The 4 Types of Careers, and How to Find Yours

So you want to start a business. You might think you need a team of people and fancy text kills, but you don't. You just need GoDaddy Arrow. I'm Walton Goggins and as an actor, I'm an expert in looking like I know what I'm doing. GoDaddy Arrow uses AI to create everything you need to grow a business. It'll make you a unique logo. It'll create a custom website. It'll write social posts for you and even set you up with a social media calendar. Get started at godaddy.com slash arrow. That's godaddy.com slash A-I-R-O. Need anything from Tesco? Like Tesco Finest salted pretzel or caramelized biscuit chocolate Easter eggs. 12 pounds each with your Tesco Club Card or Tesco Finest extra fruity hot cross buns. Two packs for just three pounds because every little helps. Selected hot cross buns, majority of larger stores and online and 6th of April, Club Card or app required, exclusions apply. What type of career do you have? The assumption of a lot of business schools and a lot of universities and the whole education system for that matter is that we all have this kind of linear trajectory to our careers. Change when you can do better and you're gonna do that until well, the end. That's kind of how it works. That assumption is wrong. A lot of people burn out on their linear careers because they're actually not linear, but they should be doing is thinking about what's my next career gonna be. There's all the stuff out there about work-life balance. I've even mentioned it here. I don't like work-life balance. I like work-life integration where your job makes your life happier and your life makes your job happier because your job is part of your life. A lot of what we find in the research is that if you cultivate outside of work happiness, it bleeds into your work itself. Hi friends, welcome back to Office Hours. I'm Arthur Brooks. I'm a behavioral scientist dedicated to lifting people up and bringing them together in bonds of happiness and love using science and ideas. I want you in the movement of happiness to have more of it in your life and to bring it more to the lives of other people. And that's why I do this show. That's why I do my writing and that's why I'm so glad that you're with me. I'm so glad that you're with me. I'm so glad that you're with me. I'm so glad that you're with me. I'm so glad that you're with me. I'm so glad that you're with me. If you like this show, if this is not your first episode or if it is, please do share this. I want people to be exposed to these ideas because this is a toolkit. This is what I do is to make it possible for people to understand the science of happiness and how they can change their own habits and become happiness teachers themselves. I teach happiness at Harvard University and I write about it in the Atlantic. And I call them, I write every week called How to Build a Life comes out every Thursday morning. It's about 1200 words on a new topic on the science of happiness. So if you like this show, do subscribe to that as well. And while you're at it, pick up a new copy of my new book, which is right behind me, this handsome yellow book right here, The Happiness Files, Insights on Life and Work, those 33 essays, a lot like what you see in this show. Today I have a very special topic and that's how to manage your career. I wanna do three things in particular. What kind of career do you have? You might not know. I'm not talking about what substantively you do all day or what industry you're in. I'm talking about the four kinds of careers based on four different areas of human psychology. Hmm, this is gonna be useful to you, I dare say. The second is how to change jobs when it's appropriate and how to know when it's time to go. The third is what can you do to give yourself the highest likelihood of being happy in a new job? So these are the three things I wanna talk about. What is your career type? How do you change jobs? And how do you make a job as happy as it can possibly be? That's really what I'm all about today. Now, if you like the show once again, please do like and subscribe and give us any questions or comments that you've got anywhere where you're watching this. Send us an email at officehours.Arthurbrooks.com or just put it in the comment section below and we'll respond ordinarily and we certainly will read all of that. And once again, please do suggest this show to all your friends, especially if you enjoy it. Okay, let's get started. What type of career do you have? Now, this is a question that was asked by psychologists at the University of Southern California in the 1990s. It was a team led by a psychologist by the name of Michael Driver. I think this research is really, really super cool. Why? Because I love research that's counterintuitive. And I'm gonna give an example of what I mean by this. I teach at a fancy business school, really, really nice high quality business school. And we do so many things right. I love teaching there, but there's one thing that we don't always get right, which is this assumption that our students have one kind of career trajectory. We don't all assume they're gonna go into one industry. They're not gonna go into some into manufacturing and some into consulting and some into financial services. We don't make any assumptions about that. But we often make the mistake of assuming that our students are gonna have this shape to their careers. They're gonna come out of business school, they're gonna take a job, and then they're only gonna change jobs when they get a better job in terms of position or power or prestige or wealth. That's where they're gonna change. And so it's kind of a stair step approach up. Or you might think of as a linear career. Michael Driver and his colleagues in the 1990s, and then later this has been developed more. And again, once all this stuff goes into the show notes, so you can look at these papers if you want, I really recommend it, they're great. The assumption of a lot of business schools and a lot of universities and the whole education system for that matter is that we all have this kind of linear trajectory to our careers. Change