🧪 Career Strategy #13: Optimise for discovery

Increase the odds of choosing the right career by taking a scientific approach, like our co-founder Lucy!

Welcome back to Fuzzy’s Career Strategy Series, where we share research-backed strategies & stories to help you realise your best career.

• Part 1: 👋 Introducing the Career Strategy Series

• Part 2: 🪜 Ladder Climbing as a Strategy

• Part 3: 👩‍🎓 Controlled Supply as a Strategy

• Part 4: 🥇 Excellence in a Power Law Field as a Strategy

• Part 5: 🔍 Niche-ing as a Strategy

• Part 6: 🧱 Skill-stacking as a Strategy

• Part 7: 👷 Be A Generalist as a Strategy

• Part 8: 📊 The Portfolio Career as a Strategy

• Part 9: 📣 Building a Platform as a Strategy

• Part 10: 🌊 Wave-surfing as a Strategy

• Part 11: 🏗️ Adding Leverage as a Strategy

• Part 12: 🌏 Proximity as a Strategy

• Part 13: ⏱️ Sequencing as a Strategy

• Part 14: 🧪 Optimising for Discovery as a Strategy

There are thousands of possible pathways for your career, but our research found there are ~10-15 dominant career strategies, which can be layered together if needed - and we’ll be breaking those down for you in this series.

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🧪 Introducing Strategy #13: Optimise for discovery.

Careers are long - we spend approximately 50% of our waking hours at work.

In fact, if we work full-time from 20 to 60 years old in a 9-to-5 job, we’ll spend 80,000 hours of our lives working.

And many of us make the decision at 18 (or even younger) about what our profession will be, with limited knowledge of ourselves and the world. 

So our odds of getting our career right the first time are low.

Yet when people inevitably experience feeling stuck or lost, even a few years into a career, many conclude that it’s “too late for them to change” - even if they have tens of thousands of hours left in their working life. 

So how do you increase your odds of getting it right - or course-correct when you get it wrong? 

Optimise for discovery!

In this week’s post, we’ll dive into this career strategy - and explore how our co-founder Lucy used it to solve her own career crisis.

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🤔 Why optimise for discovery?

Conventional wisdom tells us that the earlier you start investing in your chosen career path, the faster you can make progress.

But there’s a problem with the race to pick something and commit.

The odds are stacked against you picking the right career at 18 - here’s why.

1 Limited exposure.

This is you in high school, when you first start making choices about what to study and what career you’ll follow.

Maybe you’ve seen doctors and lawyers and teachers on TV.

You’ve dreamed of being a musician, influencer or athlete.

And through your direct experience in family and community, you’ve seen a few more professions.

But there are thousands of potential careers you have no idea exist until you start experiencing more of the world.

2 Limited self knowledge.

You might just be starting to have a sense of who you are as a person.

But you probably have more limited knowledge who you are when it comes to the world of work.

You’re still learning what your strengths are, what brings you energy, and what tradeoffs you are happy making around money, lifestyle and purpose.

So let’s say that of all the possible careers, you suit about 10% of them.

If you are only aware of 10% of the possible careers, and only suit 10% of those, you’ve got to get pretty lucky to pick the golden 1% career that’s in your purview at age 18.

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Wow, that’s a bit depressing.

Don’t worry - it’s actually fine!

But knowing those odds, you have a couple of options 💭

1. Make a hard-to-reverse series of choices at 18 with limited information and hope for the best, OR

2. Focus on gathering more data about possible careers and your own preferences first to increase the odds of long-term satisfaction.

This is where ‘optimising for discovery’ comes in:

There are things you can only learn by direct experience, or by learning from those with direct experience.

Like a scientist creating structured experiments, you can use your studies, network, internet research, internships, volunteering, work experience, extracurriculars, early roles and more to gather data.

• Maybe you discover that you actually love working in small teams.

• Or that you prefer analysing numbers to working with words all day.

• Or that the day-to-day culture of an organisation is actually more important than the content of what it works on.

Whatever it is, by taking a bit longer to fill in knowledge gaps you can make a better decision about when to go all-in and commit to a career path.

For example, using our simple diagram:

If you understand 50% of all possible jobs, you’ve increased the number of jobs you know that suit you by 5X, and dramatically increased the odds of finding something that really works for you.

If you think about your career progression, optimising for discovery often looks like an S curve instead of a linear path:

Initially you might feel like you’re not moving as fast as your peers on a linear set-and-forget path, but once you make a better decision based on higher quality information, you see rapid growth 🏃‍♀️🏃‍♀️🏃‍♀️

After all, you have 80,000 hours to spend at work - why not invest a small portion of them in making the others dramatically better?

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💡 Tips on optimising for discovery.

Not sure where to start? Here are a few of our favourite techniques 👇

• Start with an audit of what you DO know:

  • What are my skills?

  • What are my natural abilities?

  • What brings me energy?

  • What lifestyle do I want?

  • What careers am I aware of?

