When I work with people who are exploring new career ideas, I get a common request. It goes something like this: “I’ve spent my career doing XYZ, and I’d like to figure out how to leverage my skills and experience in my next role; but I’d also love to know if there’s something I should be doing that I’ve never even considered that might be an even better fit for me.”
This is an alluring idea - that there’s some career idea out there that you simply haven’t encountered or thought of yet that could solve all your complicated feelings about work.
I understand this sentiment deeply, and while I want to be able to provide people with brilliant ideas out of left field that dissolve career angst, the truth is the real revolutionary ideas are frequently the most familiar. They’re the ideas you’ve considered, likely for a long time, and either shut down, ignored, or pushed off for one reason or another.
As I’ve written about previously (“The Desire to Know or Learn”), our interests are surprisingly stable across our lifespan, which means the better place to look for ideas may be in your past, rather than your fantastical future. That is, focus less on what you’ve never considered, and more on what you’ve never considered viable.
An element of this thinking is driven by our tendency to view career questions as puzzles rather than as mysteries.
Foreign policy expert Gregory Treverton has written extensively about this conceptual frame in the world of national intelligence. He describes the difference this way:
“There’s a reason millions of people try to solve crossword puzzles each day. Amid the well-ordered combat between a puzzler’s mind and the blank boxes waiting to be filled, there is satisfaction along with frustration. Even when you can’t find the right answer, you know it exists. Puzzles can be solved; they have answers.
But a mystery offers no such comfort. It poses a question that has no definitive answer because the answer is contingent; it depends on a future interaction of many factors, known and unknown. A mystery cannot be answered; it can only be framed, by identifying the critical factors and applying some sense of how they have interacted in the past and might interact in the future. A mystery is an attempt to define ambiguities.”
Puzzles are the type of situations in which more information yields more clarity. There is an answer, and each new piece of information helps you better understand the full picture. Mysteries, on the other hand, are situations in which the addition of more information doesn’t necessarily yield more clarity, and can lead to more confusion.
We want to look for the missing piece - the idea we’ve never even considered - because there is comfort in the idea that the answer exists, that if I can just get the right information, the right amount of self-insight and knowledge about the world, it will all click into place.
But what if career questions are mysteries, not puzzles? What if the missing piece isn’t there because it doesn’t exist, and indeed the more you hunt for The Right Answer, the muddier the picture becomes?
As Malcolm Gladwell described this idea, “Puzzles are “transmitter-dependent”; they turn on what we are told. Mysteries are “receiver dependent”; they turn on the skills of the listener.”
Career questions don’t typically yield themselves to simple answers because the answers are always contingent. There are so many factors that simply can’t be known and that change over time. Sure, solutions depend on individual motives, values, traits, and interests (pieces of the puzzle?), but they also depend context and opportunity and timing.
Now that the water is good an muddied, I’d like to offer you a challenge if you find this resonating with your current situation. Here it is: try not to solve the problem.
Eat a sandwich. Go for a walk. Stop listening to podcasts. Let your thoughts unravel.
When you’re not grinding away trying to come up with an answer, what thoughts emerge?
The idea you’re looking for may not be something you haven’t thought about, it may be something you have thought quite a bit about. The call may be coming from inside the house, as it were. Now, what’s making you ignore it?
This is a useful frame, Ross. I've had two conversations in the last few months with accomplished people who have either retired from top positions or whose markets have evaporated or been taken over by big companies. They were each seeking something new and productive and each found that the networks they'd built over years provided the opportunity for novelty in their calling. The foundations we build by a lifetime of choices yield opportunities for the construction of new careers if seen afresh (perhaps from the viewpoint of an "aimless walk."