Find Out What You Want To Do In Life

Why Most Career Advice Is Useless (And What Actually Works)

I spent three years watching people waste their twenties on the wrong advice. "Follow your passion," they say. "Find your calling," they chant. It turns out that approach produces about as much as asking someone with no map to find the nearest exits in a building they've never been inside. The real method for figuring out what you want to do involves less introspection and more systematic elimination. The first thing you need to understand is that wanting is not something that happens through sitting on your couch and thinking harder. It's something you build by running experiments. I've seen people spend two years journaling about their "purpose" and produce exactly zero actionable results. Meanwhile, someone who spent six months doing different types of work every three months had a clearer answer. Here's the method that actually works. It's called forced adjacency, and it came to me after I watched a friend of mine quit his job as a supply chain analyst because he was convinced he wanted to be a writer. He wrote for two years. Didn't publish anything. When I asked him what he actually did during those two years besides read and think about writing, he couldn't name a single concrete activity.

The workaround I developed was simple enough that it felt stupid at first. Pick an industry or function you're only mildly curious about. Not passionate. Mildly curious. Then get yourself into that environment for a minimum of ninety days. Not as a observer. As someone doing actual work. The reason this works is that your brain can't simulate the reality of a job from the outside. You think you'd like being a project manager because you imagine organizing things. You don't imagine the twenty-seven Slack threads going nowhere at 4 PM on a Thursday. I used this process myself when I was thirty-two and stuck in a role I tolerated but didn't want. I identified five different functions across three industries that seemed marginally interesting. I spent about forty hours per week in each one over consecutive ninety-day periods. By the end of six months, I had eliminated four options with absolute certainty. The fifth one — technical writing for B2B software — turned out to be where I am now. I had no idea that was a job that existed until I accidentally got assigned to document an API.

The Counter-Intuitive Part Nobody Talks About

Your interests are not evidence of your aptitude. This is the single biggest mistake people make. You might love gaming and assume that means game development, but loving a product has almost nothing to do with enjoying the process of creating it. Game development involves hundreds of people arguing about hitboxes for six weeks straight. It is not a particularly fun environment. The correlation between what you enjoy consuming and what you'd enjoy producing is weaker than most people believe. I once worked with someone who adored cooking shows and immediately enrolled in culinary school. After six months, he was earning half his previous salary, working eighty-hour weeks, and had developed a stress response to the word "mise en place." He loved watching other people cook under pressure. He did not love being the person who gets yelled at when the risotto is late. The real signal you should track is not excitement. It's friction tolerance. Pay attention to which tasks you're willing to struggle through without immediately checking your phone. Not the ones that feel easy. The ones where the struggle doesn't bother you that much. That's your actual compass. Most people confuse the absence of boredom with presence of purpose, and those are very different things.

Another thing that surprises people: you usually can't know what you want until you have something to compare it against. I've had clients tell me they don't know what career they want at twenty-three. I tell them that's expected, because they've had approximately four professional experiences in their entire lives. Comparing four data points is statistically meaningless. You need at least ten to see a pattern emerge. If you're early in your career and feel lost, it's not a character flaw. It's a data problem.

What This Process Looks Like In Practice

Let me walk through a realistic scenario. I worked with a woman named Sarah who came to me at twenty-nine working in human resources. She was burned out, had no idea what she wanted, and was spending her evenings watching YouTube videos about UX design. She'd been interested in design for about six months. She'd watched maybe twenty tutorial videos and had never actually opened Figma. Instead of telling her to go back to school for a design degree, which would have cost her roughly forty thousand dollars and taken eighteen months, I had her do something much cheaper. She reached out to three people on LinkedIn who were junior designers at companies she found acceptable. She asked if she could shadow them for a week. Two said no. One said yes — a product designer at a mid-size fintech company. She spent five days sitting next to this person, watching them work, asking questions, and helping with minor tasks. She told me afterward that the job looked completely different from how she imagined it. Most of the time was spent in meetings, writing documentation, and explaining design decisions to engineers who didn't care about aesthetics. She also discovered that she actually enjoyed the meeting portions. The conflict resolution and communication aspects appealed to her more than the visual design itself.

