level of professional expertise (which can be risky if you can’t get the exact training you’ve got after you’ve earned your degree).
Beware of your talent. It is natural to want to choose a career that highlights your best abilities. But this may mislead your best advantage doesn’t match the actual work. To this end, a paper found that girls’ relatively low participation in STEM does not come from their low mathematical ability, but from their high reading ability relative to boys!
Early work is used to study, not to make money. A lot of real learning happens at work, but not all work is equal. Some will force high performance standards to provide you with challenging tasks and provide a variety of work problems. Others will stick with your regular office work that will never change. Even if (temporarily) stressful, you will learn more in the former.
“Cool” professions are often overrated. All other equal, fun, fun or high status career paths tend to be more competitive. It might be great if you are passionate and ambitious, but it does mean you are picking a steep hill to climb instead of a lesser career doing useful work.
Accept, not passive. Few people I know deliberately choose the major they are now famous for. Open thinking and flexibility about the ultimate path you will take in your career are virtues. However, combine this flexibility with a willingness to take on challenges (or if some challenges are not provided).
Focus on making friends. Despite the universal education and online job application committee, most opportunities remain connected through individuals. Compared with people whose parents are not doctors, doctors’ children are 24 times more likely to be medically. A big part of this is that the details of the career path are often obscured, and it is difficult to find opportunities if you don’t know someone at a given job.
Where you work is more important than what you work hard. Although the average person tends to use the word “productivity” as a synonym for “work hard,” economists use it almost means the opposite: high productivity means very little investment in obtaining a large amount of output. Therefore, in an economic sense, the hardest working people are usually the least productive. In a less productive country, city, industry, or company, it can lead to a quality difference in the economic value of the job (and your salary and allowances), which goes far beyond the goal of just spending extra time to achieve.