when you can do better. And you're gonna do that until, well, the end. That's kind of how it works. That assumption is wrong according to Michael Driver. On the contrary, there's four different distinct career types based on your psychology and everybody who's a professional and one in some way, shape or form fits into one of these four career types. So I'm gonna tell you what the other three are and then I want you to think a little bit about what's your natural career type and a bunch of you watching this are gonna feel kind of seen for the first time, I dare say. Because I told you about that linear career type, that's actually one of them and there are people like that. But maybe you think that's how everybody thought I was or that's how I always thought I was, but I never liked that. I never liked that. I never felt, I felt confined to always do better, I always do more, I always make more, run faster. Here's the other three career types. One career type is kind of similar to that linear career type, but it doesn't go up as fast and it doesn't have as much change. It's called the expert career type. The expert career type is one that goes up a little bit, kind of cost the living and it almost never changes. So the linear career type I talked about before, you can be changing jobs every three, four, five, six years. Really, really common, but only when something better comes along. And the expert career type you almost never change because it's the one job and career that you have that rewards you a little bit more each year and a big part of your compensation is security and dependability. So a lot of government jobs are these expert career types, people who like this. A lot of people in academia, which is a sector I've been in for a long time, they like this expert career path. My dad was on the expert career path. He had the same job for literally decades and he got probably a cost of living advance, maybe 2.5%, 3% raise. He could count on it. He wasn't trying to make sure that all of his waking hours were dedicated to his work. On the contrary, he's paying attention to his family and he had hobbies. He was a really, really skilled woodworker. He's a good carpenter. And this job was one part of his life, but he wanted to make sure he always had it. So he had good work-life integration and balance, but he also had great security. That's what people who are on the expert path, what they look like. Now, a lot of you don't have that, but a lot of your parents and grandparents did. And I really respected a lot of the people who do. I don't have it, right? But that's only the second career type. And again, this is based on individual psychology. This is not based on the job, it's based on the person who seeks out these things. And one of the problems is when you're in the wrong career type with respect to your psychology, then you get really uncomfortable. I'm not quite there yet. The third is called the transitory career type. The transitory career type is the career type where you're kind of jumping between things all the time. You'll change jobs every one and a half to three years. And sometimes you make more, sometimes you make less, but that's really not the point. These are the people who say, I don't live to work. I work to live. These are people who have, their life is really outside of work, and work is kind of a necessary evil. And again, I'm not casting aspersions. I'm not saying there's something wrong with you if that's how you see things. That's just the life that you want. But the career that you'd see from that wouldn't be like my dad who taught at a university, same university for decade after decade. This would be somebody who moves around a lot. I was driving a moving van at a Tucson for a while, and then I met a girl in Bangor, Maine, so I moved there. It was a barista for two years. That didn't work out. So I went to San Diego and I always wanted to live in San Diego. It's such a beautiful place. And I got a job in a surf shop, and that was kind of cool, but you get my point, right? I mean, parents often worry that their kids have this transitory career path, but that's because they don't understand their children's priorities in life. You decide whether or not that's a good priority, a bad priority. I strongly suspect that most of you watching this don't have that career path, but it does exist. That's the third one. But now the fourth one. This is the one I want you to be paying attention to, because this fourth one is really super common, but most people who have it don't know they have it. This is called the spiral career path. The spiral career path ordinarily is a bunch of smaller careers stitched together in the mind of the person, and it has rhyme and reason according to that person, but maybe not to outward people, to people on the outside. This is usually characterized by job and career changes every seven to 12 years. This is something we often see. There's a lot of women who have this career path, and it'll be after school working in something for seven years and then stepping back a little bit because of family life and working part-time, perhaps, and then going back into the workforce, but it's something totally different that I've always been really interested in. And then seven or 12 years later, going in an entirely different direction, and you look at it from the outside to like, this has no rhyme or reason, but you talk to the person and she says, or he says, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Everything I did, I learned from what I had done before, and everything I did in my career was enriched by my past experiences. I can see it. Spirals are really interesting. Those are the big career changers. And a lot of people who are pushed by school onto the linear career path more, more, more, more, more, more change every three or four years because this is a better opportunity. It's a better opportunity in your field. You're not gonna change field, but you're not gonna change jobs because somebody appreciates you more there. They feel kind of out of sorts and they don't love it that much, but they'll do it. They don't quite