[jakubp]

Imagine you think on that worksheet and... "What is a fulfilling career to you" -> "I don't know..." "What is your most valuable career capital right now?" -> "No idea, if I knew how to turn something I have/can do into capital I wouldn't be planning things on that level would I?" "What global problems do you think are most pressing" -> How the hell should I know? this is only based on what I read in the media, I have no exposure to those problems. "Which of your options are best?" -> "What? I don't even know which of the options might be worthwhile, let alone having criteria and confidence to judge them in the absolute..."

Etc. Etc. You get my point: based on my observations of decision making of people around me, our real difficulty is not in asking those questions, rather it's that we simply do not know what the answers might be. We have no insight. We don't know our greatest strengths (or weaknesses), we don't know what's our biggest career capital, we have no idea what the ideal career for us would look like etc.

We have little way of knowing other than trying things out and seeing how they work out. It's easy to say "ask yourself question X", but the problem for people is that they simply do not have answers to those kinds of questions.

So what can be done about this? Maybe if you get an experienced mentor who will guide you through answering those questions, that would be progress. I would love to see tools for that kind of thinking.

[sametmax]

Knowing what you want is half of the job indeed.

And then somewhere down the life you change that phrase to "knowing what you need" and you start all over again.

[pitt1980]

Right now I have a 3 and 5 year old

while they are not complete blank slates at this point, their range of future possibilities have not been significantly narrowed at this point

I've tried to put some thought into how to direct them such that their future possibilities won't be narrowed simply by wasting time aimlessly trying one thing after

here is the best I've come up with:

1) develop universal skills

There are some skills that are universally useful, regardless of what they wind up doing, My immediate thoughts about what would make these up are: reading skills, persuasive speaking skills (selling/negotiating), persuasive writing skills, some basic knowledge of the main ideas of human psychology, basic knowledge of the main ideas of rationality and logic, basic knowledge of the main ideas of probability and math, (added later after I considered it more), probably some basic financial literacy, probably some basic economic theory, (another edit) knowledge about processes to improve creativity

until you reach perhaps the top 10% of ability in each of those skills, any time you spend improving those skills will have good ROI, regardless of what you wind up doing in life

2) read a lot, and pay attention to the law of attraction

more skeptical readers will think this is BS, and in strict terms, it probably is bs, but it strikes me as useful bs

what I mean by this pay attention to what naturally peaks your curiosity, to what you don't have to make your self want to learn more about

our attention streams strike me as a mysterious but powerful force, sometimes you have to fight against them and do things that don't really capture your interests, but the less energy you can spend trying to redirect you attention, the more energy you can spend productively

3) the library is an amazing resource, when something captures you interest, dive as deep as you can for free at the library, dive deep at the library before you dive deep in life,

think being a programmer would be a good path?

Googling "book list for computer programmers" go through the first page, try to find 5 books the seem to repeat on those lists

read them, still interested? yes? great, now you have a lot more information to take next steps. no? that's ok, now you know a lot more about what computer programmers do

you can do this for any path in life, its a significantly cheaper method, in both time and money, for trying out a lot of career paths than getting formal credentials, and then getting a professional job in something (not that you shouldn't do those things, but those are expensive steps, you should take cheaper steps first)

I think this is an interesting blog post about diving deep:

http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2010/12/breakdancing-universe/

I think this is another interesting link, only tangentially related http://lesswrong.com/lw/4su/how_to_be_happy/