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"What do you want to be when you grow up?" isn't just a question for children. Revisiting this throughout your adult life helps you stay in touch with your changing interests and skills and figure out if the path you are on is still the right path for you. This self-reflection empowers you to make good career choices, embrace new opportunities and make sure your professional life is continuously challenging and fulfilling. In this blog, I provide the formula to empower you to answer this question and figure out what's next for you.

Last week, Elad Verbin and I had an interesting conversation with a friend over dinner. After spending a few months unemployed, our friend was about to start a new job. He had hesitations. He wondered: Was it the right job for me? Will this job give me the chance to have more impact on the world? Does this work inspire me? Then yesterday, I had a similar conversation with a new friend at a party. In between jobs, she wondered: What is the right path for me? Do I double down on a highly technical field or do I forge a new path elsewhere?

These conversations made me realize something important. Midlife career crises are happening now more than ever. In our parents' generation, people typically had one stable, long-term career throughout their adult lives. These days, this is actually rare. The world is still adapting from the existential disruption of covid and meanwhile AI has changed the way we work, communicate and collaborate. All of this has convinced me: our futures are not written in stone.

A thoughtful self-discovery journey brings empowerment and opportunity, but you have to know how to take advantage of it. If you have found yourself wondering what to do next, I am happy to tell you that I have written the formula to help YOU find your new path. (Note: much gratitude to Elad for contributions in creating and testing the formula).

A few things to keep in mind before you begin

Privilege: I fully recognize that there is privilege in going on this journey. Many people will never have the opportunity to figure out if the path they are on is the right one, or harder still, change that path. If you find yourself with the opportunity to explore an alternative future, recognize this is a position of privilege and take advantage of it.

Silver linings: Often, opportunities to consider a change spring up from a difficult moment in your life. A layoff or a bout of burnout could be a catalyst to start the process. Of course, it really helps to have support during this journey: savings, support from family or a strong social safety net where you live.

Patience: This is not going to be a quick process. You need to give yourself at least a few weeks to think through the formula and reflect while challenging yourself to be really honest.

Data is power: Data-driven decisions are better decisions. Reading as much as you can and talking to as many friends as possible (to learn about their own careers and journeys) will give you more data points to inform your path.

No finish line: There is no final destination. You may find the right path for you now, but that doesn't mean it's your forever path. This process is about honing your awareness for your strengths and interests, and recognizing that those evolve over time.

Ok, now we can get started!

The Formula: Find out what you want to be

Let's talk about the formula that will help you figure out your path. The formula takes the form of self-guided questions that will give you the chance to reflect on your own needs and priorities and determine what's right for you. The three questions are:

What are you passionate about? What do you want your day to look like? What skills are unique to you and fill an important need?

In a moment, we'll explore these questions, and how to answer them, in depth. To help you on this journey, I've created a Career Blueprint Template that you can use to collect your answers and gather other notes along the way. You just need to make a copy of the google doc and fill your answers in directly. Alternatively, you can print the document and fill it in by hand. Or you can download it as a Word document and fill it in Word. In the screenshot below you can see the options highlighted in red to Make a Copy or Download as a Microsoft Word (.docx).

After you answer the questions, I've provided a step-by-step process to use your answers to find insights and direction that will lead you to a new career.

This process is all about trying to gain a more rounded understanding of your place in the world and what impact you want to have. Let's start with the questions and how to go about answering each one!

Question 1: What are you passionate about?

What are you really passionate about? I don't think people give themselves permission to actually pursue their passion. It feels like a naive thing to do. So let me tell you the two reasons why it's worth considering your passion in your life decisions:

1. Pursuing something you are passionate about has compounding benefits. The more time you spend on something you're passionate about, the better you get at it. The better at it and more knowledgeable you are, the more passion you have for it, which encourages you to spend more time on it. It's a self-reinforcing loop.
2. No sunk cost or wasted time. When you work in a field you are passionate about, you get two benefits: the personal satisfaction of working on your passion and the financial benefit of working for a paycheck. Making sure you are first passionate means even if you do switch fields, you have spent that time on a topic which brings you value and fulfillment even if you later leave. On the other hand, when you work in a field that you are not passionate about and you quit years later, the sunk time in that field means you feel like you have wasted time on something you are not even passionate about.

This question is not just about finding a topic that you are passionate about, but also thinking about what types of challenges or problems are interesting and engaging to you. When do you feel motivated and excited to work on something?

Answering this question helped me on my own journey: when I moved to Germany in 2016, I worked as a project manager for a logistics team. The technical challenge of moving goods around a warehouse may sound dull but in reality it was really fascinating (especially the algorithmic automation part).

Ultimately, I realized I was not passionate about logistics. My passion was working with people to build community. After this realization, I transferred to a new role in the company focussed on community management and contributing to an inclusive workplace. This was ultimately a good decision and unlocked a lot of new and interesting doors.

How to find your answer to: What are you passionate about?

Let's get practical. To find your answer, think about a field of study that makes you focused and want to dive deeper. This is not just about figuring out what you are passionate about, but also about what problems or challenges you are excited to solve. Getting paid for a job typically revolves around spending your time and energy to make something happen or solve a problem.

It's very helpful to know what types of problems or challenges you enjoy solving. What brings you joy and gratification? If you are passionate about pandas, you need to figure out what problem or challenge related to that you want to solve — saving them, caring for them, rehabilitating them, teaching them sign language, etc.

Start by thinking about your current job. What is the most exciting and interesting part about it? If you have a list of ten tasks on your to-do list, which do you gravitate towards first? If you can't find anything you are passionate about in your current role, think about projects in the past that brought you a lot of satisfaction. What about these projects brought you joy?