understand why they're burning out. A lot of people burn out on their linear careers because they're actually not linears, they're spirals, but they should be doing is thinking about what's my next career gonna be. Now this was really interesting research for me because I'm a true spiral. I knew what I wanted to do for the rest of my life when I was nine years old. I wanted to be a professional classical musician. It's all I wanted to do. I literally wanted to be the world's greatest French horn player and that's all it was paying attention to all the way through school. I wound up dropping out of college when I was 19. I was completely unmotivated to be a college student. I just wanted to be a professional French horn player. So I went pro when I was 19. And through my 20s, that's what I was paying attention to. But in my late 20s, I started to get really restive. To begin with, I wasn't the world's greatest French horn player. I was a good French horn player, making a living, but I wasn't living up to what I wanted to be. And I also had done the same thing over and over and over again, having played chamber music for a while and I played in a symphony orchestra in Barcelona for a while. And I was teaching at a conservatory. And I thought, I'm gonna kind of do the same thing over and over again. And I wanna try some new things. So I went to college in my late 20s. I went to college through distance learning, as a matter of fact, because I didn't really have any money. But also I didn't have any time. I had a full-time job. And so I found a good place to study and I did that. And when I did that, I found I was super interested in all of these other things. I had no idea. I took a statistics class. Cool, I took calculus. Interesting, but what really lit me up was behavioral economics. I mean, just doing economics, I felt like I had this power to understand human behavior. But with a kind of a psychological twist, which is what I do now, right? But I didn't know it was so interesting. And by about two years into my college education, I'm like, yeah, man, I gotta make a change. I gotta make a change. So I was still working as a French horn player and I got my master's degree at night in economics. And then I'm like, I'm still hungry. And so I quit music. That was hard to do. I quit music when I was 31. It had been a long career. I didn't made my living full-time doing that for 12 years. But I had to do that so I could get my PhD. And I went and got my PhD in public policy, studying applied microeconomics and mathematical modeling with an emphasis on human behavior. And then I became an academic, starting to do the kind of stuff that I do now. And that was the first turn of the spiral. Now I should have known that there was gonna be more turns to the spiral, but I didn't know about this model. And sure enough, by the end of the decade, I wanted to do a new thing. And I left and I went to become the president of a think tank in Washington, DC. I was a chief executive, a huge nonprofit organization. And I did that for 10 and a half years. And then the spiral turned again. And I quit, I walked away. I'm really good at walking away from stuff, it turns out, which might seem imprudent. It certainly seemed really imprudent to my parents after some of these spiral turns. And I did what I do now, which is I went to Harvard and I introduced a class in the science of happiness. And I started doing all this stuff in media about bringing the science of happiness to you, which is the fourth turn of the spiral. But I've had these four incredibly different careers. People are like, wow, that's weird, man. French horn player to happiness professor. How does it work? And it's like, spiral career, baby. But you gotta know how to do it. And you have to have a confidence to do it. That's what I wanna talk about because a lot of you are spirals. And right now I'm talking about this. You're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, but it's not so easy, is it? Well, it turns out there's a lot of research that can help you spiral better. And even if you're not a spiral, if you're a transitory or an expert or even a linear, you're gonna switch jobs a lot and you need to know how to do it well to give the highest likelihood of being successful and happy over the process of doing it. So that's what I really wanna talk to. And then we'll come back to your spiraling. And I want you to be thinking about that along the way because you deserve to have a career of your own design. Your creativity should be made manifest in what you do with your life because your life is a startup. You're an entrepreneur. You incorporated, you're the founder. And you can do whatever you want with it so that you can have the love and happiness that should be your destiny. And you can bring the love and happiness that other people deserve and need too over the course of your life. But you're not gonna do it very happily or well if you're not in the right career path. If you don't know which of these things that you actually are. Okay, so when you are on almost any one of these career paths, you're going to change jobs. Almost everybody does. Our graduate students, depending on the data that you believe, are gonna have four different careers, whether they're spirals or not, they'll be in certain different industries and probably nine to 11 really different jobs even if they're all in the same career, in the same area, professional area. And so that means you're gonna be moving between employers and then the question becomes, how do you do that well? How do you do that happily? And how do you do that successfully? And there's a lot of research that can actually help that. Now, that for some people is super scary. There's two types of people that find changing jobs incredibly scary. Number one is people who are risk averse, naturally risk averse. These are people who have a fear that change is actually gonna hurt them because fear of the unknown is something that's particularly scary to them. And there's a whole lot of neuroscience about that but people who fear a lot of change, there's a lot of amygdala activity in the limbic