My last blog post talked about the exploration phase of figuring out what options are available vs. the selection phase when you choose what you’re going to do next. I mentioned the importance of paying attention in the exploration phase, to “be more critical in trying to tease apart the common patterns that make one option sing to you when another doesn’t”. So what do I mean by that?

When I was first thinking about leaving my physics PhD program, I didn’t know what to do with my life. I was talking to a friend about the possibility of taking a few months off to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. He said that was the stupidest idea he’d ever heard of, and explained that I’d never figure out what I wanted to do by thinking about it; I’d only figure it out by trying things and seeing what worked for me and what didn’t. Thinking about a job wouldn’t tell me what it was actually like; only doing it would give me that information. I thought that was wise advice, and I’ve followed that philosophy ever since.

My next big realization in how to think about finding my path was several years later. I had dropped out of grad school to become a programmer because I was good at getting computers to do what I wanted. I had done that at a few different companies, but I was starting to hit my ceiling as a coder. I went out for a beer after work with my coworkers on a Friday evening, and was chatting with Brett, the lead software developer. Brett excitedly said to me “Eric, do you know what’s great?!” “No, Brett, what’s great?” “My fiancé has to work until midnight tonight! That means I can go home and code for four more hours! Isn’t that awesome?” “Um, that’s great, Brett!”

I love telling this story because it’s such a great example of somebody doing the thing that he loves. Brett loved writing code so much that he was super excited to get to do more of it on a Friday night for fun, and his eyes were shining with that excitement. I, on the other hand, did not love writing code. I never programmed on my own time, and I didn’t have a hobby of learning the latest and greatest languages. I was never going to be able to keep up with somebody like Brett in terms of my professional development as a programmer because I just didn’t love the activity of programming the same way that he did.

In retrospect, it should have been obvious what excited me the same way that programming excited Brett. I was spending my nights and weekends reading sociology, speculating about management, and generally thinking about the question of how people work together. Or, as I put it in my purpose and meaning post, “helping people do something new”.

To help others figure out what similarly engages them, I will often ask people in career coaching conversations about their last several jobs, and what aspects of those jobs excited them and gave them energy, and what are the things that drained their energy. As we examine those two categories, we can start to draw connections and figure out the underlying patterns. We can also look at what they spend their free time doing — what would they do with a free Friday night like Brett? And then we can figure out what jobs might offer more of the aspects that energize them, and less of the aspects that drain them. We are looking for the activities that make their eyes light up.

And, as my friend noted, this search for a meaningful job is not solved by thinking about it, but instead by trying things out. That doesn’t necessarily mean trying different jobs, and immediately quitting them if they don’t feel right. As I mentioned in my small steps post, there are a number of possibilities to learn more about a job before doing it.

• You could do an informational interview with people who have the job, as I did when thinking about getting into coaching.
• You could try on aspects of the job in a volunteer capacity e.g. writing code for an open source project.
• You could start attending talks and meetups for the community of people with those jobs.

Each of these will let you learn more about what being in that job would actually be like, and may even potentially make it easier to get hired into a similar job later by making connections or having volunteer experience.

Another thing to remember is that no job is perfect. Every job has sucky parts. The question is whether you enjoy the other aspects of your job enough to tolerate the aspects you don’t like. Thus, every job requires discipline, which one commenter described as the “ability to push through unpleasant, but necessary things to reach a goal”. But with some experimentation and research, you might be able to find the right balance of job attributes, where the great parts make your whole day, and the other parts are tolerable.

As you try different things in the exploration phase, you will start to see patterns of what aspects of a job are essential to your happiness in the job (what makes your eyes light up), and what aspects are so demoralizing that they are intolerable. As you get clearer on those patterns, you can use them as the requirements for selecting your next job, as described in my last post. And if you use a set of criteria that lead you into a job that isn’t a good fit, adjust the criteria and try again.

This post has primarily been about finding a job that suits you, but the same exploration process can apply to the other activities I discussed in my last post, such as dating or house hunting. Pay attention to what attributes make you light up, and what drain your energy, and start looking for patterns; I find journaling very helpful in starting to see those patterns. It was certainly eye-opening for me to start to figure out what I actually needed in a relationship vs. what I thought I needed, which changed my whole approach to dating last year. Once I had a better sense of the patterns, I could be more selective. Exploration, and then selection.

