- This video is sponsored by Skillshare. There's a 10 word phrase that almost all of us get
asked when we're kids, what do you wanna be when you grow up? And for most of us, the
answer to that question usually has to do with specific job roles, firefighter, engineer, CEO, or sometimes it is a specific
company we wanna work for, Tesla, Apple, Nintendo,
whatever company it may be. And I'm not here today to say the answers to those questions are wrong or that the question itself is wrong. But when it comes to the
challenge of figuring out what to do with your career, what to do with your life and what makes work truly satisfying, these types of answers
might be incomplete. And there might be
better questions to ask. I am almost 30 years old at this point. And I was reflecting the
other day on the 10 years that I've spent running my business, my website, College Info Geek, my podcast, The Inforium
and this YouTube channel. And I was reflecting on the
fact that over those 10 years, I've been a part of tons of different and very disparate projects all of which I've gotten a
lot of satisfaction from. These include things like learning PHP and making tweaks to my
website's WordPress theme, to learning about
cinematic lighting setups, and camera sliders, and focus pulling, and basically setting up
intense camera setups, being a camera operator to being on stage giving presentations and being in front of
the camera, making videos to improving the physical
networking setup in my home to even going through the US tax code and writing Excel formulas
so that my budget spreadsheet would calculate my taxes correctly. These all seem incredibly different. And if I had taken my
experiences with just one of them and gone to a high school career counselor and asked them what I
should do with my life, they would give me a ton
of different answers. They would say, I should
become a web developer or maybe a network technician
or an actor or a news anchor, or a camera operator in
Hollywood or an accountant. And of course, all these
jobs are incredibly different and what's more important, they each have their own
unique path of education and experience required
in order to get to them. So if I were to go back in time, how would I know what to tell
18 year old Thomas to pursue since I've done all these things and gotten a lot of
satisfaction out of all of them? Well, in truth, it really doesn't matter, but I would tell 18 year old Thomas is pursue what interests you now, because I've come to believe that what makes work satisfying isn't the specific job role that we have. It isn't the specific
company that we work for. It's the traits and
qualities of the work itself. And this is obviously,
if you think about time, a lot of the jobs we do today, haven't been around very long. YouTuber has only been a
job for let's say 10 years. YouTube has been around
for more like 14 or 16, but how long have professional
YouTube has been around, react developer, well, that's been around as long as the react programming
language has been around, I guess the JavaScript framework. All these jobs didn't exist 50 years ago, 75 years ago, a hundred years ago, and people who were in their
prime careers back then, weren't sitting around just wishing that these fulfilling jobs
would come out of the heavens so they would stop feeling
unfulfilled in their work. They had work that fulfilled them as well. The motivational
psychologists, Edward Deci, did a lot of this kind of research on motivation and job
satisfaction and came up with a framework called
self-determination theory, which I first learned about in Cal Newport's book, "Deep Work". And this theory posits that
there are three main qualities that make work satisfying; autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Autonomy is essentially
your level of control over your time and your actions. Competence is the feeling that
you are skilled in your work and that it's non-trivial work, it's a skill that's worth having. And finally, relatedness has to do with your
connections to other people. Do you feel loved by them? Do you feel respected by them? Do you feel like you're an
integral part of your group, both with your coworkers at work, but also with your personal relationships. So according to the
self-determination theory, to find work that you love doing, to find your passion as it were, involves simply finding work that has these three qualities in spades. And I think that is good advice, but I think there are also
some more specific qualities that you should be on the lookout for. And I've actually got
a list of seven of them that I wanna share, which I have been keeping in a list ever since my original
internship in college kind of shattered my original
high school career goals. So let me explain that for a second. When I was in high school, I wanted to be a systems administrator. I was gonna go to college, I was gonna get an IT degree, and that was going to
be the guy in the chair with 15 monitors, kind of
like Tank from The Matrix. That was my dream. But then, after my
sophomore year in college, I got a job at a fortune
500 finance company in the IT department. And I remember thinking to myself, during that internship, that those three months
felt like a prison sentence. I could not wait to get out of that job. Now, this had nothing
to do with the people that I worked with, my
coworkers, my boss, my mentors, they were all great, but the nature of the
work made me feel trapped and I really, really didn't enjoy it. And as I started to journal
and kind of record my feelings, I started to realize
some of the reasons why. And it came up with this
list of seven qualities that I now look for in the work that I do. So the first one is this, are you building, or are you maintaining? Do you do work where you're
building new things from scratch or are you maintaining things that maybe you built in the past or that somebody else built? Personally, I need to build new things. I need to be creating. If I'm maintaining stuff for too long, I get really, really bored and
really, really checked out. And this actually illuminates some of those past seemingly
disparate experiences that we talked about near
the beginning of this video, because whether it's learning
a bunch of Excel formulas and building cool spreadsheets or building these
cinematic lighting setups, or making videos from scratch, all of these types of work
involve building new things. And they also often involve
learning new things, which is my second list item. Are you doing work that lets you comfortably
use your existing skill set most of the time or does each new project force
you to learn something new? Personally, I love to learn. I'm always looking to get
better at some new technique or add some new tool to my tool belt. And if I'm doing work, I
don't have that opportunity again, I get pretty checked out. Third, how much creative
autonomy do you have? This kind of goes back
to that autonomy concept from self-determination theory. How many of the decisions in your work do you get to make? Back when I was in high school
and early on in college, I was a freelance web developer and I found that work creatively
fulfilling in some ways, but kind of stifling on the whole because I was really just doing
what clients told me to do. And I didn't have a
whole lot of creativity, at least for what I wanted to do. Whereas contrast that to
my career as a YouTuber, I do have some constraints, there's the algorithm, there's the fact that I
know a lot of sixth graders in classrooms watch my videos, there are sponsors to think about, but for the most part, I have complete control over