system of the brain, et cetera, et cetera. You know who you are if you're a really risk averse person. Probably not very many of you watching this are this because you're probably pretty entrepreneurial and risk isn't your problem on the contrary. But maybe some of you are. And that's a normal thing. There's a distribution of people who hate risk and don't hate risk. And I've talked at different times about how to get better at taking big risks, how to have a little danger in your life. As a matter of fact, I'm gonna do a show about the importance of embracing danger. But I've done research on that and it's kind of cool. The second type of person who struggles with job changes are people who are high in conscientiousness. Conscientiousness is one of the five big personality traits. Openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. These are the five big personality characteristics. And the way that you remember this is ocean. Openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, neuroticism. That's how you remember it. That's how I remember it in the very beginning as well. And people who are really, really conscientious, they don't walk away from stuff because they have a commitment to it. So my dad, one of the reasons that he was on the expert career path, besides wanting to have a reliable career where there was security and predictability and work-life balance, is because he was an incredibly conscientious individual. And he felt that he had committed his career to a particular employer and they had committed his career to him. And that was the deal. That was the implicit bargain. Most of you, if you're under 40, you're like, what? Are you kidding me? That's insane, right? But that's old school. That's kind of the way that people were a lot back in the day. My dad was born in 1936. So there you go. So most people don't think that particular way, but conscientious people on the left, they do have a more of a struggle leaving their jobs. So they stay put, right? But that can be a problem, right? So it can be scary to move, but unhappy to stay. And by the way, that's actually getting harder. Interesting statistic today. In 2024, 51% of people said that they were looking for a new job. This is, yeah, this actually comes from the Wall Street Journal. 51% of Americans reported they were looking for a new job. That's really, really high, right? Actually, it's way down. During the coronavirus epidemic, some estimates said that 90% of people of professionals in the American economy were on the market. That's insane. But that's actually a function of the fact that a lot of people were not enjoying their jobs when they were having Zoom meetings all day long, which is pretty bad. I mean, even though it was convenient, it certainly didn't make you love your job more, which is one of the reasons that people were so keen to leave their jobs. So in other words, 51% is high, but it's going down. And one of the reasons that that percentage of people that are looking for jobs is going down these days is because the job market's getting harder. As I'm recording this, we have this weird situation in the American economy that economists can't quite figure out, as a matter of fact, where there's very few layoffs, but very little hiring. So the job market is sort of constipated. It's sort of stuck, is what we find. And that's one of the reasons that people are having really, really a lot of trouble when they're coming out of college finding jobs because nobody's leaving, but nobody's hiring, and nobody's laying off at the same time. And so kind of nothing's moving. So the result of that is that people are a lot more conservative than they'd been in the past. So it's hard, I get it. But even if you can find a job, the big fear that people have is, if I change jobs, maybe it's worse. Like let's say that you have a job that you're done with. If you're a spiral, how do you know when it's time to change? The answer is you're not interested anymore. If you stay in a job where your interest is waning, you're gonna burn out. Burnout is about interest, is what it comes down to. So that's how you know. If you're at the end of the seven to 12 year cycle, fellow spirals, you'd be like, you know, I used to love it, but no, not so much. Why? Because I'm bored and you hate being bored. You're a curious person. Spirals are always really curious people. But you'll worry, if I actually go into something new, am I gonna be happier? I was terrified of this when I left music. I was burned out and I was ready to go, but I'm gonna go to get my PhD and I was 31, 32, 33 years old and then become, I don't know, an economist. I don't know what I'm doing. I literally didn't know how to do anything except play the horn. And so this might be the biggest mistake of my life. And a lot of people said that. A lot of my musician friends said, you're walking into a hole, man. I mean, you don't know how to do this and you're not gonna like it. Or what are you, some sort of a square anyway? And it was super scary. I might not be happier. It got a little bit easier later, but when I was the chief executive of a nonprofit, you know, people around me, when I was walking, I was voluntarily walking away from this cool corner office job. People said, you're making the biggest mistake you'll ever make. I was walking into this, what I'm doing now. It is so great. I'm so happy that I did it. And part of the reason I had the confidence to do that is because I had experience in job changing at that particular point. Okay, now back to the question. When you change jobs, let alone careers, will you be happier? Now, I have data on this. And this is data that you can actually use. Job changers, people who are changing jobs, there's a reason that they're doing that, obviously. The average rating on a one to seven scale, and this is how social scientists always measure this, it's called a Leichert scale. And the reason they use measure things on a one to seven scale is it's got a midpoint because it's got that number in the middle. So which has nice mathematical properties. Job changers on average rate their old job in satisfaction whereas