How to Find Clarity When You’re at a Career Crossroads

In elementary school, you studied five subjects. In college, you picked a major but spent your elective credits learning about Heidegger and housing policy. You embarked on a career or got a graduate degree that added some letters after your last name, but despite having found a foothold on your professional path, your other interests nag like a pebble in your shoe. You’re ready for a change but not sure what that exactly means. 

There are, unfortunately, no signposts when you’re at crossroads in your career. Other people’s advice tends to justify their past choices, and your family and friends’ definition of success may not be your own. You were told that choosing a lane would lead to clarity, but all it seems to be leading to is a healthy serving of existential angst. 

If it sounds like I’m working through my past trauma, it’s because I am. Before I turned 30 I worked in four different industries—tech, journalism, advertising, and design—exploring each in an effort to find my vocational soulmate. Whenever I felt too antsy on a path, I swerved in search of another.

Thankfully, I found a channel for my listlessness in the form of a research project that became a book. Over the past two years, I interviewed over 100 workers—from Wall Street bankers to kayak guides in Alaska—and pored over dozens of academic papers to uncover insight into developing a healthier relationship to work. 

Though I can’t point a stethoscope toward your soul’s deepest yearnings, here are five research-backed principles that have helped me in my exploration. 

Find a compass, not a map

A map might give you directions from A to B, but a compass will help you find true north wherever you are. Often when we seek out career advice, we look for maps: follow the morning routine of this highly successful person. Reverse-engineer your way to the C-Suite, one LinkedIn cyberstalk at a time. Even the metaphors we use with regard to careers—ladders, stepping stones, paths—assume a linearity that is rarely consistent with lived experience. 

Our career maps may be distorted by other people’s preferences and our own outdated ideas of what we thought we wanted. Take prestige. Prestige “warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy,” writes investor Paul Graham. “It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you’d like to like.” Instead of planning a route from the get-go, we benefit from first taking a step back to determine what matters, irrespective of any particular job or direction.