# A Cognitive Framework for Choosing Your Next Career Move

A year ago, I left Y Combinator feeling somewhat lost, unsure of what to pursue next. Many around me were confident about the right path forward, but I wasn’t convinced, and most of their suggestions didn’t resonate with me.

As I pondered various paths, I realized I lacked a suitable decision-making framework. My intuition wasn’t helping because I found many things interesting. I sought advice from friends, and Henrik Verdelin shared a decision-making template that was exactly what I needed to figure out my next steps.

While I was applying his advice, something strange happened—many of my friends began facing the same dilemma I had just overcome. Perhaps we’re all experiencing a natural career evolution, an early mid-life crisis, or the lingering existential fears from the prolonged pandemic that are disrupting our preconceived notions of how we should organize our lives.

In any case, I found myself repeatedly discussing decision-making methods, and I decided to encapsulate this into a post.

## The First and Most Important Thing to Remember

There is no perfect career decision, and there are no decisions without risks. Moreover, no one really cares about what you do. This is especially hard for achievers to accept and even harder for those who have achieved public success. It might be toughest for people who feel that nothing they’ve done aligns with their identity (their self-perception and internal expectations).

## Next Steps: Create a Few Lists

The next thing you need to do is create several lists. Specifically, three lists.

## First List

The first list involves listing all the qualities you want to see in your new role and what you want to gain from that role. These are high-level descriptions, such as:

• Work with genuinely fun people.
• Easy commute to the workplace.
• No weekend work.
• Earn at least X amount.
• Colleagues in person are as you are on social media.
• Work relates to personal experience.
• Interesting opportunities arise in the future.
• Other points.

It’s perfectly acceptable to add very personal and possibly unexpected items for yourself. Maybe you want fewer risks or ambitions than you showed before. Maybe you know you’ll never be happy with your boss. Write it down.

## Second List

This list includes all the positions that seem interesting to you. Try to go beyond your current experience and think about things you’ve always found intriguing but never seriously explored. You’ll likely cross out most of them, and that’s okay. You might include:

• Pursue a Ph.D. in American History.
• Work in an office setting.
• Join government service.
• Launch a software development company.
• Become a baker.
• Start your own hedge fund or work for one.
• Create an NGO.

Obviously, this list will be based on what you already know and what you aspire to. Some things will be impractical, and that’s fine.

## Third List

This is a list of people you know and would like to work with. Sometimes this list is long, sometimes it’s short. There’s no right answer here.

Once you’ve completed these lists, start connecting items together to notice which combination of qualities, roles, and people seems like the best career fit.

There’s no science to this. You might decide that salary is the most important criterion and prioritize it accordingly. Usually, the balance is more noticeable. What helped me the most was forcing myself to list all options, interests, and criteria. I had never done something like this before, and the task made me think hard and seriously consider what I wanted and didn’t want.

This process took me some time, and eventually, I chose the optimal combination in a way that leveraged some unfair advantages in my career. I arrived at an answer but was still too scared to try what I had discovered. At that moment, another friend, Omri Dahan, gave me the last puzzle piece I so needed. He pointed out that I was trying to find the optimal combination for a long-term solution and suggested narrowing the planning horizon to six months instead. I hadn’t considered that very few career decisions are permanent. I thought I was choosing a job I would follow for the rest of my life, but that’s not the case. I’m merely choosing the next thing I want to learn and try. I was fortunate to apply this advice to myself and give it a try. Eight months later, it became clear to me that I made the right choice based on how much I was able to learn and create. Perhaps what’s important to me is that the problem only gets more complex and increasingly interesting. Nevertheless, I still remember that this is just another experiment I’m conducting until I lose interest in it.

# Notes

1. I want to clarify that “what to do” and “work” are not necessarily equivalent terms. I’m using them to indicate that this doesn’t concern family and personal life. Someone might do the exercise and decide that nothing is more important to them than family and personal life. I’m happy for them, but my own desire is a balance between family and work.

2. Making a note about personal experience, I understand that this might not work for everyone. But if you find it useful for yourself, great!