A Job Is Just An Activity
Climbing into the skin of careers
If there’s any career advice that I wish someone told me earlier, it’s this: a job is an activity. Like taking a shit or making a morning cup of coffee, it’s just another thing that you do.
But because prestige has a universal pull like the Earth’s gravity, it’s easy to sacrifice our own happiness just to sound impressive to strangers. Knowing that prestige is a prank, I created an exercise for myself to escape it.
Let me show you using story of my own career path.
A Microsecond
On my gap year in January of 2021, I tore my ACL and MCL playing hockey. Pop. Click. Fuck. After the surgeon sliced my knee open, I was a certified cripple for six weeks. I had to learn how to walk, run, and pee standing up again. Naturally, I became fascinated with biology and the body.
So after retiring from a 14 year hockey career, I picked pre-med. I studied physiology in college out of curiosity. I thought I wanted to be a doctor. I figured that me and medicine would match for two reasons: I loved school, and gushing blood didn’t gross me out.
To be a doctor, both of these things are probably true. But this is like choosing to eat at McDonald’s just because you’re hungry. There’s more depth to the decision.
About a month ago, I was touring apartments in Austin and realized something: I spent about 15 minutes looking at a place that I would live in for 15 months. Just like with picking a career in college, it seemed short-sighted. Like there was a massive mismatch in my decision making. In college, the logic was like, “Oh, I think I’m gonna study this. I’m gonna commit at least 4 years to a decision that I maybe spent a microsecond making.”1
Real Research
I used to love watching Youtube vlogs of doctors. They’d wake up early, drive to the hospital in the dark, and scrub their skin before surgery. I was like, this looks cool. I’d like to do this.
But then I did some research.
When I put myself in the actual day-to-day of a doctor, I realized that I’d loathe my life, even if that white coat shined so bright and I was making $200,000 a year. Do I actually like talking to people all day? Hell no. That’s draining. Do I like lying to people? Never. Would I like dealing with insurance paperwork? No way. I’d hire someone to do that, but then again, I don’t like dealing with people that much, anyways.
Playing doctor sounded fun to me, but my deeper drive came from thinking about how cool it would be to tell other people about my job title. I will say: Dr. Blackwood would’ve sounded sexy.
But of course, I didn’t have this awareness at the time. So I created an exercise that’s designed to excavate our motives and think: “do I actually want to do this or does it just sound cool?”2
Climb Into The Skin
In To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee wrote that you can’t really understand a person “until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”
Here’s my 3-step exercise to climb into the skin of a future career:
1) Make it mundane as math. Take the job you think you want and turn it into a math variable. Call it “Job X.” It’s neutral and unsexy, stripped of the sparkle of prestige.
2) Make a day to day list. A job is an assortment of activities. List the daily activities of Job X. Create a to-do list. If you’re not sure what this looks like, go talk to someone who’s already in that job. Ask them what their life is like.
For doctor, this would look like:
Job X:
Be on call
Touch people
Talk to people all day
Wash your hands a lot
Deal with insurance paperwork
3) Assume that work doesn’t have to be painful. Then, ask yourself: “do I actually like doing these things?”3
This simple exercise showed me that I wouldn’t like Dr. Blackwood’s life. Not only because his day-to-day sucked ass, but because, sadly, he spent an hour choosing a stressful career that would cost him the freedom of his entire twenties.
It showed me that I’d actually have no time for the thing that I love the most: solo study. Uninterrupted think time. Reading, writing, and deep thinking. I also value independence and autonomy. I know that I want to work by myself or on tiny teams for the rest of my life. So even just socially, medicine would’ve been a massacre.
As I wrote in my last essay, prestige comes from the Latin word praestigium, which means delusion or illusion. The delusion with medicine was that I should do things I don’t really like, even if I’m helping other people.4
To summarize the exercise:
Days
Life is made out of many days. It’s just a fat stack of the the tiny things that you do every day.
So when you try to think about what you want to do, look past the shininess of status and try to figure out what you like doing. As a mentor told me last year: when you’re young, experiment with living out your dream day until you find the one that you can do forever.5
As Benjamin Franklin wrote in his autobiography, “Human felicity is produc’d not so much by great pieces of good fortune that seldom happen, as by little advantages that occur every day.”
P.S. Hey! Quick note:
This was part #4 of an essay series that explores the idea of Performance-Based Love. It relates to topics like prestige, labels, and external validation. Read the first three essays below:
Notes
Of course, it’s was ok to change my mind because I’m so young. Some of this is just guess work. But moving forward in the future, it’s probably a good idea to prepare to pivot at some point. As Paul Graham wrote in his brilliant 2005 essay, "What You’ll Wish You’d Known":
“But there are other jobs you can't learn about, because no one is doing them yet. Most of the work I've done in the last ten years didn't exist when I was in high school. The world changes fast, and the rate at which it changes is itself speeding up. In such a world it's not a good idea to have fixed plans.”
In 2022, I read two articles that changed the way I see a job and made me realize that me and medicine weren’t gonna fuck with each other:
“Work Life Balance is Impossible” by
(2022)“The Problem with Passion” by Cal Newport (2008)
One societal script that’s poisonous is that work must mean pain. School says that we should be disciplined about doing things we don’t like doing. But what if that wasn’t true? What if we could work forever and life a life that we didn’t need to retire from?
I believe that this is possible with the Internet. But then you may ask: what about making money?
I'm still figuring this out. I suspect that I’ll have a full answer after 5-10 years of deep work. My parents are helping pay rent right now while I experiment with building different things, writing, and working on paid projects that I like. I'm really grateful for this. I’m aware that in their time, a job was mostly about making money. But now because of their sacrifices and the Internet, I have more freedom. Worst case, I’ll drive Uber. That’s still a pretty good life because I’m in Austin.
On the topic of doing what you love, there are two other reads that I recommend and refer to often:
“How to Do What You Love” by Paul Graham (2006)
If anything, learning about the ugly parts of medicine gave me a greater appreciation for our healthcare workers. Thank you.
But on the topic of helping people, everyone has a wonderful role in this world. We wouldn't be able to drive on the roads without construction workers or order coffee without baristas. Sure, doctors are actually amazing and they save lives, but just because you’re not helping people in the most measurable and memorable manner doesn't mean you’re not impacting other people.
When I think of my favorite modern writers like Derek Sivers and Paul Graham, I've never met them and yet they completely changed my life and the way I see the world. There are different ways to help people. As Stephen King wrote in 11/22/63 about the butterfly effect: "We were changing the world. Only in small ways—infinitesimal ways—but yes, we were changing it."
As Paul Graham also wrote, to get good at anything, you have to like doing the thing itself:
“You don't need to be in a rush to choose your life's work. What you need to do is discover what you like. You have to work on stuff you like if you want to be good at what you do.”
I think it’s safe to assume that because of the Internet’s infinite flexibility, you can eventually make money doing things you love doing. As Paul Millerd put it in The Pathless Path, your job in life is to find your forever tasks:
“More important is the realization that finding something worth doing indefinitely is more powerful and exciting than any type of security, comfort, stability, or respect a job might offer. Fighting for the opportunity to do this work is what matters, whether or not you make money from it in the short term.”
Thanks to
for your advice and guidance.
Fantastic stuff, Baxter!! Well done my friend.