Originally published on my blog (trying an experiment in re-publishing on Medium to see what happens)

1. Empathize: Observe and engage and listen to the people you want to help. Ideo once did a design session for Nightline on re-designing the shopping cart, and step one was to go to a grocery store and watch people, figure out what was difficult with existing shopping carts, and the workarounds they used.
2. Define: This is where the team sifts through their observations and figures out the specific problem they want to address. This is also where the team has to decide on the specific user (or composite user) they are trying to help — design works best when it is specific. The classic example of this is the Oxo Good Grips series, which was designed for older people with arthritis who couldn’t use many kitchen utensils. But it turned out that utensils that were easier to use for those users, were easier for everybody to use.
3. Ideate: This is the brainstorming phase where the team generates as many ideas as possible around the problem statement. Everything goes in this phase, and the rules of brainstorming apply, where nothing is discarded or rejected. In fact, it is often encouraged to build on wild and crazy ideas (“Yes and”) which can lead to exploring interesting and fruitful solution spaces.
4. Prototype: This is the experimentation phase. Make quick prototypes, the simpler the better, to test whether the ideas from the previous phase actually solve the defined problem for users. The goal here is to test possibilities, and sift through ideas quickly by failing quickly and cheaply. The d.school brief emphasizes is that it’s important to know what each prototype is testing, so you can learn from the prototype — a failed prototype is not a waste of time because it should answer a question.
5. Test: This is where you refine prototypes and solutions by bringing them back to the user and learn whether they actually solve the user’s problem.

In general, the design thinking process is not linear, but involves iterating within each phase, and among the phases e.g. the team may need to bounce back to the Ideate phase, or even the Define phase, to come up with new ideas if they learn something new about the user in the Test phase.

Design thinking is being used around the world to create better products and services, and I think that it would also be a great process to design a better self. What I mean by that is that if I accept that much of my behavior is under my control, and that by changing myself, I can change the subjective (and possibly objective) world I live in, then the question becomes: who do I want my future self to be? That sounds like a design problem, and I think it would make sense to apply design thinking to engage with it.

The first stage, as outlined above, is the Empathize or Observation stage. Part of the benefit of being in therapy for the last year is that I’ve gotten better at observing myself and noticing my reactions in situations. One specific example is when I have been emotionally triggered — when I notice that, I am learning to separate the stimuli from the more painful experiences that created the trigger. The process of deconstructing what happened also makes it easier to get the view from the balcony — getting out of the emotional fray and taking in the bigger picture.

The next stage is the Definition stage, where I take what I learn about observing my own behavior and reactions, and define what aspects of myself I want to work on. For instance, I have sometimes in the past had the tendency to dismiss others and/or blame them for getting in my way. Noticing that about myself is part of what prompted me to start focusing on being generous. Another example is that I noticed that it is easy for me to be unaware of my own privilege, which led to a focus on practicing gratitude. The goals here can be general (e.g. “I want to be more social” or “I want to be in better shape”) if you are clear on what those goals mean to you. In the next phases, we will be experimenting with specific behaviors and you will need to decide whether those behaviors are successful or not at helping to achieve your goals — in other words, how will you Test whether the experiments are successful?

The next two stages, Ideate and Prototype, are where things get really interesting in applying design thinking to myself. This is where I start brainstorming different ideas for me for me to change my behavior, and experiment with those changes. Doing quick experiments in behavior change is the challenge here. For me, it often starts with “can I display this behavior for 15 minutes?” Alternatively, I can decide to bias my normal decision making process, as I did with my Year of Yes, where I said Yes to several adventures that I previously might have declined out of anxiety and uncertainty. Or I can try to go into situations with a different mindset (e.g. gratitude or generosity) and see whether things go differently for me.

This can even work with more prosaic goals like “eating better”. With free food being available all the time at Google, I put on some weight after I joined because I didn’t have the willpower to say no to pizza and fries and sodas. But over time, I’ve found some strategies that work for me. One was to mechanically substitute water for soda whenever I went to the kitchen — I don’t always manage it (and when I don’t, it’s generally a sign that I’m having a bad day), but it definitely helps. Another was to always go first to the salad bar in the cafe at lunch, and fill a bowl with salad. I’ll often add the prepared meat and veggies to the top of the salad bowl, but I’ll add less than I would if I were starting with an empty plate. And making that my default behavior in the cafeteria has definitely helped with eating better.

Along those lines, one thing that really matters for me is building habits. As was clear with eating better, willpower alone is not enough — I won’t make the right decision every single time if I always have to choose. So it’s building the habit of always going first to the salad bar. Or of reaching for water rather than soda. Or when I was training for my bike rides last year, it was waking up every Tuesday and Thursday morning and always getting on my bike to join the group ride. If I was trying to decide at 6am if I felt like getting on the bike, I wouldn’t, so it was important to not give myself a choice — if there was a group ride, I was going.

The group bike rides highlight another strategy of how to sustain behavior change, which is enlisting allies and finding a new community. By riding with a regular group, it made me more likely to get up in the morning to do those rides before work, and helped reinforce the habit. Riding with that group also gave me a new sense of what was possible — I went from thinking riding 40 miles with a big hill was really long and hard, to thinking that was a nice warm-up, because I was riding with people who regularly ride 100–200 miles in a day. Changing the people we spend time with changes our notions of what is reasonable or possible — I would never have thought I could do Death Ride if I hadn’t spent a year riding with people who had done it.

