One Thought

I’ve talked in the past about performing thought experiments to discover what you want. Those can be effective, but they’re not the best method. The best way to discover what you want is to do it.

When you do something, you get a real measure of how much you like it. You cut through fears and fantasies. You adjust your expectations to fit reality. To discover whether you like something, you need to do it. There’s just no other reliable method.

That’s why school is dangerous. The work you do in school is rarely similar to the work you do after you graduate. Sometimes your post-school job is more enjoyable, but often it’s less. In any case, it’s always different.

School is time-consuming. It’s possible to go through years of school only to realize a year into your post-school job that you hate what you’re doing. And since it can be hard to admit you wasted the time, it’s tempting to stay the course, even when that means spending the rest of your life doing something you don’t like.

School is often expensive. It’s common to graduate from law school, medical school, and business school, for example, with tremendous debt. When graduating with this kind of debt, it’s hard to switch directions: you’d better like what you’re doing because you may need to do it to pay off your debt. These schools are able to charge so much in part because their students expect to earn high incomes when they graduate.

When you’re in school, you don’t get a good picture of your future working life. The day-to-day of school is vastly different from the day-to-day of a job. It’s possible to love school but hate what it’s training you to do. That’s its danger: school saps your time and money without doing much to help you to discover what you want. When you graduate, you know whether you like school or not, but not much else.

School is a good option when you’re certain of your chosen path. But it may be a terrible one if you’re not. School’s an attractive form of procrastination: It allows you to spend several years living comfortably. It gives you structure. It gives you a feeling of certainty about your direction. As long as you’re in school, it’s easy to think you’ll love what you’ll do after you graduate, even when that’s not the case.

When you don’t know what you want, school is rarely the best option. It’s particularly dangerous when it puts you in debt. If you don’t know what you’d like to do and are thinking of returning to school, be sure to consider the alternatives.

If you think you want to do something that requires a degree, you’re not going to do it before you get the degree. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a lot you can do before heading to school. If you think you want to be a lawyer, work with lawyers for a year — say, as a paralegal. You’ll get a realistic view of what it’s like to be a lawyer. You’ll be able to talk to lawyers about what they like and dislike about what they’re doing. If you decide being a lawyer isn’t for you, you’ve dodged a bullet: no years of law school, no debt, and no need to work as a lawyer to pay off that debt.

If you’re not sure of what you want to do, it’s worth doing even unpaid work if it will help you learn more. School carries an immediate prestige boost, which is why many find it tempting. It’s more glamorous to be in grad school than it is to be an unpaid intern. But the unglamorous approach is often the best one — do the thing that will help you find and do what you want the soonest, not the thing that’s most comfortable right now. Don’t sell out your future self by wasting time and acquiring needless debt.

If you think you’d like to do self-employed work, do it. What you’re doing doesn’t need to be profitable — and it probably won’t be for a while anyway. If you like the idea of writing, write. No need to get an MFA (or whatever) unless you’re sure of what you want and know the degree is going to help you get there.

How can you afford to do unprofitable self-employed work? There are two main approaches: being unemployed and being partially employed. If you already have a reasonably well-paying job and have saved money, take a year or two off work. You can do this for substantially less money than it would cost to attend most schools, and you’ll have all the time in the world to pursue your interests. If you’re disciplined, you’ll learn far more about what you like to do than you would in school.

If being unemployed isn’t a realistic option right now, take the partial-employment route. Take a part-time job that pays the bills and isn’t mentally taxing. Pursue your interests in the time you’re not working. You’ll make slower progress when partially employed than unemployed, but it still shouldn’t take long to discover what you like (and don’t like) doing.

Why is doing so effective in discovering what you want? Because when you do something, you cut through the fantasies of what it’s like to do that thing. You see what it’s really like. You’ll learn far more about what you want doing things that interest you day after day than you will learning how to do them in school. If you’re unemployed or partially employed, you can make quick adjustments: if something’s not working for you, change it or try something else. You can’t do that in school without considerable pain.

If you don’t know what you want and you aren’t working toward finding out, you’re procrastinating. School is a particularly time-consuming and expensive form of procrastination. Grad school is not a good place to find yourself — if you need to find what you want, take the most direct route, not the most comfortable or prestigious one.

When you’re trying to find what you want, money and prestige are your enemies. They can cloud your judgment and make things seem better than they really are. It feels good to have or be working toward a well-paying job, at least for a little while.  Money and prestige make you feel important. But their effects eventually wear off — if you don’t like what you’re doing, you’re left with nothing.

For this reason, it’s actually better to do activities with low prestige and money attached to them while trying to find what you want. You can be sure they aren’t clouding your judgment if they aren’t there in the first place. Going to a top-ranked school is more prestigious than working part-time as a waiter and writing for free, but the latter is often more effective in helping you find what you want.

What if you don’t know what you want and no clear possibility springs to mind? Here’s my suggestion: Make a list of all the things you might be interested in doing. Choose one. Commit to doing it for a few months, and then do it. After a few months, gauge whether it’s working for you. If it is, great — it’s not easy to discover something you love. If it’s not, cross it off your list and pick something else.

This approach sounds time-consuming, and it is. But it’s the best way to discover what you want. Don’t dive into school just because you don’t know what you want. And don’t assume you do know what you want if you haven’t actually done it. There are other options besides school, and they may be a better fit for you.