How to get good at something useful: Part 10 How to find the right career for you

Everyone says it’s important to find a job you’re good at, but no-one tells you how.

The standard advice is often to think about it for weeks and weeks until you “find your calling.” To help, you might consult the internet or a career advisor who may give you a quiz about your interests. Others could recommend you go on a gap year, reflect deeply, and try to figure out what truly motivates you.

But as we saw in part seven, which discussed common ways people sabotage their career, becoming really good at most things takes years of practice. To a large degree, your abilities are built rather than ‘discovered.’ Darwin, Lincoln, and Oprah all failed early in their careers, then went on to dominate their fields. Asking, “What am I good at?” needlessly narrows your options. It’s better to ask, “What could I become good at?”

The bigger problem is that these methods aren’t reliable. Plenty of research shows that while it’s possible to make better predictions about what you’ll be good at, it’s not easy. “Going with your gut” is particularly unreliable, and it turns out career tests don’t work very well either.

Instead, you should aim to think like a scientist: begin with a hypothesis, then test out your options, looking outwards rather than inwards. In other words, make contact with the world, rather than your own preferences and intuitions. In this article, we’ll explain how.

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Being good at your job is more important than people think

It sounds obvious that it’s important to find a job you’re good at. But we believe it’s even more important than people think, especially if you care about your impact on the world.

The most successful people in a field account for a disproportionate fraction of the impact. A landmark study of leaders across a range of fields found that about half of the contributions were made by the top 10% of the performers. Meanwhile, the bottom 50% accounted for only about 15% of the output. The study concluded “the most productive contributor is usually about 100 times more prolific than the least.”

This means if you were to plot degree of success on a graph, it would look like this:

It’s the same steep upward curve we’ve seen several times already in this guide. In part six, on high-impact jobs, we saw this in action with areas like communicating ideas and research, in which the top 0.01% of papers receive 1,000 times more citations than the median.

These are areas where the outcomes are particularly skewed, but we gathered all the research we could find about how much workers differ in productivity in more normal jobs, and found that the most productive in almost any field have significantly more output than the typical worker. The more complex the domain, the more significant the effect, so it’s especially noticeable in jobs like research, software engineering, and entrepreneurship.

Some of these differences will be due to luck. For example, two researchers could be equally skilled, and both tackle equally promising research questions, but one question could turn out to be much easier to solve than the other. However, some component will almost certainly be due to skill. This means if you can find a job that’s a better fit, you’ll have a higher chance of being one of the most productive people.

We also argued in part seven that being successful in your field gives you more career capital. This also sounds obvious, but it can be a big deal. Being thought of as a person who’s great at what they do can open up all sorts of (often surprising) opportunities. For example, many AI companies have hired people without a background in AI because they’d done something impressive elsewhere.¹

Moreover, being successful in any field — even if it seems a bit random (like magic or modelling) — gives you influence, money, and connections, which can be used to promote all sorts of good causes.

Finally, being good at your job gives you a sense of competence, and that’s a vital component of being satisfied in your work.

What is personal fit?

Personal fit is an important factor to look for in any job, which is why we’ve already mentioned it several times. We can define ‘personal fit’ a little more carefully as how well you expect to perform compared to the typical person in the field, if you work at it.

If we put everything we’ve covered in the last few parts into an MBA-style formula for the perfect job, we could write something like:

But now we’ve just seen your career capital and impact both also depend on your personal fit. If you think of your personal fit as your impact in a job compared to the average, then fit would multiply with the average impact to give your overall expected impact.

You can use these factors to make side-by-side comparisons of different career options (which we’ll explain in part 12).

For these reasons, we’d never recommend taking a high-impact job that you’d be bad at, even if it seems great in the abstract. Put another way, if you have several promising options, and you’re unsure which will be best, usually the thing to do is just to pick the one that will suit you best. But how do you know which option that is?

What doesn’t work in predicting your fit

When thinking about which career to take, people’s first instinct is often to turn inwards: to “go with your gut” or “follow your heart.” Those we advise have often spent months or even years agonising over which options seem best, trying to figure it out from the armchair through endless introspection.

These approaches assume you can work out what you’re going to be good at ahead of time. But the reality is, you can’t. Here’s the best study we’ve been able to find about how to predict performance in different jobs. It’s a meta-analysis of selection tests used by employers, drawn from hundreds of studies performed over 100 years.² Before I unpack what they mean, here are the raw results:

The first thing to note is that all of these tests are pretty bad. The best methods correlate 0.4 with job performance, but that’s still pretty weak. And these studies only predict performance in the next couple of years — the accuracy for longer-term predictions is likely even worse.³ So even if you tried to predict using the best available techniques, you’d still be wrong much of the time. Candidates who look bad will often turn out good, and vice versa.

