How to Find Clarity When You’re at a Career Crossroads

In elementary school, you studied five subjects. In college, you picked a major but spent your elective credits learning about Heidegger and housing policy. You embarked on a career or got a graduate degree that added some letters after your last name, but despite having found a foothold on your professional path, your other interests nag like a pebble in your shoe. You’re ready for a change but not sure what that exactly means.

There are, unfortunately, no signposts when you’re at crossroads in your career. Other people’s advice tends to justify their past choices, and your family and friends’ definition of success may not be your own. You were told that choosing a lane would lead to clarity, but all it seems to be leading to is a healthy serving of existential angst.

If it sounds like I’m working through my past trauma, it’s because I am. Before I turned 30 I worked in four different industries—tech, journalism, advertising, and design—exploring each in an effort to find my vocational soulmate. Whenever I felt too antsy on a path, I swerved in search of another.

Thankfully, I found a channel for my listlessness in the form of a research project that became a book. Over the past two years, I interviewed over 100 workers—from Wall Street bankers to kayak guides in Alaska—and pored over dozens of academic papers to uncover insight into developing a healthier relationship to work.

Though I can’t point a stethoscope toward your soul’s deepest yearnings, here are five research-backed principles that have helped me in my exploration.

Find a compass, not a map

A map might give you directions from A to B, but a compass will help you find true north wherever you are. Often when we seek out career advice, we look for maps: follow the morning routine of this highly successful person. Reverse-engineer your way to the C-Suite, one LinkedIn cyberstalk at a time. Even the metaphors we use with regard to careers—ladders, stepping stones, paths—assume a linearity that is rarely consistent with lived experience.

Our career maps may be distorted by other people’s preferences and our own outdated ideas of what we thought we wanted. Take prestige. Prestige “warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy,” writes investor Paul Graham. “It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you’d like to like.” Instead of planning a route from the get-go, we benefit from first taking a step back to determine what matters, irrespective of any particular job or direction.

Figuring out what you value is different from determining what you’re passionate about. As Cal Newport argues in his book So Good They Can’t Ignore You, passion is often the result of, not the precursor to, good work. Whereas passions come and go, values remain core to who you are.

Adam Grant@AdamMGrant

Following your passion is a luxury. Following your values is a necessity.

Passion is a fickle magnet: it pulls you toward your current interests. Values are a steady compass: they point you toward a future purpose.

Passion brings immediate joy. Values provide lasting meaning.

There are countless studies that have proven the benefits of reminding yourself of what you value. Doing so has been shown to lead to better learning outcomes in school, more decisive decision-making, and higher levels of resilience. And there are many ways to uncover your values—like journaling, card sorts, and online quizzes, to name a few. Regardless of how you determine them, clarifying your values will help you connect any career choice to what actually matters to you.

Learn through action, not rumination

Ruth Chang is a philosopher who studies how people make hard decisions. She defines a hard decision as one where one option is not clearly better than the other. Though that distinction may seem obvious, it’s important to acknowledge—especially when we pressure ourselves to get decisions “right.”

A hard decision is not hard because you can’t seem to “figure it out.” Hard decisions are hard because option A is better in some ways and option B is better in others. “When alternatives are on a par, it may matter very much which you choose, but one alternative isn’t better than the other,” Chang writes. “Rather, the alternatives are in the same neighborhood of value, in the same league of value, while at the same time being very different in kind of value.”

This is often the case at a career crossroads. Once, I was deciding between a job at a digital magazine and another at a prestigious design firm. The journalism job felt more aligned with my passion but the design job paid 50% more. If one job were better than the other in every way, it wouldn’t have been a hard decision. Yet I was convinced there was a “correct” choice that would reveal itself if I banged my head against the wall at a certain angle.

Chang sees hard choices as an opportunity to put ourselves behind an option. Rather than try to perform endless thought experiments to gain clarity, we can choose a direction and then create the reasons for why we did so. That is to say: instead of making the right choice, we have the power, through our actions, to make the choice right.