What You Actually Want When Every Option Looks Good

Three good roads are open. You can argue convincingly for any of them, which is exactly the problem, and you have now reread the same list of pros and cons for a week without it telling you anything new. This is not indecision and it is not a shortage of self-knowledge. It is what happens when a capable person tries to answer a question about themselves by imagining harder.

Imagination is the wrong instrument here. You already own a better one, which is the record of what you have actually done, week after week, with nobody making you. That record is unglamorous and specific and it does not flatter you, which is why it is more accurate than any amount of visualizing. What follows is how to read it in about forty minutes, and how to test the answer before you commit five years to it.

Why is imagining the options not working?

Because you are simulating a life you have never lived, and people are poor at that in a very particular way. Gilbert, Killingsworth, Eyre and Wilson showed in Science in 2009 that people predicted their own reactions to a speed date and to a peer evaluation more accurately when all they had was a report of how one other person reacted than when they had detailed information about the event itself. And they did not believe it. Participants and observers both assumed the detailed description would work better.

That result is unusually useful for a career decision. It says the accurate data is somebody's lived report, not your own forecast, and it says your confidence in your own forecast is not evidence about anything.

So stop asking which option you would love. That question runs entirely on simulation. Ask what the record already says, then go and get one person's lived report of the road you are considering. Both of those are evidence. The daydream, however vivid, is not.

What in my record actually counts as evidence?

Four things, and all four are behavioral. What you lose track of time doing, what you say yes to before you have time to think, what you keep doing unpaid and unwatched, and the compliment you always wave off.

Set forty minutes and write:

• The last ten times you lost track of the clock. Not the good evenings. The specific tasks. Csikszentmihalyi and LeFevre followed 78 adults with beepers for a week and found the quality of an experience tracked whether challenge and skill were matched, and that most of those absorbing moments happened at work rather than in leisure. Absorption is a signal about the work itself.
• The last five things you said yes to instantly. Speed of yes is data. Deliberation is where you argue yourself into things.
• Everything you did in the last year that nobody asked for. Unpaid, unwatched, unrewarded, and done anyway.
• The compliment you keep dismissing. Write it as a plain sentence, in the words the person actually used.

Do not interpret while you write. The interpreting is the next step and it is far easier once twenty entries are sitting on the table.

How do I read the list without fooling myself?

Look for the verb, not the field. Underline what you were physically doing in each entry: explaining, building, negotiating, arranging, fixing, deciding, hosting. The nouns on your list are jobs and industries and they will change three times in a career. The verbs are what you are actually pulled toward, and they travel.

Then count. A verb that turns up in six of twenty entries is telling you something a single dramatic memory is not. Pay particular attention to the overlap between the unpaid column and the absorbed column, because that intersection is the closest thing to a direct answer this exercise produces.

Two cautions. Discount anything that appears exactly once, however vivid it was. And separate the thing itself from the room it happened in. A great year might have been about the craft or it might have been about the two people you sat beside, and those point at completely different next moves. Ask which parts would still have been good with different colleagues, in a different building, for a different employer. The parts that survive all three substitutions are the ones you can build a decade on.

How do I test the answer before I commit to it?

Run it for two weeks at the smallest possible scale, then ask somebody already doing the full size version what an ordinary Tuesday actually contains.

The small test is not a pilot project and it is not a side business. It is four hours of the actual verb: one client, one lesson taught, one prototype, one negotiation on somebody else's behalf. You are not testing whether you are capable. You are collecting the same kind of evidence you just mined from your past, only about the future, and two weeks of it beats two months of thinking about it.

The second half matters more than people expect, and it is the direct application of that neighborly advice finding. Find one person doing the thing and ask a narrow question: what did last Tuesday look like, hour by hour? Not whether they like it, and not what advice they have. Their report of one real day predicts your reaction better than your own imagining does.

There is a payoff to picking this way rather than guessing. Sheldon and Elliot found that goals fitting a person's own developing interests and values drew more sustained effort and were more likely to be reached. Evidence-picked goals are the ones that hold when the novelty is gone.

What if the record points somewhere I did not want it to point?

Take it seriously and then act small. A record pointing somewhere inconvenient is still the best information you have, and the correct response is not to blow up a good career on the strength of a list written on a Sunday.

The usual finding is not a change of direction. It is a change of proportion. Your list says explaining, and it turns out you do that for ninety minutes a month, so the move is to get it to eight hours inside the job you already have before you consider anything larger. That is a conversation with your manager, not a resignation letter.

Watch for the opposite failure too. If an option appears on your list only as a title, and never as a verb, it arrived from outside you. The verbs are yours. The titles usually belong to somebody else, and they are the most expensive thing on the page to chase by mistake.

Pick from the record, then go hard

You have three good options and no way to feel your way to the right one. Nobody has that. What you have is evidence you already generated: the verb that keeps repeating, a two week version of it, and one person's account of a real Tuesday.

Then choose, and stay chosen long enough for the choice to compound. The reason to do the evidence work is not caution. It is so you can go at the thing without relitigating the decision every eight weeks, because relitigating is what actually costs people the decade.

You are not lost and you are not undermotivated. You are spoiled for choice, which is a good problem, and it gets solved with a list and a pen rather than a retreat.

Sources

• Science, The surprising power of neighborly advice
• Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Optimal experience in work and leisure
• Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Goal striving, need satisfaction, and longitudinal well-being: the self-concordance model