How to Find a Job (That You Care About!) | Career Advice

so for this person and everyone else out there who's stuck trying to find a career what i'd say is like think about what you're passionate about first and then try to figure out how can i make this work as a job how can i get compensated for doing this how do i find a career when everything in life is boring to me i've tried college and self-study in the past but i never finished anything i've switched majors like eight times and i was still unhappy i just can't see really see myself doing anything to be honest in the past ten years the only career fields i've worked on have been restaurants and clinics working in the billing call center departments i've hated them both because both are dead end low paying stressful and soul-crushing i don't care about being super rich i just want to find something that pays decent and that also doesn't make me want to kill myself by the end of the week this is something that i can absolutely sympathize with empathize with um you know i had a period of time in my life when i was like really felt like everything was sort of a dead end and and nothing was really working for me so let's take a look at this because i think this is a really common problem so nowadays a lot of people struggle to find a career and find everything to be boring right so they're like i tried this i found it boring i tried this i found it boring like how do i figure out like what kind of career to have so i want to talk to you all a little bit about how we approach decision making and how to find the right career for you okay so the first thing is that we have this idea that like we need a career right and so like there's we're sort of like taught like societally that there is oh god so this is a really common problem that people have right they'll say like how do i find the right career for me like i've tried this i've tried this i did this for a while and um you know none of it really worked i didn't enjoy it how do i find the right career so the first thing to understand is that we tend to think about a career right we say to ourselves like oh like i need a career of some kind the other thing that tends to happen is if we look at how people make decisions it's basically like monkey see monkey do so i remember i was working with a a you know a young patient of mine who um had started to use substances and so i was his addiction psychiatrist and he had gone to a 30-day rehab and he was trying to figure out you know what to do with his life and i you know i was kind of asking okay so like what's your plan going forward and he's like well you know i've got a body that works at an auto shop so i think he can hook me up with a job and so it was really interesting because as i talked to him what i realized is like the options that he was considering are basically exactly what's in front of him so we as human beings tend to be like very monkey see monkey do so like based on when we think about the options for like what we should do with ourselves it tends to be based on things that are immediately available like so i'm the child of two doctors and i grew up in a small town in east texas where three out of five of the indian kids in my class like in my grade there were like five indian kids that were in my grade in the entire city three of them wound up becoming doctors so when i was growing up and i went to college like i majored in pre-med because that's just what people did right so when we look at decision making what we tend to do is we don't actually make like objective decisions we don't really look at all of the choices available to us we tend to reach for the first thing that is available to us so like it's kind of weird because this is there's a there's a good um exploration of this kind of thing in um who's that nobel prize-winning economist daniel kahneman so i think he sort of talks about this it's important in medicine as well where one of the things that doctors are trained how to do is to not make decisions based on the first thing that pops into their head or the second thing or the third thing or the fourth thing so a lot of times doctors make mistakes when they sort of rely on like their first instinct to make a decision and what we train doctors to do is something called differential diagnosis which is to think through all of the possibilities before settling on one so i see this a lot where people are trying to figure out what should my career be i've tried all this stuff i've tried switching majors eight times and it still hasn't worked what do i do so i'd say the first thing to do is to take a step back and to really think about okay what are all of the possibilities here construct a differential diagnosis about how you can spend your time and when someone says i can't figure out what my career is i'd say that's actually too narrow to begin with because forget about a career like i you know even a career is maybe not like is the problem is that your mind is coming up with solutions that are already so narrow so if your problem is that i don't i can't find a career i enjoy i think part of that problem is because your mind is narrowly chasing options for a career and by doing so you may actually miss out on all kinds of things that you could earn like a livable wage with but your mind won't even consider them because you're locked into this idea of career because the problem is that when you think about career right like then you start thinking about things like call center oh i can get a job at a call center i can get a job at a billing department i can get a job in food service so you're reaching for the simplest thing the most available thing instead of considering all of your options so what i'd strongly recommend is take a step back from the idea of a career entirely even if we look at how we started a healthy gamer like this is a mental health startup that's relatively successful right like we're doing some good stuff we're helping some people things like that i did not start out like thinking i'mma create a mental health startup and quit my job that is really not what i cared about at all it was like hey there's uh there's there's like people who are really struggling in a particular way and i'm gonna try to help these people because it seems like no one else is and so when you're really thinking about what you should do the first thing i do is take a step back from the idea of career and so this person was kind of saying everything that i've tried is boring so then what i'd say is like take even a further step back and ask yourself the question if you're trying to find a non-boring career start by asking yourself what do you enjoy and forget about the career right start to think like okay what what was the was what's something that i'm genuinely interested in what's something that i enjoy doing what's something that i you know really like kind of been passionate about when was the last time that i really had a lot of fun doing something when was the last time i was intellectually engaged what do i care about what do i think i can do to make the world like a better place like what's some kind of problem in the world that i would like to have an impact on and you have to be kind of careful here because your mind may go for more what we call premature closure because it may say oh i'm really passionate about you know like equal rights but i have no qualifications okay and so then then what your mind does is it'll say oh that's not an option because i have no qualifications that's a premature closure too um thinking about a career is also a premature closure so what we want to do is take a really big step back and then start to think about what you actually care about what you find interesting and then once you pick a couple of those things then what we're gonna do is like an investigation based on what you find interesting and what the purpose of an investigation is a couple fold the first is like it's really interesting because i don't know if you guys know this but like there are professional dms in new york city that will charge like 400 a week to run like a dm'ing session right and so you may say to yourself like i never realized that was a career i don't even know if it is a career but what some people discovered is that hey i'm really really passionate about this and it does seem like there's a lack of good dms so there's actually like people who are willing to pay like like 400 bucks a week you've got like you know people who are you know maybe investment bankers or whatever like in new york city there's like five people in the group they're all willing to chip in 80 bucks a week and like that's their entertainment budget because if you go out a single night like you go to dinner and you get drinks in new york city it's like 200 bucks at a minimum right so there's actually like supply and there's demand and like i've actually met some professional dms and it's kind of interesting you may say to yourself oh i never realized that was a career and like yeah because we don't think about that as a career right it's not something that people around you are going to be regularly doing but there are all kinds of niche opportunities for you to make a livable wage doing something that you love and the key thing to get into that kind of thinking is to step out of the idea of a career so i'd say start with something like thinking about what do you actually enjoy what do you