Insight

Nadia's Spreadsheet Had Thirty Career Options

Mihaly·Tuesday, August 18, 2026 Edition

THIRTY OPTIONS, ONE ANSWER

"I think I've been planning my career instead of living it," said Nadia Osei, setting down a laminated spreadsheet — thirty rows, color-coded by salary band — after a weekend workshop on professional development. She was twenty-nine, had changed jobs twice without feeling she'd arrived anywhere, and looked more relieved saying it than worried.

A plan tells you what you intend to want; only the work itself can tell you what you actually want. This matters because attention is how we actually know anything. When challenge and skill are matched, when goals are clear and feedback is immediate, attention locks and the self goes quiet — that is the signature of flow, and flow is the most honest signal we have about fit. You cannot simulate that from the outside. A plan built on imagination asks you to commit before the signal fires.

A plan tells you what you intend to want; only the work itself can tell you what you actually want.

In the early 1990s, designer Bill Burnett began teaching what he called life design at Stanford — the recorded lectures exist — and the central move was always prototyping over planning: find the smallest real version of the thing and run it. Not a thought experiment, not an informational interview, but an actual small engagement with the work. The prototype surfaces what the plan conceals: how time feels inside it, whether energy arrives or drains, whether the challenge is alive or flat.

THE EXPERIMENT YOU CAN RUN NOW

Nadia's spreadsheet, for all its columns, couldn't do that. Consider the hour before you pitch your manager on a new direction. You've rehearsed your arguments. What you haven't done is worked inside that direction for even a week — written the thing, made the thing, sat with the problem until it resisted you. Take the next six weeks and find the smallest real version of the role that interests you most: a freelance project, a volunteer slot, a short collaboration with someone already doing it. Let your attention — not your ambition — report back. If time disappears, that's data. If it drags, that's data too, and it's better to have it now than after the offer letter.

The life that fits you is not waiting at the end of a good enough plan. It surfaces through contact — with real work, real resistance, real time spent inside something that either holds you or doesn't.

🎯

Try This

Name one role or direction that interests you and find a single real task associated with it — not research about it, but an actual piece of the work — and do it for two hours this week. Notice whether you need to remind yourself to check the clock, or can't stop checking it.

How?

Key Facts

*A career plan tells you what you want to want; a short experiment tells you what actually holds your attention under pressure.

*Flow requires challenge matched to skill — and you cannot know whether a role provides that match until you are inside it, doing real work.

*Treat the next six months as a prototype run: pick one adjacent possibility, find the smallest real version of it, and let your attention report back honestly.