That week of observation redirected her entirely. She ended up pursuing product management instead, which combined the communication strengths she discovered with enough technical proximity to keep her engaged. The whole process cost her nothing and took one week. A traditional approach would have sent her down a seven-figure education path based on assumptions.

The Problems With This Method

Forced adjacency doesn't work for everyone, and I need to be honest about where it breaks down. The primary failure point is economic access. Not everyone can afford to take a lower-paying role in a new field, or spend weeks shadowing someone without pay. If you're working two jobs to cover rent, ninety days of exploration is not realistic. The second limitation is that this method assumes you have the basic executive functioning to plan and execute experiments. For people dealing with severe depression, ADHD without treatment, or chaotic life circumstances, the structured approach of running systematic trials can feel impossible. In those cases, the method needs to be adapted or replaced with something more accommodative. There's also a timing issue. Some people genuinely do know what they want early on. They have a clear passion and the skills to pursue it. For those people, this process is unnecessary overhead. It's designed for the majority who are confused, not the minority who have clarity. Using it when you already know what you want is like reading a manual for a device you already know how to operate.

I've also seen this approach produce false positives. People try something for ninety days, realize they don't like it, and conclude that the entire field is wrong for them. But sometimes the problem isn't the field. It's the specific company, the specific manager, or the specific team culture. A bad boss can make any job miserable. I learned this the hard way when I thought I hated project management after a terrible six-month stint, only to discover three years later that I actually enjoyed the work when I had a decent manager and the right tools.

Tools That Actually Help

There are some practical frameworks worth using alongside the experiment approach. The Ikigai diagram is widely circulated and mostly useless as presented, but the stripped-down version — listing what you're good at, what the world needs, and what you can get paid for — can create a rough intersection point faster than pure reflection. The "career portfolio" concept from the McKinsey report "A Portfolio Life" is more useful. It suggests tracking not just your job titles but your skill units across different contexts. Did you manage a budget? Did you write a policy? Did you run a meeting? These units transfer across industries in ways that job titles don't. Building a ledger of your actual capabilities rather than your job history helps you see adjacent possibilities you'd otherwise miss. Another tool I recommend is the "regret minimization test" adapted from Jeff Bezos's decision framework. Instead of asking what you want, ask what you'd regret not trying. People tend to have clearer answers about avoidance than pursuit. I asked myself this question when I was considering a major career shift: what would I regret not attempting? The answer was immediately obvious, even though I couldn't articulate positively what I wanted to do.

When to Stop Searching

The hardest part of this process is knowing when you have enough information to commit. There's a point where continued exploration becomes procrastination disguised as wisdom. The rule I use is this: if you've completed at least three substantial experiments across different domains and still can't decide, you're not gathering data anymore. You're avoiding the discomfort of choosing. At that point, pick based on the option with the strongest upside and the weakest downside. Not the option that sounds best. The one that gives you the most room to change course again. Most careers are not linear. The first choice matters less than you think, provided you're willing to adjust based on real feedback rather than fantasy. I should also mention that some people genuinely struggle with this question for extended periods, and that's okay. There's no deadline by which you must decide. I know people who spent five years working random jobs before finding their direction. Some of them ended up in places better suited to them than if they'd committed earlier. The narrative that you need to figure it out by twenty-five is manufactured pressure, not useful guidance.

The practical takeaway is this: stop thinking your way into a decision you can only arrive at by doing. Your brain is not the right tool for this particular problem. Get data from actual experience. Run small experiments. Eliminate options ruthlessly. Repeat until the remaining option feels tolerable, then commit and see what happens. You'll learn more from six months of real work than six months of wondering.