  • How do they fit with all of the above?
    

• Do exercises that deliberately broaden your perspective

  • We like tools like government jobs reports for exploring the full range of careers available. And we love tools like ChatGPT for brainstorming!

  • Try a prompt like:

    • Here is what I know about my skills and preferences… (insert yours). Suggest 100 career paths / job titles which could be possible for me, in a table, rating each by salary, work life balance and exit options.

  

• Like a scientist, make a series of hypotheses or assumptions that you would like to test based on what you know now.

  • e.g. I think I would enjoy working in a social impact organisation with a focus on big public policy issues.

• Test your hypotheses with a series of low-cost reversible experiments & investigations e.g.

  • Do the work in a short-term paid, intern, volunteer or self-directed project capacity, or

  • Learning from those who have done it by reading, podcasts, outreach to people in the career path for quick coffees and the like.

• Keep a career diary and note down your observations as you go, building a richer profile of what’s available and what suits you.

“Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity” - Seneca

🧪 Case Study: say hello to Lucy, one of our co-founders.

Hey folks!

Lucy here 👋

I’ve used a few of the strategies we cover in this series, but optimising for discovery is the strategy I feel most passionate about advocating for.

And that#s because I have seen so many people who feel prematurely trapped in their careers, and don’t know what to do to get unstuck.

So I wanted to share my experience using this strategy - I hope it’s helpful to you, and if you have questions or comments, feel free to get in touch!

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No job, who dis?

After I left my job at the management consulting firm McKinsey, I felt a lot of self-imposed pressure to be visibly ‘on the right track’ and figure out what I was going to do with my career right away.

I was privileged to have a lot of lucrative exit options - but I wasn’t keen on the corporate strategy and private equity roles recruiters were sending.

What helped me get unstuck was taking about 18 months (all up) to run a series of structured experiments, before throwing myself 100% into the world of startups for the next phase of my career.

So here is a non-exhaustive list of all the things I tried:

• Short-term projects with a boutique consulting firm in the energy sector, which paid the bills and helped me learn more about energy issues,

• Writing half a movie, which helped me realise I enjoyed running dialogue in my head more than the lonely experience of writing for the screen,

• Pro bono projects helping civil liberties and human rights organisations, which helped me realise I enjoyed combining a strategist’s mindset with problems I cared about,

• Writing reports about the venture capital world for corporate readers, which helped me realise I was fascinated by the startup industry,

• Working on an academic project at the intersection of philosophy & public policy with a friend, which helped me realise I loved these topics but wanted to be able to see tangible, large-scale impact from my work,

• Joining a very early-stage healthcare startup, which helped me realise I enjoyed the pace and culture of startups but wanted a different team,

• And so on, and so on.

Did it confuse my family?

Sure.

Was it hard to explain my choices at parties?

Definitely.

Was cash flow a challenge?

100% - until I figured out how much consulting work I needed to subsidise my unpaid experiments.

But was it extremely helpful for understanding my preferences and the worlds I wanted to join?

Absolutely!

Optimising for discovery was also the most intense period of professional and personal learning I’ve had - and it unlocked the most productive and enjoyable phase of my career as well. If you’re feeling stuck at any point, I recommend it!

🧠 Keep in mind.

A few considerations to note before you choose this strategy.

• 🎰 Know when to go ‘all-in’: It’s easy to spin your wheels forever, so keep in mind a level of conviction or threshold for when to commit and work at a career path.

• 🎰 No-regrets moves: There are probably still skillsets and credentials you can acquire which unlock a wide range of likely careers, and you can invest in these in parallel to running a discovery process.

• 👀 Watch out for peer pressure & FOMO: Admitting uncertainty and taking time to discover what you want can be psychologically challenging, especially if you’re in a peer group where others project a high degree of confidence in their work. Remember that it’s your journey, most people think very little about you, and ultimately you’re the only one who needs to live each hour of your life, so don’t live it for someone else. 

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Found this helpful?

We created this series to help people realise their best careers - so if a post really resonates with you, we’d love you to share it! ✉️

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Keen for more? Check out the other posts in the series 👇

• Part 1: 👋 Introducing the Career Strategy Series

• Part 2: 🪜 Ladder Climbing as a Strategy

• Part 3: 👩‍🎓 Controlled Supply as a Strategy

• Part 4: 🥇 Excellence in a Power Law Field as a Strategy

• Part 5: 🔍 Niche-ing as a Strategy

• Part 6: 🧱 Skill-stacking as a Strategy

• Part 7: 👷 Be A Generalist as a Strategy

• Part 8: 📊 The Portfolio Career as a Strategy

• Part 9: 📣 Building a Platform as a Strategy

• Part 10: 🌊 Wave-surfing as a Strategy

• Part 11: 🏗️ Adding Leverage as a Strategy

• Part 12: 🌏 Proximity as a Strategy

• Part 13: ⏱️ Sequencing as a Strategy

• Part 14: 🧪 Optimising for Discovery as a Strategy