So for this person and everyone else out there who's stuck trying to find a career, what I'd say is like think about what you're passionate about first and then try to figure out how can I make this work as a job. How can I get compensated for doing this? How do I find a career when everything in life is boring to me? I've tried college and self-study in the past, but I never finished anything. I've switched majors like eight times and I was still unhappy. I just can't see, really see myself doing anything to be honest. In the past ten years, the only career fields I've worked on have been restaurants and clinics, working in the billing call center departments. I've hated them both because both are dead-end, low-paying, stressful, and soul-crushing. I don't care about being super rich, I just want to find something that pays decent and that also doesn't make me want to kill myself by the end of the week. This is something that I can absolutely sympathize with, empathize with.

Um, you know, I had a period of time in my life when I was like, really felt like everything was sort of a dead end, and nothing was really working for me. So, let's take a look at this because I think this is a really common problem. So, nowadays, a lot of people struggle to find a career and find everything to be boring, right? So, they're like, I tried this, I found it boring. I tried this, I found it boring. Like, How do I figure out what kind of career to have? So, I want to talk to you all a little bit about how we approach decision-making and how to find the right career for you, okay? So, the first thing is that we have this idea that we need a career, right? And so, we're sort of taught, like, societally, that there is... Oh, God, so this is a really common problem that people have, right? They'll say, like, How do I find the right career for me? Like, I've tried this, I've tried this, I did this.

for a while and um you know none of it really worked. I didn't enjoy it. How do I find the right career? So, the first thing to understand is that we tend to think about a career, right? We say to ourselves, like, Oh, like, I need a career of some kind. The other thing that tends to happen is if we look at how people make decisions, it's basically like monkey see, monkey do. So, I remember I was working with a, you know, a young patient of mine who um had started to use substances. And so, I was his addiction psychiatrist, and he had gone to a 30-day rehab, and he was trying to figure out, you know, what to do with his life. And I, you know, I was kind of asking, Okay, so like, what's your plan going forward? And he's like, Well, you know, I've got a buddy that works at an auto shop, so I think he can hook me up with a job. And so, it was really interesting because as I talked to him, what I realized is like the options that he was considering

are basically exactly what's in front of him. So, we as human beings tend to be like very monkey see, monkey do. So, like based on when we think about the options for like what we should do with ourselves, it tends to be based on things that are immediately available. Like, so I'm the child of two doctors, and I grew up in a small town in East Texas where three out of five of the Indian kids in my class, like in my grade, there were like five Indian kids that were in my grade in the entire city. Three of them wound up becoming doctors. So, when I was growing up and I went to college, like I majored in pre-med because that's just what people did, right? So, when we look at decision-making, what we tend to do is we don't actually make like objective decisions. We don't really look at all of the choices available to us. We tend to reach for the first thing that is available to us. So, like it's kind of weird because this is, there's a good um

exploration of this kind of thing in um who's that Nobel Prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman. So, I think he sort of talks about this. It's important in medicine as well, where one of the things that doctors are trained how to do is to not make decisions based on the first thing that pops into their head, or the second thing, or the third thing, or the fourth thing. So, a lot of times, doctors make mistakes when they sort of rely on like their first instinct to make a decision. And what we train doctors to do is something called differential diagnosis, which is to think through all of the possibilities before settling on one. So, I see this a lot where people are trying to figure out what should my career be. I've tried all this stuff. I've tried switching majors eight times, and it still hasn't worked. What do I do? So, I'd say the first thing to do is to take a step back and to really think about, okay, what are all of the possibilities here? Construct a differential diagnosis.

about how you can spend your time. And when someone says, I can't figure out what my career is, I'd say that's actually too narrow to begin with. Because forget about a career. Like, I, you know, even a career is maybe not like... The problem is that your mind is coming up with solutions that are already so narrow. So if your problem is that I don't... I can't find a career I enjoy, I think part of that problem is because your mind is narrowly chasing options for a career. And by doing so, you may actually miss out on all kinds of things that you could earn, like a livable wage with, but your mind won't even consider them because you're locked into this idea of career. Because the problem is that when you think about career, right, like, then you start thinking about things like call center. Oh, I can get a job at a call center. I can get a job at a billing department. I can get a job in food service. So you're reaching for the simplest thing, the most available thing.

