Career Planning When You Don't Know What You Want

"Follow your passion" assumes you already have one clearly identified, which most people don't — and even when you do, it doesn't tell you which of three plausible next jobs to take. A more useful starting point is working from evidence about yourself, not a feeling you're waiting to have.

Start from what you've actually enjoyed doing, not what sounds impressive

Look back over your last two or three roles or projects and separate what you did from how you felt doing it. The specific tasks that made time disappear — debugging a gnarly problem, presenting to a room, structuring a messy dataset — are a far better signal than a job title that sounds prestigious on paper but that you've never actually done day to day.

Separate the "what" from the "where"

A lot of career indecision is really two decisions tangled together: what kind of work you want to do, and what kind of organization you want to do it in (size, industry, pace). Untangling them usually shows that you're more certain about one than you thought — e.g. clear on wanting more people-facing work, genuinely unsure between a startup and a large company.

Talk to people doing the job, not just the job description

Job postings describe requirements, not what a Tuesday actually looks like. A 20-minute conversation with someone actually doing the role you're considering surfaces the parts a posting never mentions — how much of the job is meetings versus deep work, what the actual growth path looks like, what wears people down about it.

Optimize for information, not for the "right" choice

Especially early in a career, the highest-value moves are often the ones that teach you the most about what you do and don't want, not the ones that look best on a five-year plan. A role that turns out to be a bad fit but that you learn something concrete from beats an indecisive year spent trying to guess correctly in advance.

Write down your reasoning, not just your decision

When you do choose a direction, write down why — the actual factors you weighed — not just the conclusion. Six months later, when you're evaluating whether it's working, you'll be checking against real reasoning instead of reconstructing it from memory or judging purely on how you feel that week.

Try the Career Guide module to think through a specific decision — a role change, a pivot, negotiating an offer — with structured back-and-forth, free for your first 5 responses.