one is the least satisfied and seven is the most satisfied as a 4.5. That's the average. Your results may vary. Maybe you're like, there's a one. But if your job is a seven, you're probably not on the market. Right? So the average is 4.5. Now you'll wanna know what the satisfaction is and the new job on average. And we know what that is. The satisfaction jumps after switching in the two months after switching to about six. That's called the honeymoon effect, 4.5 to six. So probably when you change jobs, you'll be like, this is way better. This is way better. At the beginning, the problem is that it goes up for a few months and then it starts to go back down again. And what you find is that you get this bump over the first three or four months and then it starts to decline. And at the end of the first year, you find that generally speaking, it's down to about 5.5 at the end of the first year. You might call that the one year itch for jobs, new jobs, the end of 12 months. The problem is not that you like it less than your old job because 5.5 at the end of 12 months is still higher than 4.5, which is what you left. The problem is it was higher and then it fell. It fell a little bit. And that falling is lousy. It feels like negative progress. And a lot of people really suffer from that, which is the reason that you hear people often say at the end of 12 months, I think I might've made a mistake because it's falling and I know it's gonna keep falling and then I'm gonna like it less than the one that I left and maybe I shouldn't have left that job. Some people actually bail and go back. That's almost always a mistake as it turns out, more on that in a second. Now, how can you actually see things turn around again after that? Because now people in new jobs break up into two groups. Half of the people keep going down and half of the people start back up again after about a year. I know which group you wanna be in and here's how they differ. The groups that keep going back down and go back down to about 4.5, which is the job they left before or even lower, these are people, according to the research, and this is a really interesting study from the Journal of Organizational Behavior from 2023. It's a pretty new study that are self-centered about their orientation, about their career orientation. Now, I'm not saying that you're self-centered or a narcissistic or a selfish person, but you think about your career with respect to you only. People who have this self-orientation, self-centered orientation in their career, they tend to max out in the early months and then start going back down and by the end of a year, a little bit better than the old job, but it keeps going back down and pretty soon after about 18 or 24 months, they wanna change again. And they do have a lot of job turn. The people who start back up again after a year and they tend to spend a lot longer in their careers and so they can have a seven to 12 year run as a really happy spiral are called organization-centered people. They have an organization-centered orientation. In other words, they think more about themselves as a member of a team. And that's why it's so critically important for you when you're going from one job to another to be thinking about the team you're joining. Do I like this team that I'm joining as opposed to is this job gonna be good for me? If it's a good team, it's gonna be good for you is the whole point, but be thinking about the organization. I'm gonna be proud of this. Am I gonna be happy with these people? Am I going to learn and grow a lot in this job so that I can create more value for this company? Do I think that these managers are going to do a good job with the whole company that I'm part of? Or is it just kind of about me is what it comes down to. Look for the organizational centered job and try to align your incentives in that particular way. And you'll have a much higher likelihood of not hopping between things. And you're more likely to get a full turn of the spiral even if you are a spiral in this new career, seven to 12 years. That's what will give you the most satisfaction and the most longevity in the career. Now, next question. Will a change per se bring happiness or does happiness in life make it more likely that you'll get satisfaction in your job? You see what I'm saying here, right? I mean, there's all this stuff out there about work-life balance. I've even mentioned it here. I don't like work-life balance. I like work-life integration where your job makes your life happier and your life makes your job happier because your job is part of your life. That's the way it's really supposed to work. That doesn't mean it's boundary list. It doesn't mean you should be checking emails at 5 a.m. and 11 p.m. No, no, no, you shouldn't be doing that. You should be with your family and with your friends and reading the brothers Karamazov or something in those off hours to be sure. But they should fortify and strengthen each other in very beautiful ways. But the question then still is, if I'm happier outside of work, will it make my job change easier and better? Or is it just that the job change is gonna make me happier? And the answer is both. The answer is both. You should have to be more satisfied with your job, look for more life satisfaction outside your job. One of the biggest predictors of liking your job is liking your life. And I guess it kind of makes sense, right? Because happy people are happy in all different parts of their lives. But it's really interesting because, you know, there are people that I find who say, my home life is blissful and my work is drudgery. But it's pretty rare. And people in the same jobs, you'll find they're doing the same job, you know, like Mary and Paul are sitting in cubicles next to each other and they're doing data entry. And Paul's like, this is the worst. I wanna jump out the window. And Mary's like, this is a really, really good job. I like the people around me and I think I'm working for a company and I think it's pretty good and it's not always really interesting. Sometimes it's boring, but all in all, I'm really grateful to have this job. Why do