care about what do you like find interesting and then what you want to do is start to think a little bit about okay like i'm how can i pursue this how can i make this work and then something really fascinating will happen so let's say that you're interested in like you know equal rights or whatever like then the interesting thing is you may not have any skill set but as you start to like move towards something that you genuinely care about the ability to do things that you don't enjoy will become far more tolerable so the problem right now is that we have a group of people who like go to school and they have no end game in mind they're not going to school for a particular reason that they're passionate about this is something in addiction psychiatry that we call a competing interest so this is a really important principle if you want to do something that's very very difficult you have to have a competing interest so an addiction psychiatry if you want to get someone to quit smoking smoking offers a strong biological reward it offers dopamine it offers nicotine it offers socialization it helps calm you down it's an easy way to meet people so smoking has all of these advantages and it turns out that if you want to get someone to quit smoking you can't just give them information and say hey you're going to get heart disease you're going to get lung cancer you'll get bad you know complications of covid all of that information doesn't actually affect behavior what affects behavior is a competing interest something that you care about and once you develop a competing interest so you know my favorite thing in terms of working with smokers is i'll ask them like what do they care about right what do they think is interesting and so i had you know one patient and this is sort of the example that i use so i had one patient who was a smoker and i tried to explain and this is early on in my career and so i tried to explain to them i was like okay if you if you smoke you're gonna get lung cancer do you want lung cancer and he's like no i don't want lung cancer comes in a month later i'm like how's your smoking going is oh i'm still smoking i'm like okay you'll also get heart disease you'll get stroke comes in a month later and he's like still smoking right so then finally i get to like talk to the guy and i get to know him and then like it turns out that he's got a daughter and he's like really happy and like he's you know he likes his daughter a lot and then you know i even try this sort of thing where it's sort of like hey like you know if you want to stay alive and healthy for your daughter like you know maybe you should quit smoking he's like yeah that sounds really important but he still continues to smoke so one day we talk a little bit about oh you know would you like to walk your daughter down the aisle one day and he's like yeah absolutely and then i asked him you know when you walk your daughter down the aisle do you want to be wheeling an oxygen tank behind you and then he's like no right so like he's got this vision he's working really hard he's like trying to be a good parent he wants to like like be there for his daughter and then it's about finding something that they care about and once you develop that competing interest that competing interest that thing that you care about then becomes enough to overcome all of the biology all of the dopamine all of the nicotine all of the the you know social aspects of smoking and then over the next like six to eight months he actually like quit smoking and it's all about developing a competing interest and the problem right now that i see is that a lot of people like find a career because it's logical it's good on paper but that logical advantage of like oh i should do this and should do this is not enough to actually overcome the suffering that you have to go through for the career so as you think about what you actually care about and then you enroll in a school with a purpose and then even though you don't want to take statistics even though you don't want to take you know philosophy or like intro to chemistry once you have a good competing interest and you're like hey this is something that i actually care about i want to learn this and this this is what i'm passionate about and then what you do is you align your career behind your passions right it's not how do i find a career that i can enjoy and like your passions are sitting over here you start by like thinking about what you care about what you enjoy and then you try to do like a very systematic process of making it work so i'd say like if we go back to this reddit post we can kind of see it pretty clearly that like you know i want you all to pay attention to this how do i find a career when everything in life is boring to me i don't think everything in life is boring right what we see is that i've tried college and self-study but i never finished anything i keep on switching majors and i'm still unhappy so the real question that this person should be asking is what are you attracted to what do you gravitate towards what do you care about what do you genuinely enjoy doing and then be careful because your mind may tell you oh you can't do that because x y z and the cool thing is that when your mind tells you you can't do that because xyz that is actually going to be like your solution so as your mind tells you you can't do that because you haven't graduated from college then you know what you need to do you need to graduate from college well you can't graduate from college until you get into college okay so then it sounds like what we need to do is get into college you can't get into college without applying to college okay then it sounds like i need to write an application and the cool thing is then when you write your college application and you write your college essay if you have that end goal in mind like when you look at your essay it's going to be like why do you want to go to college i want to go to college because i'm interested in supporting equal rights and developing countries i want to go to college because i'm interested in esports i want to study creative writing because i want to be a professional dm and i want formal training and sort of constructing adventures and storytelling like colleges love seeing unorthodox candidates that have like interesting ideas about what they want to do right it's really fascinating and what i found time and time and time again is that people who are able to do this process of taking a step back really think about what you enjoy doing think about what you're passionate about and then if you have to make some sacrifices along the way to get to where you want to go it works out really really well so for this person and everyone else out there who's stuck trying to find a career what i'd say is like think about what you're passionate about first and then try to figure out how can i make this work as a job how can i get compensated for doing this and like literally it was like i enjoy talking to gamers all day like that's what i like doing i like helping people with their problems so one way that i was able to turn that into a career is by going to medical school and becoming a psychiatrist but then i was also like you know that's not insufficient for me i actually like vibing with chat so what are we gonna do i guess maybe i'll start streaming on twitch and like i don't know if y'all get this but like i just started streaming on twitch one day right like i had like 10 people who were viewers and then we had like 15 and then we had 50 and then we had 200 we were like sitting around 200 viewers for a couple of weeks and if you're passionate about something and you kind of give it your all and you try really hard it turns out that i think the world will kind of respond to you like pretty well and that's why we have professional dms we've got people who are like hey i really love dming and like that's their job now so what if he doesn't know what he enjoys doing or he lost interest in everything he used to love like me so that's a great question so then the question becomes how did you lose interest right because that passion is there it's just buried and so then well i think we'll have a couple of other posts today that that may relate to that but like interest is something that is not like gained or lost i think it tends to be buried or not buried so a case in point like i had kova the last two weeks so like all of the things that i was passionate about and interested in i didn't care about right like when you've got covid you just don't care about anything you're kind of an hedonic even playing video games and stuff would like not be fun so then there's like a there's a process of sort of uncovering what you enjoy what you love like where did you lose sight of it what made you lose sight of it there also all kinds of like physical things that you can do right you can take care of your body and then your interest will naturally grow so you can do stuff like yoga meditation eating healthy food like all that kind of stuff is going to be good for you you know if you go see your doctor you know get your vitamin d levels checked get um you know there are all kinds of biological things that can result in a lack of motivation so you can kind of work on some of those things and remember that just because you've lost your interest doesn't mean that you can't find it again you have to really figure out how it got buried