Anyone who’s hired people before will tell you that’s exactly what happens. One headhunting firm told the Financial Times that out of 20,000 placements, around 40% of senior hires were gone within 18 months. This is despite the fact that employers really want to pick the best candidates, and they also know exactly what the job requires. If even they find it hard to figure out in advance who’s going to perform best, you probably don’t have much chance.

On a more positive note, this also means you shouldn’t rule yourself out of potentially great careers too early. Just as Oprah was fired and told she was “unfit for TV,” a few early failures or negative judgements don’t necessarily mean you’re a poor fit. It’s just too hard for anyone to predict with confidence.

Why not to go with your gut

While predicting with confidence isn’t possible, it is possible to make better or worse predictions. The method closest to “going with your gut” is unstructured interviews, but these were one of the worst. The best approaches tend to look pretty different, and for good reason. There’s been a lot of research looking at intuition as a guide to making decisions, and studies find it only works in certain circumstances. But there’s a surprising level of consensus about what those are.

Your gut can tell you very rapidly if someone is angry with you. This is because our brain is biologically wired to rapidly warn us when we are in danger and to help us fit in socially.

Your gut can also be amazingly accurate when trained. Chess grandmasters have an astonishingly good intuition for the best moves because they’ve played lots of similar games, building up a sense for what works and what doesn’t, until it becomes almost automatic.

However, gut decision making is often poor when it comes to working out things like how fast a business will grow, who will win a football match, what grades a student will receive, or as we saw in part one on job satisfaction, how happy different life events will make us. That’s because these are situations where:

1. The results of our decisions take a long time to arrive
2. We have few opportunities to practice
3. The environment keeps changing

Each of these factors makes it harder to train our intuition, leaving us vulnerable to being swayed by attention-grabbing but ultimately unimportant factors.

Career decision making seems closer to these sorts of situations than being a chess grandmaster. We only make a couple of major career decisions in our life, it takes years to see the results, and the job market keeps changing. This becomes even trickier if you care about your impact, because then you need to consider the downstream effects of your actions too, which are even harder for your gut to internalise.

Your gut can give you clues about the best career. It can tell you things like ‘I don’t trust this person’ or ‘I’m not excited by this project.’ But totally deferring to your gut isn’t likely to work.

See our evidence review for more detail

Why career tests don’t work either

Career tests are usually built on interest- or personality-match, often using something like Holland Types. These classify you as being one of six interest types, things like ‘artistic’ or ‘enterprising,’ before recommending careers that match that type.

Imagine someone you know who’s really assertive, and is passionate about selling and persuading. Surely someone like that should go and become an advertising accounts manager, or perhaps a car salesman?

Maybe not. An analysis of the Terman study, which followed over 1,000 gifted men over their entire lives from 1921, showed that the ‘enterprising types’ that took these kinds of high-octane jobs were more likely to burn out and die younger than other types of people. It seems that these jobs brought out the worst tendencies of these assertive people, making them more stressed and unhappy.⁴

This case was unusual. Normally, Holland Type⁠–match is helpful, but only weakly. As the table above shows, it’s one of the worst predictors of performance. It’s also only weakly correlated with job satisfaction, as were various other attempts to measure interest-match.⁵ (And don’t even get me started on Myers-Briggs.)

Career tests can also provide weird results because they often make recommendations based only on a personality match, with no attention to other factors, such as how common or desirable the jobs are. This is why a UK government career test released in 2020 recommended that many people become lock-keepers or professional boxers, even though there’s only about 1,000 professional boxers in the UK, and only a few dozen earn a living full time from the sport. All this is why we don’t pay much attention to traditional career tests.

How to find your fit

The two approaches with the most predictive power were structured interviews and biographical data. This suggests the ideal approach to finding your fit would involve talking to people in the field, asking them to list the key traits that drive success, and then asking how you stack up on those traits. Even better, try to speak to people who have experience recruiting in the field.

Also high on the list are work-sample tests. This suggests another intuitive method would be trying to get as close to actually doing the work as possible and seeing how that goes. We talk about some practical ways to do that later in this guide.

Another strategy: just apply to lots of jobs as an experiment. See which you get offered. Employers themselves are usually the people best placed to predict who’s going to perform because they’ve seen it happen lots of times.

You can also try asking experts in the field to assess your chances. Though, given the difficulty of predicting fit, don’t put too much weight on any single person’s opinion. Take an average of five or more predictions.

What connects all these approaches is that they’re empirical. Rather than endlessly reflecting on what you feel most called to do, get out into the world, speak to employers, try things, and make applications. These types of actions are the best way to discover your fit.

Your attitude to figuring out your career should be like a scientist:

1. Make some best guesses about which options are best (define hypotheses).
2. Identify your key uncertainties about those guesses (think of experiments).
3. Go and investigate those uncertainties (run experiments).
4. Update your guesses with new evidence (update hypotheses).