they have these different orientations? And it has to do a lot more with the fact that Mary is more likely to have a happier life outside of work and Paul is likely to have an unhappier life outside of work. And you might be saying to yourself, it's because Paul's a naturally unhappy person. You've heard me say in the show that half of your happiness is genetic. You have a genetic proclivity. You know, your parents and grandparents gave you half of your baseline happiness. Literally your mother made you unhappy, sorry. But it's not all that. A lot of what we find in the research is that that if you cultivate outside of work happiness, it bleeds into your work itself. And this is a really important thing to keep in mind because for you to have a happier career, you need really good leisure hygiene. You need to take it really seriously. Here's the pattern that I see in my work. The people who work hard and are really exhausted and go home and don't do something generative and creative, but rather just scroll Instagram, these are the people who are unhappier about their non-work lives and they burn out more on their work as a result. You need to, as Stephen Covey said in the famous Seven Havids of Highly Effective People, sharpen the saw. And that means that when you're not at work, you're reading, you're learning, you're loving, you're spending time doing things that are incredibly generative, you're developing your spirituality. You're doing serious things that don't happen to pay you and you're hours outside work. And again, I'm gonna do a whole episode on leisure because structuring your leisure is so interesting and it can be so scientifically robust as well. But suffice it to say that if you're serious about your life outside work, your work is gonna seem a lot happier and your job change is gonna work better. Okay, now, here's the third question. Does it matter why you change for the likelihood that your change is gonna be successful and happy? And the answer is yes. So there's two reasons to change your job. We'll call them push and pull. Now, pull is you wanna do something else and so you quit. Push is your boss says, I think it's time for you to move on. For example, those are the two impetuses. And you know perfectly that when you're not in control, it's gonna be harder. Now, I know a lot of people who've said, my boss said that this wasn't a good fit and I had to go to work someplace else and I was really, really upset, it was really, really mad. But by about two months into my new job, I realized that my boss was right and I told her that. And that's great when that happens. But in general, it's more or less what you'd expect. That when it's a push motivation, that you don't control the timing and that's really uncomfortable, it can vary inconvenient for your life and it can be really hard on your family. When you don't feel like you have a sense of self-control, that is cognitively a high load on you. Then you worry about unemployment and you're worried you're gonna have to take something you don't like, it doesn't pay enough, et cetera. And frankly, it's just really crummy for your self-esteem. When your job goes away, even if it's not personal, it feels really, really personal. And for all those reasons, the push motivation is much harder than the pull motivation. That's an important thing to keep in mind because I'm gonna give you four things I want you to think about. And that's one of the things that I want you to be thinking about as you're contemplating a job change. Now let's go back to the four career types. If you are feeling burnout, it probably means that you're a spiral and that your spiral's turning. Kind of what it comes down to. And the reason is because the spiral turns when interest wanes, pay attention to that. You're not gonna suddenly be like, well grind more, work harder, reignite the passion, which people talk about all the time. Fellow spirals, you're probably not going to. You're probably gonna wanna go look for a new thing. And thank God for the free enterprise system where we have options. I mean, not everybody has options all the time. And some people are way more privileged about that than others, don't get me wrong. Some people can't do that, they can't do it. But a lot of you can. And what it takes is the imagination and the fortitude and the courage to say, I think the spiral's turning. And how do I know? Because my gut is telling me, I'm feeling a little dead inside. I'm fine for me to go. Maybe I need to go study first. Maybe I need to move. But all that feeds into the fact that you're probably a spiral as opposed to the linear but the economy and the education establishment told you all along. You might not be that. So when it's time to change, and incidentally, maybe you're on a three or four year cycle is a linear and it's time to change. Or maybe you're an expert and not of your own volition, your career went away. You know, whatever happens, something you had layoffs or you're a transitory. And you know, you met some, the love of your life across the country, which is why you change your job. I want you to be thinking about with a job change. Here are four rules that govern the best possible job changes. Okay, here's the four things that you can do. You should be thinking about to give the highest likelihood of a very successful, very happy job change. Number one, number one, manage your expectations. Spirals in particular are optimists. And I love that. But optimism is not the same thing as hope. Optimism is a probability of prediction. It's, I think things are gonna be good, right? I predict things are gonna be good. Hope is not that, by the way. Hope means something good can be done and I can do it. That's what hope is. Hope is active. That's the reason that hope is a theological virtue. In the New Testament, Paul talks about, you know, Saint Paul talks about faith, hope and charity. Right, he talks about, these are the three things. Let's see the three, you know, these three theological virtues. He doesn't talk about faith, optimism and love. You know, he talks about faith, hope and love, faith, hope and charity. So there's a