What is the right job for me?
How you spend about 40 hours every week makes a big impact on your happiness and quality of life. Yet you have to earn a living. To balance your effort against the results, you can think more broadly about what it is you’re really trying to accomplish.
Complex problems are often vague and have many possible solutions. The Meta-Problem Method may lead you far away from the dilemma that started your quest. That’s because the method forces you to clarify what you really want and what you are willing to give up. It enables you to compare objectively the possible pathways and their trade offs. It prevents you locking into solutions mode too early and then doubling down on solving a low-yield problem that does not serve your goals as well as the alternatives. At the end of this process, you will have a better understanding of your priorities and how to achieve them.
Steps in the Meta-Problem Method
Dilemma
The high-level issue you are trying to address
Find the best options for work.
Goal
The changes you want to make to address the dilemma. There are usually many options.
Supporting Goals
- Maximize your earnings.
- Get enough fulfillment in life.
Other goals could include minimizing commute time, learning new transferable skills, ensuring your job is future-proof, and minimizing time spent working.
Problem Space
The set of problems you could chose to solve to advance your goals, plus the constraints that hold you back.
Example problems
- Which job will maximize my earnings? Maybe the problem to solve is “How can I use my skills to make as much money as possible?”
- What does fulfillment look like to me? Maybe the problem to solve is “should work be my main source of satisfaction in life, or should I look to other activities?”
There are many other potential problems to solve related to choosing a job. Each goal has many possible problems we could link to it. Are there other problems linked to these first two goals? Which options come to mind for the other goals?
High-Yield Problems
Sometimes solving one problem helps make progress towards several goals. In this step, we identify these “two-for-the-price-of-one” problems.
Which options will advance more than one goal?
- Working in the trades can maximize earnings, reduce the time spent studying, gain you valuable skills, and future-proof your career. However, it can involve a lot of time on the road, and often means long working hours.
- Working in a service profession can give you a lot of fulfillment, minimize commute time, and give you flexible hours. However, jobs like teaching are often lower paid and can pose challenges with transferrable skills if you want to change professions later.
There are many potential solutions that will have varying effects on the set of goals. Which alternatives improve the most important goals? How might the unknown change the right path forward? What other possible solutions are there to address the dilemma?
Problem Selection
Which of the many possible options in the high-yield problem step is the best set to address the dilemma?
- Which solutions make the most sense to you?
- Which solutions will best address the dilemma?
- Which solutions will deliver the best outcome for the least amount of time, effort and money?
Implement, Learn and Adapt
Check continuously that you are still solving the best problem, as new information emerges.
Observe and learn as you go. As new information reveals itself, check continuously that you’re still solving the best problem.