the content that I wanna make and that's very fulfilling. So think about that. How much creative autonomy
do you want to have? Fourth, we've got interaction with others. There are two different aspects to this. First is the raw amount of interaction, is your work largely solitary or do you have a lot of
interaction with other people? And secondly, there is
the type of relationships, the types of interactions. Are you interacting with
the public at large? Like somebody working in a retail store. Are you interacting with a small but dedicated group of clients who really wanna be there like
a tutor or a music teacher? Are you interacting with
coworkers or superiors? These are all different
types of relationships and different people are gonna
gravitate to different ones. This in particular has been a very important observation for me, because if you see what
I do on the internet, a lot of people would
point to that and say, oh, you like to teach, you should be a teacher or a tutor, but I actually have experiences
with that type of work and personally, it's not for me. Back when I was in high school, I took a tutoring job at
a local community college and I really didn't like it that much. Whereas I really do like making videos and blog posts and podcasts
for YouTube and the internet because I get to work in solitude, I get to build something that is mine and then share it with the world and hopefully they find it helpful. That is very different
than in-person tutoring because the level of interaction and the type of interactions are completely different themselves. And speaking of interactions, number five is your level of
authority over other people. Do you want to manage other people or do you want to just
sit down and do your work and not have to bother with that? Personally, I don't like
managing other people. I like doing my own kind of work, which is why I have
taken steps to delegate a lot of the management in
my company to somebody else so I can focus on creation. Next we have the spotlight. Do you wanna be in it or
don't you wanna be in it? Do you wanna be the person
who gets all the attention and the glory for something, or do you want to be behind the scenes? And related to this, do you want credit when you do something or do you not care so much? Now, we have a weird society where saying that you want the spotlight seems to be looked down upon, even though we tend to reward
people who seek the spotlight. So I've done a lot of thinking on this because obviously I'm somebody who kind of likes the spotlight otherwise I wouldn't
do the work that I do. And there are feelings of guilt here, but I've kind of come to this conclusion. It is not really useful to beat myself up, to engage in this sort of
mental self-flagellation over my enjoyment of the spotlight, because there is good that comes of it. As long as I keep my ego in check, as long as number one, I realized that my self worth is not defined by how much
applause I get from other people and just as importantly, as long as I take a time to
raise other people up as well, to acknowledge the work of others, I think if I'm making deliberate attempts to do both of those things, then my enjoyment of the
spotlight isn't problematic, but it is something
you should think about. Lastly, have your work-life balance. In other words, how much you
prioritize your personal life over your work one? How much time do you have
for your relationships with your friends and your family? Where do you live and how long is the commute between where
you live and your work? Do you get to travel for work or do you have to travel for work? Some people wanna go see the world. Some people want to just
kind of have a home base. And does your work offer
you a hard cutoff time at the end of each work day? Do you get to sort of
shut off your work brain and go think about other things or are you expected to sort
of always be available, always be on call. So with these seven
traits of work in mind, we now come back to the original question. How do you know what to do with your life? Well, if I somehow got time travel powers and I can go back and talk
to 18 year old Thomas, this is what I would tell him. Number one, simply pursue your interests and work hard at doing that because none of us can
pick what our passion is out of a hat. And none of us really understands
what traits and qualities of work really resonate with
us until we get experience. So go out and get as much
experience as possible. And secondly, while getting
that experience be observant, maybe even keep a journal and think about these qualities and any other that come to mind and how the current work that
you're doing relates to them. And if you can do that while continuing to build your skills and hone your current ones and continuing to build new
relationships over time, then wherever you find
yourself working in the future, whatever job role you find yourself in, there's a great chance
that the work you're doing is gonna be something that satisfies you. Now when it comes to going
and getting that experience, one common objection that a
lot of people have is that, well, nobody will give me the opportunity to get experience in the first place. Everyone who is hiring wants somebody who has five
years of experience or more so it's this chicken and the egg problem. And with certain industries,
that is a problem. But with many of the jobs available today, especially jobs that you
can do from your computer, nobody has to give you
permission to get experience. First and foremost, you can
go volunteer for organizations that need this kind of help,
offer to do work for free. But secondly, you can
always do personal projects, side projects, just learn on your own. If you're looking for a place
to gain the skills necessary to get started there,
Skillshare is a great option. Skillshare is an online learning library with thousands of different classes that can teach you practical skills and a ton of different topic areas, from music production
and audio engineering, to video, editing, to
graphic design and animation, whatever skill you want to build, there is almost certainly a class for you. If you wanna build those
crazy Excel formula skills that let me build my
huge budget spreadsheet. Well, Al Chen's foundational
class and Excel skills is something you might wanna take. If you wanna learn how
to mix your own music or edit podcasts for people, Young Guru's class in mixing music is something you might
wanna get into for that. And if you would like to give Skillshare a test drive before you buy, you can be one of the first 1000 people to click the link in the
description down below to get yourself a free trial. Even after that, Skillshare is still a
very affordable platform with their subscriptions costing
less than 10 bucks a month on an annual basis. So once again, click that link down below, be one of the first
thousand people to sign up to get you that free trial and start learning something new today. As always, thank you so much for watching. Hopefully found this
video helpful in some way, if you did hit that like button to show the YouTube algorithm what's up. And if you're looking for a more of a discussion
on work-life balance, I made a whole video about that, that you can check out right there. Or if you're in the mood
for something a lengthier, our link to our recent podcast episode on the concept of anti unhappiness, which relates a lot to
our work satisfaction. Beyond that, you can subscribe at wherever the subscribe
button is on screen. I'm not sure where I put it. So click that if you want to. Otherwise don't cause I'm not your dad, but I will see you in the next video.
The video I've needed!