natural tendency, if you're a spiral, to be always looking into the future and say, that's gonna be great, it's gonna be so great, it's gonna be so great. And this is gonna be great some of the time. But be realistic about the fact that, you know, you're gonna move from a 4.5 to a 6. And if you're organization-centric, then you can actually, you'll go down a little bit as the honeymoon is over, but you can start back up again. But it's not as if you're gonna go, it's gonna be the permanent seven, because the money's so good, and it's so interesting, and you're gonna love it forever. It's a job. It's a normal thing to not have it be perfect, in a perfect part of your life. So keep that in mind, manage your expectations, remember what things were like in the past, and don't pretend that it's gonna be Shangri-La, this perfection. That's just a grown-up thing to do. And I struggle with that. But the more that I do that, the better off I am. Second, look for your happiness first outside your job. Right? I mean, this is in general something that's important, because, you know, your job is gonna change, but you're always gonna come home to you. I hate, I mean. And so that therefore, coming home to you, the you that's at home, that's not at work, that circumstance, that ecosystem should be optimized as much as you possibly can. Always work on that first, because then, no matter what you're doing, whether it's the first part of the spiral, the end part of the spiral, whether you're burning out or freshen your job, wherever you are, whether you're in the honeymoon or not, it's gonna be better than it would have been otherwise. You're gonna get an extra point or two on that Likert scale. If you're working seriously about your non-work life, look for happiness outside work. Don't look for your life happiness in your work, exclusively. On the contrary, look for your work satisfaction in your non-work life by setting it up and taking care of your happiness hygiene. Third, this is a hard one. Jump before you're pushed. Most people know. I mean, sometimes there's, you know, out of the blue layoffs in your company. Or, you know, you get a new boss and the boss is a jerk and they come around and like you out, out, out, out. But most of the time when people talk about having gotten rift or, you know, losing a job for any reason, in retrospect, there were a lot of signs and they were hoping for the best. Hope for the best, I guess. I guess that's maybe optimism of how I, better how I should put it, based on how I defined that a minute ago. But most people know and pay attention to that because once again, if it's on the pull side, you're in charge. If it's on the push side, you're not. And push is a lot harder on you than pull. I recommend that when things are getting really, really dicey, if you can, you start looking at your options. That's just a prudent thing to do with respect to the likelihood of having a happy transition is what it comes down to. You can't always do it, I got it. But you can more than you think and by keeping your eyes open and playing heads up ball, that's just prudential judgment, which is not a theological virtue, it's a cardinal virtue if you're following the philosophy that I'm laying down here. And last but not least is, don't be afraid. Change is great, change is good. Now again, if you are a risk averse person or excessively conscientious, I guess there's no such thing as excessively conscientious, really, really conscientious, like my dear old dad, we can make you really reluctant and even fearful of job changes. But don't be afraid because change is super healthy, change is super good. I'm talking to my students all the time, yeah, it's okay to quit your job. It's fine to quit your job. Don't quit your job every six months because it's gonna be on your resume that you're a job hopper and it's bad for you. Plus you'll never be able to dig in, I got it. I mean, this is all within the boundaries of what makes sense. But especially for a spiral, walk away, walk away. I said this in a lecture last year and one of my smart savvy Harvard Business School students, wonderful, they're great. She puts up her hand and said, professor, in last unit, you were talking about family dynamics and you talked about how you can have a higher likelihood of having a marriage that lasts for a lifetime. I said, yeah. She said, in this unit, you're talking about careers and you're encouraging us to walk away when we lose interest. Why don't you talk to us about building a career that lasts a lifetime, but having a marriage that you change every seven to 12 years? I said, that is a smart question. And there's an answer to that. There's an answer to that because the spiral marriage pattern doesn't lead to ultimate happiness for the very reason that a lifelong partner, the person on whom you will be laying your eyes as you take your dying breath, is most associated with happiness. And it doesn't work out for everybody. I'll do an episode. I'm gonna do a bunch of episodes coming up on love and happiness and staying in love, et cetera. That's a really interesting topic and not everybody can have that. But if you can, that's really worth dedicating yourself to and it's very different than the pattern that you experience in the workplace. And no small part, because the relationships that you have in the workplace can be wonderful. They can be satisfying. They can be great, but your colleagues at work are not most likely gonna be the people that are around your bedside when you're taking your dying breath. This is the different kind of relationship. They are what Aristotle calls friendships of transaction. Useful friends, deal friends. Your ultimate real friend, if you're blessed to have it, is your lifelong partner. And that's why it's a different species of problem. So that's worth keeping in mind. And again, every case is different and there's aspiration. And sometimes it works out. But these are the patterns that we need to look at so that we can design our lives as optimally as we possibly can. Now, what I'm gonna talk about in a future episode is when you're getting ready to change jobs, what should