A sorting strategy for resolving career anxieties

Hi Charlotte,

I've been in Austin for four weeks now, my savings are as low as they could ever be, and I really need to find a job. I have no work and no friends here--no anchor at all--and I think that's why I've been sleeping at random hours. At 4am the other day, I ambled off like a zombie to the 24-hour Whataburger and ate pancakes and sausage. The cashiers are starting to recognize me, but so are the bums that frequent at that hour.

I'm going broke, and I think that's the real reason my unemployment drought is coming to an end. I just woke up one day, and it hit me, "I need a job, I need a job, I need a job." I've always needed a job, but I've never heard my inner voice demand it so loudly before. I started visualizing myself running out of money, packing up, and driving back home to my parents' house in San Diego, and the thought just killed me. I told myself, "forget your hang-ups Phil, you're going to find a job."

So I went to craigslist, pulled up the jobs board, and wrote down nearly every single job that I could conceivably be eligible for. After an hour this amounted to more than 50 jobs. I then urged myself, "Well, what are you waiting for, apply to them!" I hesitated for a moment, making excuses like, "I don't care for any of these jobs." But then a idea popped into my head. What if I pulled up two jobs at random, and asked myself a simple question: "Which is more interesting?" What if I then did this for every job? Wouldn't the whole list be sorted from most interesting to least? So I ran this thought experiment, and in the process, good jobs got differentiated from bad jobs. Instead of having yet-another dead-end session on craigslist, I started to sense opportunity. So I then just blindly picked the one at the top of the list and applied to it.

The job is for a video game tester, starting pay at $7.50/hr. Looking at this job and the pay, I'm skeptical, especially coming from my experience of getting paid many multiples of that per hour as a freelance web designer. But I hate freelancing with every fiber of my being, and having some kind of work is better than wallowing around for months on end not making a single dime.

During the interview, the expressions on the interviewers' faces showed some incredulity. One man asked, "So I see you went to Stanford for computer science. Why not get a job as a programmer?" Another interviewer tried to scare me away: "You might find yourself testing a My Little Pony mini-game for a week straight, could you handle something like that?" I answered affirmatively, and I could tell they were trying to suss out if I was over-qualified for the job. I probably am over-qualified, but I've never understood what that means. Wouldn't you want someone who is more than capable of doing the job?

After the interview, though, their doubts became mine. "Why am I stooping so low?" I asked myself. "Maybe I should get over my hang-ups and apply for some job in programming." "This is insane, no way I can keep this up." I started to feel the same work anxieties I was feeling a few days ago. I started to feel like I was standing alone, in the desert again, with zero viable opportunities in sight.

The next day, I got an email saying I got the job, and my mood did a 180. I started to see the positive. I kept thinking back to that list of sorted jobs, and I kept wondering, "What if there's a reason for all this? What if there's a reason this job was at the top of the list?" Then it dawned on me, that maybe by throwing myself into this formula, of just picking the most interesting kind of work at any given moment, I'm subconsciously walking down the road to a fulfilling career. I've always loved video games, and the last start-up I worked on was a social-network for video gamers. And who knows, I've heard that you can jump from video game testing to video game design, and that may ultimately become my dream job. Maybe I've been so dissatisfied working all this time because I've either had to go all tech (boring, but pays well), or all liberal arts (really fun, but pays squat). And so this perfect blend may be where my instincts are taking me.

And now, all of a sudden, I'm filled with hope about work. If I ever get to the point again, where I feel stuck and hate my work and all the work opportunities in front of me, I'll just go to the jobs board and sort by interest. Done, I'll never be unemployed again. If I run this script enough times, it should eventually lead me to the holy grail: work that I love.