We all encounter blockers and pressures as we work towards finding the next step in our career — and that’s okay! Identifying and engaging with those blockers and pressures is a great way to learn more about what’s important to you. For this chapter, we’ll look through various common blockers & pressures, and we encourage you to bring a mindset of openness and curiosity to the readings. Which ones hit close to home? Which ones do you feel resistance to engaging with? These are all important clues about what matters to you in your career.
Note that the reading section is particularly short this week because the chapter exercises are longer; in total this chapter is still roughly 90 minutes.
Recommended time: 5 minutes Nate Soares, the Executive Director of Machine Intelligence Research Institute, writes his advice on practicing self-compassion for oneself. He notes that self-compassion is not making excuses for oneself, but rather holding warmness and kindness towards ourselves even when we think we are not moving fast enough. He considers it as a key towards going beyond guilt, and learning to work with ourselves to unlock our power. For more on self-compassion, check out psychologist Kristen Neff’s book Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself.
Recommended time: 5 mins In this opinion piece from the 2010s, Marina Keegan laments that more than 25% of her graduating class at Yale would go into the consulting and finance industries. She observes strategies used by banking companies to make students feel “special and desired and important”.
Recommended time: 3 mins Paul Graham calls prestige “the opinion of the rest of the world.” He argues that you should care about opinions of those you respect, but not the rest of the world. He goes one step further suggesting that one may be better off with the less prestigious option between two equally appealing options, because prestige leads us astray.
Recommended time: 30 minutes A job is not just a step towards your career, it is also what will support your financial life. Beth Kobliner writes a straight-forward book in getting one’s financial life together. Chapter 1 gives a quick cheat sheet for achieving financial security, and Chapter 2 helps you understand your financial goals, and the bigger picture.