{"id":17386,"date":"2025-06-11T12:09:02","date_gmt":"2025-06-11T20:09:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.scotthyoung.com\/blog\/?p=17386"},"modified":"2025-06-11T12:09:03","modified_gmt":"2025-06-11T20:09:03","slug":"choose-your-career","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.scotthyoung.com\/blog\/2025\/06\/11\/choose-your-career\/","title":{"rendered":"How Should You Choose Your Career?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Work is a huge part of life. A person who starts work at 25, retires at 65, and works the United States\u2019 average of roughly 2000 hours per year will spend 80,000 hours on the job during their lifetime.<\/p>\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

But work is more than just time spent. It provides us with the money we use to live, friends and colleagues who form a community around us, and, for many of us, an identity.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve written a lot about how to make progress in your career, but less on how to choose what you do in the first place. Today I\u2019d like to share some ideas I think would have benefitted me when I was first starting out:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Money isn\u2019t everything \u2026<\/strong> The people who think the most important thing in life is to be rich are delusional. Being rich is better than being poor, but being rich doesn\u2019t magically make your life perfect.<\/li>\n
  2. \u2026 but it\u2019s definitely not nothing! <\/strong>At least where I went to school, pretty much everyone was broke (or pretended they were). In such an environment, the major you chose functioned like a badge of personality. In the outside world, different career choices have starkly different degrees of renumeration and difficulty, which can lead to an abrupt transition when you get into \u201creal life.\u201d<\/li>\n
  3.  College is for proving your abilities; it\u2019s not a substitute for job training.<\/strong> Most of higher education is signaling. That doesn\u2019t mean you don\u2019t learn anything useful, but simply that appearing smart and conscientious (and conformist) is probably the biggest reason college students tend to get better jobs. This means harder majors are more valuable than easier ones, and broad knowledge is probably more useful than highly vocational specializations (which can be risky if the exact job you\u2019ve trained for isn\u2019t available after you finish your degree).<\/li>\n
  4. Beware of your talents.<\/strong> It\u2019s natural to want to pick a career that highlights your best abilities. But this can be misleading if your best strengths don\u2019t correspond with actual jobs. As an example of this, one paper<\/a> found that girls\u2019 relatively low participation in STEM originates not from low math ability, but from high reading ability relative to boys!<\/li>\n
  5. Early jobs are for learning, not earning.<\/strong> A lot of genuine learning happens on-the-job, but not all jobs are created equal. Some will force high performance standards, give you challenging assignments and offer a varied set of work problems. Others will stick you with routine office work that never changes. You\u2019ll learn more in the former, even if it\u2019s (temporarily) stressful.<\/li>\n
  6. \u201cCool\u201d careers tend to be overrated.<\/strong> All else being equal, the career paths that look fun, interesting or high-status tend to be more competitive. That might be fine if you\u2019re passionate and highly-ambitious, but it does mean you\u2019re picking a steeper hill to climb than a less-glamorous career in which you do useful work.<\/li>\n
  7. Be receptive, not passive.<\/strong> Few people I know deliberately chose the specialty for which they are now renowned. Open-mindedness and flexibility about the eventual path your career will take are virtues. But combine that flexibility with a willingness to take on challenges (or make some, if none are offered to you).<\/li>\n
  8. \u00a0\u00a0Focus on making friends.<\/strong> Despite universal education and online job application boards, most opportunities still flow through personal connections<\/a>. Doctor\u2019s children are 24x more likely<\/a> to be in medicine than people whose parents were not doctors. A big part of the reason for this is that the details of a career path are often obscured, and opportunities are hard to find if you don\u2019t know someone who is in a given line of work.<\/li>\n
  9. Where you work matters more than how hard you work.<\/strong> While ordinary people tend to use the word \u201cproductivity\u201d as synonymous with \u201cworking hard,\u201d the sense in which economists use it is almost the opposite: high productivity means getting a lot of output for relatively little input. Thus, those who work the hardest are often the least productive in the economic sense. Being in a less productive country, city, sector or company can result in orders-of-magnitude differences in the economic value of your work (and, in turn, your pay and perks), which go far beyond what you can achieve by simply putting in extra hours.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Agree or disagree? Any points of advice you would have given your past self? Share your thoughts in the comments!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Nine thoughts on how to choose your career in life.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-17386","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-personal-development","7":"entry"},"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nHow Should You Choose Your Career? - Scott H Young<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.scotthyoung.com\/blog\/2025\/06\/11\/choose-your-career\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"How Should You Choose Your Career? 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