Channel: HealthyGamerGG

Views: 366,757

Keywords: career, career advice, doctor k, dr k career, dr k job, dr kanojia, dr.k, drk, healthy gamer gg, healthygamergg, how to find a job, how to find a job you love, mental health, psychiatrist, twitch

Id: pqMCdKH9oBQ

Length: 17min 27sec (1047 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 27 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/bigfatpeach]

Things like "premature closure" and all these terms, are so cool. I wish Dr K has a video listing all these things, they are very useful. I always google them when he mentions it to find the meaning

[u/binchhahawhyyoumad]

You mentioned in this video that you may have some more posts related to this topic later today. I'm new to this channel/subreddit, does anyone know where I would find those posts?

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I don't know what I'm passionate about, does anyone have resources/links to stuff I should look into further?? (I bet Dr.K has posted something related to this, but it would be nice to have recs.)

[u/SnooPuppers4019]

This is werid, since Dr. K went to med school just for the sake of going there

[u/ionslyonzion]

I wish he would hide chat from the stream. It's really distracting and most chatters are just memeing and jumping to conclusions and just generally being really dumb.

[u/MrChilli2020]

i haven't watched the video but for me, I realized i have to try a lot of stuff out to even know what i like.

For example, when i was younger i used to like computer stuff as i like video game stuff a lot. But as i've gotten older i realize it's boring(i even tried coding lol). I have to have people on the job to talk to and have my work matter more than making some CEO a lot of money. to some degree i like art too but i have to have a lot of inspiration in my life outside of doing it for that to work(just can't keep that up lol). Humanities work such as education has been a life-changing exp for me to be honest. I wouldn't have known that if i didn't get out of my shell and tried different jobs out.