instead of considering all of your options, so what I'd strongly recommend is take a step back from the idea of a career entirely. Even if we look at how we started a healthy gamer, like this is a mental health startup that's relatively successful, right? Like we're doing some good stuff, we're helping some people, things like that. I did not start out thinking I'mma create a mental health startup and quit my job. That is really not what I cared about at all. It was like, Hey, there's uh, there's like people who are really struggling in a particular way, and I'm gonna try to help these people because it seems like no one else is. And so when you're really thinking about what you should do, the first thing I do is take a step back from the idea of career. And so this person was kind of saying everything that I've tried is boring. So then what I'd say is like take even a further step back and ask yourself the question if you're trying to find a

non-boring career. Start by asking yourself, What do you enjoy? and forget about the career right. Start to think like, Okay, what was the, what's something that I'm genuinely interested in? What's something that I enjoy doing? What's something that I, you know, really like, kind of been passionate about? When was the last time that I really had a lot of fun doing something? When was the last time I was intellectually engaged? What do I care about? What do I think I can do to make the world like a better place? Like, what's some kind of problem in the world that I would like to have an impact on? And you have to be kind of careful here because your mind may go for more what we call premature closure because it may say, Oh, I'm really passionate about, you know, like equal rights, but I have no qualifications. Okay, and so then what your mind does is it'll say, Oh, that's not an option because I have no qualifications. That's a premature closure too. Thinking about a career is also a

premature closure. So, what we want to do is take a really big step back and then start to think about what you actually care about, what you find interesting. And then, once you pick a couple of those things, then what we're gonna do is like an investigation based on what you find interesting and what the purpose of an investigation is a couple fold. The first is like, it's really interesting because I don't know if you guys know this, but like there are professional DMs in New York City that will charge like $400 a week to run like a DM'ing session, right? And so, you may say to yourself like, I never realized that was a career. I don't even know if it is a career. But what some people discovered is that, Hey, I'm really, really passionate about this, and It does seem like there's a lack of good DMs. So, there's actually like people who are willing to pay like $400 bucks a week. You've got like, you know, people who are, you know, maybe investment bankers or

Whatever, like in New York City, there's like five people in the group. They're all willing to chip in 80 bucks a week, and like that's their entertainment budget. Because if you go out a single night, like you go to dinner and you get drinks in New York City, it's like 200 bucks at a minimum, right? So there's actually like supply, and there's demand. And like I've actually met some professional DMs, and it's kind of interesting. You may say to yourself, Oh, I never realized that was a career. And like, yeah, because we don't think about that as a career, right? It's not something that people around you are going to be regularly doing. But there are all kinds of niche opportunities for you to make a livable wage doing something that you love. And the key thing to get into that kind of thinking is to step out of the idea of a career. So I'd say start with something like thinking about what do you actually enjoy, what do you care about, what do you like, find interesting.

and then what you want to do is start to think a little bit about, okay, like, how can I pursue this? How can I make this work? And then something really fascinating will happen. So, let's say that you're interested in, like, you know, equal rights or whatever. Like, then the interesting thing is you may not have any skill set, but as you start to, like, move towards something that you genuinely care about, the ability to do things that you don't enjoy will become far more tolerable. So, the problem right now is that we have a group of people who, like, go to school and they have no end game in mind. They're not going to school for a particular reason that they're passionate about. This is something in addiction psychiatry that we call a competing interest. So, this is a really important principle. If you want to do something that's very, very difficult, you have to have a competing interest. So, in addiction psychiatry, if you want to get someone to quit smoking, smoking offers a strong biological reward. It

offers dopamine. It offers nicotine. It offers socialization. It helps calm you down. It's an easy way to meet people. So, smoking has all of these advantages, and it turns out that if you want to get someone to quit smoking, you can't just give them information and say, Hey, you're going to get heart disease, you're going to get lung cancer, you'll get bad complications of COVID. All of that information doesn't actually affect behavior. What affects behavior is a competing interest, something that you care about. And once you develop a competing interest, so you know, my favorite thing in terms of working with smokers is I'll ask them, like, What do they care about, right? What do they think is interesting? And so, I had one patient, and this is sort of the example that I use. So, I had one patient who was a smoker, and I tried to explain, and this is early on in my career, and so I tried to explain to them, I was like, Okay, if you smoke, you're gonna get lung

cancer. Do you want lung cancer? And he's like, No, I don't want lung cancer. Comes in a month later. I'm like, How's your smoking going? He's like, Oh, I'm still smoking. I'm like, Okay, you'll also get heart disease. You'll get a stroke. Comes in a month later, and he's like, Still smoking, right? So then finally, I get to talk to the guy, and I get to know him, and then it turns out that he's got a daughter, and he's like really happy, and like he's, you know, he likes his daughter a lot. And then, you know, I even try this sort of thing where it's sort of like, Hey, like, you know, if you want to stay alive and healthy for your daughter, like, you know, maybe you should quit smoking. He's like, Yeah, that sounds really important, but he still continues to smoke. So one day, we talk a little bit about, Oh, you know, would you like to walk your daughter down the aisle one day? And he's like, Yeah, absolutely. And then I