Here are some more tips on each stage:

1. Make some best guesses

Even later in your career, when you’ve learned a lot about your skills, which job is best will never be certain. All you can do is to make a best guess, learn from your experiences, and update your guesses over time. You also won’t have time to investigate or try every job you could take, so you need to start by narrowing down the field somehow. Start by making an initial ranking of your options in terms of fit. It’s OK if it feels extremely uncertain. This is only the first step.

2. List your key uncertainties

Once you have a ranking, ask yourself, “What are my most important uncertainties about it?” In other words, if you could get the answers to just a few questions, which of them would most change your ranking?

Once you’ve narrowed down to jobs that might tackle pressing problems, we often find the most important questions are not the big-picture philosophical ones, but rather things like, “If I applied to this job, would I get it?” or, “Would this pay me enough to cover my student loans?”

When we think about a career, we tend to have a fantasy image attached to it. We picture the professor wearing a tweed jacket, lecturing their students, for example. We imagine how it would feel to be a professor, and what our friends and family would think of us.⁶

We don’t picture the hour-to-hour reality of working alone — reading, writing papers, applying for grants, and doing stacks of university admin. While at school it’s possible to push through and get good grades at something you don’t enjoy, it’s hard to sustain this for 10 or 20 years. You shouldn’t become an academic unless you’d enjoy spending hours and hours doing these things.

As we saw in part one, how engaging you find the work hour to hour is the biggest predictor of how satisfying you’ll find it overall, while things like status aren’t nearly as important. But we routinely see people chase jobs due to the status they’d bring, while eliminating whole areas, like working in government, when they can’t even explain what people in these jobs actually do. If you don’t already know, one of your key uncertainties should be what a typical day in the life is actually like.

Beyond that, your key uncertainties should focus on what most drives success in the field and how you stack up on those drivers. Some of these will be your individual traits, but context matters too. One study found that star investment analysts who got poached by another firm would tend to drop in industry rankings, suggesting their strong performance was partly a product of the particular team and firm they were in, not only their individual ability.

Another way to gauge your fit is to compare your track record to others in the field. Just make sure to compare to others with a similar level of experience to you so it’s actually fair. For instance, if you’re at grad school in a subject where about half of people go into academia, and you’re in the top 25% of students academically, you could roughly guess you’ll be in the top 50% of academia. If possible, focus on your rate of improvement compared to others with similar experience, rather than your current level of performance, since that’s probably a better predictor of long-term success.

3. Do cheap tests to investigate those uncertainties

Now that you have a list of uncertainties, try to resolve them. Think you could be good at writing? Start blogging. Think you’d hate consulting? At least speak to a consultant before writing it off entirely.

In particular, consider how you might be able to eliminate your top option, or what might make you move a different option to your top slot.

Start with what’s easiest. We often find people who want to, say, try out economics, who then apply for a master’s degree. That’s a huge investment of time. Instead, think about how you can learn more with the least possible effort by doing what we call ‘cheap tests.’ This could mean first reading an economics textbook, or taking a single course.

You can think about creating a ‘ladder’ of tests. Start with the cheapest ways to test your options, then after each step, re-evaluate.

A ladder might look like this:

1. Read our relevant career reviews, all our research on a given topic, and talk to LLMs about what the jobs are like (2–5 hours).
2. Speak to someone in the area (two hours).
3. Speak to a friend to get an outside perspective on what’s best (two hours).
4. Speak to three more people who work in the area, and read one or two books (20 hours).
5. Given your findings, look for a relevant project that might take 1–4 weeks of work — like applying to jobs, volunteering in a related role, or doing a side project in the area — to see what it’s like and how you perform.
6. Only then consider taking on a 2–24-month commitment — like a work placement, internship, or graduate study. Being offered a trial position with an organisation for a couple of months can be ideal because both you and the organisation want to quickly assess your fit.

4. Update your guesses until your answers stop changing

Each time you do a test, update your best guesses. But when should you stop your research and just try something? Here’s a simple answer: when your best guess stops changing. If you keep investigating, but your answers don’t change, then the chances are you’ve hit diminishing returns and you should just try something for a while.

Otherwise, stop when you’ve used up the time you’ve budgeted for the decision. Something like medical school is a huge commitment, so it can be worth budgeting months investigating your fit. But when a decision is easily reversible, much less investigation is needed — if it doesn’t work out, you can just go back to what you were doing before.

Either way, don’t confuse the right decision with a decision you feel confident in. After you’ve done your investigation, you might still feel extremely uncertain about which option is best. However, if your best guess has stopped changing, or you’ve run out of time to investigate, then the right move is to go with it, even if it feels uncertain.

Since it’s so hard to predict which career will be right for you, it’s normal and rational to feel like you haven’t found your one true calling. Instead, make your hypotheses about what you’d be best at, investigate them with cheap tests, and make the best decision possible.

In fact, even when your investigation is complete and you start a job, that too is an experiment, as we’ll cover next.

Take a break

Read next:  Part 11: When should you settle in your career?

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