you be looking for? I mean, what should you be looking for to know that the next opportunity is the right opportunity, but I'm gonna leave that for a future episode. Let me sum up. I've talked here about the four career types. And I've said that most of you were told that you're linear and that you should be really motivated and ambitious to go up that line, but you might not be a linear. You're probably not the expert career pattern, which is your father, mother, grandparents. You might be, but that's that steady state kind of career. You're probably not a transitory. You wouldn't be watching this podcast in the first place, but that's okay too if you are, which is kind of up and down and here and there and back and forth and changing a lot. Most likely, if you're not that linear, which people told you you were, it's because you're a spiral where you're creating on the canvas of your life a painting that is a series of seven to 12 year scenarios, professional scenarios. Sometimes you make more, sometimes you make less. Sometimes you do this, sometimes that. Changing. And then you have to venture. It's a new dawn once a decade or so, and that's a very, very beautiful thing. And if you are, you need to be pretty comfortable with what major changes are all about. And I've given you a whole bunch of ideas on how to do that, how to manage your expectations, how to see your career with respect to organization as opposed to self, how to make sure that you are focusing on the happiness of your life and not just the happiness of your job. You know, last but not least, if you can, making sure that it's about pull and not push. And then I gave you these rules. The four rules, once again, manage your expectations, look for happiness outside of work first, jump before you're pushed, and fear not. Get away! So embarrassing! They're growing up. Won't be long before the thought of a family holiday is just. But with Hilton's staycations all over the UK, we don't need to go far to feel close. Welcome! And with connecting rooms confirmed when we book, we'll have plenty of space to make the most of every moment. Everyone in the photo! When time away means time together, it matters where you stay. Book now at hilton.com. Hilton for this day. Project Hill Mary is the first masterpiece of 2026. The world is counting on you. Critics are in agreement. It's utterly spellbinding. So, I'm an alien. You are bravest human I have ever met. Project Hill Mary. His joke. I only meet one human. And is you. In cinemas now. All right. A couple of questions. We got some good ones this week. I got this one. I got a name this person by email. And this came in at officehours.orgtheverks.com. This is from Zeus Bear. Thank you, Zeus Bear. Cool name. Zeus Bear. My kids are grown now. And although I've never worked in my main job since being as a child, was as a caregiver to other people, now that my kids are grown up, people keep saying I need to use my education and talents and go to work. I have a lot of ideas, but I'm afraid I don't know where to start. 53 years old. What should I do? Well, there's one piece of information that I don't know, which is do you need money? Right? Because, you know, from what you've told me here, you might actually be relatively financially independent in the context of your family. It might be married to somebody who is earning as much money as your family needs, for example, because you've been doing caregiving to children who've now moved out. If you need money for that, at least some money, one of the things that I recommend is actually figuring out a way to work with people that you know, providing something that they need and where they trust you because they know you. This is a really good introduction into the workforce. You have somebody who has a retail establishment and say, hey, can I give you a hand? This is a really good way to do it. You know, one of my kids, as a first job, went and worked for the father of a dear friend of mine who had a farm and lived in the farmer's basement and learned how to become a farmhand. It's just based on these relationships. It was a good start. It was a really, really good start to his career. Learned a lot of job skills and was with people who knew him. It wasn't this transactional relationship. It was a little bit based on friendship. That's a good introduction to the workforce. If you don't need money, I really recommend volunteering because there's tons of people, ZeusBear, and they need you. They need your talents. They need your energy. At 53, you're loaded for bear. ZeusBear, sorry. Figuring out how to volunteer in your community can be a real joy. Who knows? That might be vocationally something you've been looking for for a big part of your life. Those are great questions. Keep them coming, my friends. Thank you so much for participating in the show. We've got comments. Leave the comments below, whether you're watching this on YouTube or listening on Spotify or Apple. We do read the comments and they really give us a lot of ideas. We appreciate it because we want to make the show better and better as weeks go on. Give us suggestions for people you'd like for me to talk to as guests because I like doing that too. Those are some of the really fun conversations and some of the most successful shows that we've had so far. Like and subscribe. Pound the subscribe button so it comes to you automatically and the algorithm gods actually start smiling on us and we get more traffic. This gets in front of people who haven't heard of us before, which is really great. Follow me on Instagram, on LinkedIn, on whatever your social media platform of choice is and you'll get all kinds of little short ditties and clips and things of not just this show but a lot of other things that I'm doing in media. In the meantime, order the happiness files, the handsome yellow book behind me right now for 33 essays as well as reading my call in the Atlantic. Please pass these ideas on to other people because the world needs to be a happier place and it starts with all of us becoming happiness teachers. I know you can do it. Hope you enjoy it and I'll see you next week.