Simone Stolzoff

To that, I say, go out and try to do it.

At IDEO, this place that I used to work, we used to say, never come to a meeting without a prototype.

Being able to prototype your career will be the quickest way to tell you whether or not it is actually something that is desirable to you.

The other thing it'll do is give you a sense of agency.

Part of the reason why it's so hard to be in the job market right now is because all of these applicants are sending out their resumes and cover letters into the void and waiting for a hiring manager to take mercy on their souls.

It feels like they don't have very much control.

And the way that you can take back control is by trying to build something on your own terms.

It might not sound very optimistic at this point, but if you are curious about, say, building your own business or becoming an advertising art director or trying out your hand at coding, the best way to show your work is to actually do that work.

And that skill of being able to learn through building is going to be one of the most important skills as we go from a more sort of laddered version of what a career looks like into this more sort of meandering path age, this pathless path that we're all entering today.

So build to learn and don't wait for anyone else to give you permission to start creating the work that you want to be creating.

Yeah, so the first book is about how work has come to be so central to our identities.

And I talked to many different workers from Michelin star chefs to Wall Street bankers to software engineers at Google about how to think about their jobs.

And the main argument of the book is about the value of diversifying your identity.

Rather than putting all of your eggs in one basket, if you're able to diversify the sources of identity, meaning, purpose in your life, then it is a much more sustainable way to think about work's role.

I think it's also great advice for how to deal with uncertainty.

If all of your identity eggs are in your basket of being, say, someone who works at Google, and that job is taken away from you, maybe by no fault of your own, then it can drive you towards an existential crisis.

But if you have been able to diversify, to say, okay, I'm going to, you know,

Invest in my relationships over here.

I have these hobbies that really bring a lot of meaning to me.

I have work that is a source of meaning, but it's not the sole source of meaning.