One last experiment that worked well for me was designating myself as the Unrepentant Generalist. Back in 2006, I was frustrated with my career, and kept getting stuck on the idea that I had to pick one thing and just do that. I was interested in all the things. And so I said I’m going to stop apologizing for who I am — I am a generalist and I’m not sorry about it, and that’s when I renamed my blog to the Unrepentant Generalist. And the interesting thing was that once I rebranded myself that way, it helped to change how I saw myself — that I should embrace that aspect of myself rather than try to fight it. It also changed how others saw me and helped me to find similar people, as another illustration of the strategy of finding a community.

To be balanced here, I have not yet figured out how to consistently change my behavior. I have been trying for years to develop the habit of doing pushups and core exercises in the morning to develop my strength. I have tried to commit to just doing 5 minutes — that didn’t work. I joined a Facebook group of friends to have accountability partners — that didn’t work. I tried using music to motivate me — that didn’t work. I tried to get motivated by having my friend scorn me for not being able to do as many pushups as her — that didn’t work. So I’m still experimenting to try to figure out how to make that behavior change happen. I think I need to reframe it somehow.

The point here is not about the specific experiments or strategies for behavior change — it’s about using design thinking to be more purposeful and systematic in making those changes.

• Empathize: What do you observe in yourself that is driving your current behavior?
• Define: What behavior change do you want to create? What different actions do you want to be choosing?
• Ideate/Prototype: What are some different ways you can move towards our goal? What are some quick and easy experiments you can try? Is there something you can do today that will give you an idea of whether the behavior change works for you?
• Test: Which experiments work? What sticks? Then go back to Empathize, and think about why certain experiments work better than others? For the ones that don’t, is it because this particular experiment doesn’t click with you, or is it that the problem definition isn’t right?

I leave you with this challenge — can you be more purposeful in designing the person that you want to be?

[republished from my blog]

Design Thinking for the Self was originally published in The Overlap on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

One powerful distinction that was discussed was the difference between identity (“I am”) and action (“I do”). This seems like a subtle point at first, as “we are we what we do”. But when we frame the world through the lens of identity, it becomes much harder for us to change. Identity is the story we tell ourselves and defines us. Changing one’s identity is a perilous and scary process, and not something that we generally want to undertake. And the very process of saying “I am this” also generally implies that “I am NOT that or that or that”, which closes off possibilities. We tend to choose actions and behaviors that reinforce our existing identity, even if we don’t necessarily like that identity.

Imagine the flip in mindset that occurs when we stop saying “I am” and replace it with “I do”. To take a personal example, I said “I am not a social person” and “I am an introvert” for most of my life. So when given the chance to go out to a party or join others in an activity, I generally demurred and chose solitude instead, which is why this blog had so much content from 2003 to 2009. And it was just the way things were because that was who I was, so why fight it? But a few years ago, I re-examined that identity assumption, and realized I was choosing to not do social things, and I could change that by just saying yes instead. And now I have a thriving social life that is far richer than what I had before.

This identity vs. action duality also reflects what Carol Dweck calls the fixed and growth mindsets. The fixed mindset assumes that we have a fixed amount of talent or ability, and it can’t change, so when we are unable to do something, it is because we don’t have the innate ability (aka identity). So when we fail at a math test, it’s because we aren’t good at math. This turns into a vicious circle, because if we aren’t good at math, then why bother trying, which leads to poorer performance, which reinforces the initial belief that we aren’t good at math.

The growth mindset instead assumes that we can always grow and improve. If we are bad at math, we can practice it and get better at it — Dweck uses the analogy of getting stronger by exercising. This article mentions a study where “a total of 50 minutes [was] spent teaching not math but a single idea: that the brain is a muscle. Giving it a harder workout makes you smarter. That alone improved their math scores.” It is a much more empowering mindset, as we can always get better by applying ourselves — effort and trying is what matters, not results.

Another angle comes from Brene Brown, who does powerful research on shame and vulnerability. In her books, she points out the difference between shame (“I am bad”) and guilt (“I did something bad”). In her book The Gifts of Imperfection, she notes “Shame is about who we are, and guilt is about our behaviors. … Guilt is just as powerful as shame, but the effect is often positive while shame often is destructive.” The reason for that is that when we feel guilty about something, we apologize for it, make amends, and change our behavior so it doesn’t happen again. When we feel shame, we beat ourselves up and either hide (I don’t deserve to be seen) or attack (other people are just as bad)… but we don’t change our behavior because we think it is just who we are.

When we want to make a change in our lives, we have to get away from holding onto the behavior or attitude as being part of our identity. If it’s part of who we are, we can’t change. But if it’s just a behavior, then we can wake up one morning and choose to do something different. And by practicing a different behavior, we can slowly change our perception of ourselves, and by doing so, change our identity. It’s a powerful idea to me, and one I plan to explore more as I choose to spend more time writing.

[republished from my blog]

Choose Action over Identity was originally published in The Overlap on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.