asked him, you know, when you walk your daughter down the aisle, do you want to be wheeling an oxygen tank behind you? And then he's like, no, right? So like, he's got this vision, he's working really hard, he's like trying to be a good parent, he wants to like, like be there for his daughter, and then it's about finding something that they care about. And once you develop that competing interest, that competing interest, that thing that you care about, then becomes enough to overcome all of the biology, all of the dopamine, all of the nicotine, all of the, you know, social aspects of smoking. And then over the next like six to eight months, he actually like quit smoking. And it's all about developing a competing interest. And the problem right now that I see is that a lot of people like find a career because it's logical, it's good on paper, but that logical advantage of like, oh, I should do this and should do this is not enough to actually overcome the suffering that you have to go

through for the career. So, as you think about what you actually care about, and then you enroll in a school with a purpose. And then, even though you don't want to take statistics, even though you don't want to take, you know, philosophy or like intro to chemistry, once you have a good competing interest, and you're like, Hey, this is something that I actually care about. I want to learn this and this. This is what I'm passionate about. And then what you do is you align your career behind your passions, right? It's not How do I find a career that I can enjoy? and like your passions are sitting over here. You start by thinking about what you care about, what you enjoy, and then you try to do like a very systematic process of making it work. So, I'd say like if we go back to this Reddit post, we can kind of see it pretty clearly that like, you know, I want you all to pay attention to this: How do I find a career when everything in life is boring to me? I don't think everything in

life is boring, right? What we see is that I've tried college and self-study, but I never finished anything. I keep on switching majors, and I'm still unhappy. So, the real question that this person should be asking is, What are you attracted to? What do you gravitate towards? What do you care about? What do you genuinely enjoy doing? And then be careful because your mind may tell you, Oh, you can't do that because x, y, z. And the cool thing is that when your mind tells you, You can't do that because xyz, that is actually going to be like your solution. So, as your mind tells you, You can't do that because you haven't graduated from college, then you know what you need to do? You need to graduate from college. Well, you can't graduate from college until you get into college. Okay, so then it sounds like what we need to do is get into college. You can't get into college without applying to college. Okay, then it sounds like I need to write an application. And the cool thing is then when you write your college application

and you write your college essay if you have that end goal in mind. Like when you look at your essay, it's going to be like, Why do you want to go to college? I want to go to college because I'm interested in supporting equal rights and developing countries. I want to go to college because I'm interested in esports. I want to study creative writing because I want to be a professional DM, and I want formal training in sort of constructing adventures and storytelling. Colleges love seeing unorthodox candidates that have interesting ideas about what they want to do, right? It's really fascinating. And what I found time and time and time again is that people who are able to do this process of taking a step back, really think about what you enjoy doing, think about what you're passionate about, and then if you have to make some sacrifices along the way to get to where you want to go, it works out really, really well. So for this person and everyone else out there who's stuck trying to find a

career. What I'd say is like think about what you're passionate about first, and then try to figure out how can I make this work as a job. How can I get compensated for doing this? And like literally, it was like I enjoy talking to gamers all day. Like that's what I like doing. I like helping people with their problems. So one way that I was able to turn that into a career is by going to medical school and becoming a psychiatrist. But then I was also like, you know, that's not sufficient for me. I actually like vibing with chat. So what are we gonna do? I guess maybe I'll start streaming on Twitch. And like I don't know if y'all get this, but like I just started streaming on Twitch one day, right? Like I had like 10 people who were viewers, and then we had like 15, and then we had 50, and then we had 200. We were like sitting around 200 viewers for a couple of weeks. And if you're passionate about something and you kind of give it

your all and you try really hard. It turns out that I think the world will kind of respond to you like pretty well, and that's why we have professional DMs. We've got people who are like, Hey, I really love DMing, and like that's their job now. So what if he doesn't know what he enjoys doing or he lost interest in everything he used to love, like me? So that's a great question. So then the question becomes, how did you lose interest, right? Because that passion is there, it's just buried. And so then, well, I think we'll have a couple of other posts today that may relate to that, but like interest is something that is not like gained or lost. I think it tends to be buried or not buried. So a case in point, like I had COVID the last two weeks. So like all of the things that I was passionate about and interested in, I didn't care about, right? Like when you've got COVID, you just don't care about anything. You're kind of anhedonic.

even playing video games and stuff would like not be fun. So then there's like a process of sort of uncovering what you enjoy, what you love, like where did you lose sight of it, what made you lose sight of it. There are also all kinds of like physical things that you can do, right? You can take care of your body, and then your interest will naturally grow. So you can do stuff like yoga, meditation, eating healthy food, like all that kind of stuff is going to be good for you. You know, if you go see your doctor, you know, get your vitamin D levels checked, get, um, you know, there are all kinds of biological things that can result in a lack of motivation. So you can kind of work on some of those things and remember that just because you've lost your interest doesn't mean that you can't find it again. You have to really figure out how it got buried.

How to Find a Job (That You Care About!) | Career Advice

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