Ask yourself: What is it about the work that makes it feel rewarding for me? Is it the topic itself, is it solving a sticky technical challenge, is it teaching or transferring skills to others, is it creating connections and building bridges?

Give yourself permission to write or talk openly about what inspires you, without any limitation or judgment. A good way to do this is to speak freely into an audio transcription tool (SpeechTexter) and then use ChatGPT to help you synthesize those long pieces of text into meaningful points and takeaways.

Make a list of the 5 things you are passionate about alongside the 5 things you hate working on.

To help make this a bit more concrete, I've shared my top five (assembled from years of professional successes and disappointments!).

1. Thinking strategically and building long-term plans to solve broad problems with many interdependencies
2. Communicating complex ideas simply, through presenting or writing, making sure the concepts are actionable and easy to understand
3. Working on topics (like inclusion) that have a personal impact for colleagues or stakeholders
4. Discovering meaningful insights through data analysis
5. Bringing people together by community building on topics of shared interest

Note, I've kept my own list relatively agnostic to a professional area. These could be applied to many different industries. You may not be able to be generic in this way, but if you can, it may help you find interesting opportunities in a variety of different fields.

Question 2: What do you want your day to look like?

Why is this a relevant question to answer? We all have our own preferences and idiosyncrasies about working style. If we end up working in the wrong style, it can spoil the satisfaction we find at work.

There are many, many different ways your workday can look. So ask yourself: Do you prefer to wake up early and head to a physical office with in-person meetings? Do you want to work outside in nature? Do you like working from home and structuring your own day? Do you prefer to set aside time for creativity or deep focus work?

While I was trying to answer this question for myself, I realized waking up to a daily schedule packed with back-to-back meetings fills me with dread and anxiety. I like connecting with people but not in a way that feels rushed or one-sided. The best meetings I have are when I have a chance to discuss a problem with someone and come to solutions together. This realization pushed me towards a workday that has some mutually-beneficial meetings but also plenty of time to be creative and spontaneous.

How to find your answer to: What do you want your day to look like?

To tackle this question, think about everything about your day except the work itself: your schedule, your workspace, your interactions with coworkers, your break time, your focus time, etc.

What makes you feel comfortable and at ease? What makes you feel tense? Spend some time describing your ideal scenario. Go into detail about:

1. Where do you go to work (office, home, co-working space, etc)?
2. What does your workspace look like?
3. What fills your day?
4. Who do you meet and interact with?
5. How do you like to be contacted by colleagues during your work?
6. In what scenario do you feel most productive?
7. What scenario do you feel least productive?

Use those insights to describe your ideal week. Be specific about all the details (where you are working, how you are working, what your calendar looks like). Feel free to write this as a narrative, even in the third person if that helps you articulate it. Remember, your work is never going to be 100% the same thing over and over, but rather a mix. Use percentages to separate your week into different modes, such as: "I spend 80% of my time in high-focus mode, and 20% of my time collaborating with others. I prefer the collaboration to be restricted to two days a week at fixed times to avoid distraction. On the other days, I maintain high focus throughout the day and structure my own time."

Being able to articulate these preferences is a huge step in realizing what kind of structure you need to succeed and thrive at work. Paul Graham has an interesting blog: Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule that explores different modes of work. It's worth reading while you consider your own preferences.

Question 3: What skills are unique to you and fill an important need?

What do I mean by skills that are "unique to you and fill an important need"? You likely have at least one skill (or a combination of skills) that is highly sought after. You may not even realize this. One way to think about it is a skill or set of skills that give you an "unfair advantage" because they act as a super power in a field desperate for that particular skill.

This question is more difficult to answer than the first two. If we don't have exposure to new and challenging tasks, we can't figure out what secret skills will flourish. This is especially difficult for people who are easily discouraged while trying to learn a new skill. Sometimes, we don't know we have a strength for something until we are able to master it.

How to find your answer to: What skills are unique to you and fill an important need?

To answer this question, you need to first understand your own strengths and then you need to understand shortages in skills across different fields.

To figure out what your strengths are, think critically about where you excel, and be specific. If you are an excellent project manager, that may be a sign of fantastic stakeholder management and communication skills. Or, it may be proof of your analytical thinking skills and ability to break down tasks into logical pieces. It could signal your ability to inspire others and delegate. You have to drill down.

Ask for honest feedback from your colleagues and think introspectively to figure out where your strengths lie.

When figuring out where the shortages of skills are, talk to many people in different professions and ask them where they see a skills gap. Take every opportunity to ask friends about their jobs and what roles they struggle to fill. Sometimes these skills are not even listed in the job ads. Soft skills like empathy, emotional intelligence and excellent communication are often incredibly in demand but not explicitly searched for.

There may also be emerging fields that will grow substantially in the next few years and have a high need for skills in the future. These could be worth proactively upskilling for.

Two things to keep in mind while answering this question:

1. Build onto your existing skills. It's of course possible to build new skills from scratch. But it's much more efficient to first take advantage of and grow the skills you already have. I've personally found it's much easier to level up a skill I already have(from "proficient" to "expert" level) than starting from scratch to build an entirely new set of skills.
2. Combinations of skills are more rare. Keep in mind the increased rarity of combined skills. If an employer is just looking for an expert in a certain field, there are thousands or even millions of people in the world for any given generalist field. But if that employer is looking for someone who has expertise in three different things simultaneously, you could very possibly end up as the only person with that intersection of skills. Think of your unique strength as potentially a combination of skills and see if you can make your skillset more rare by adding something unique to what you already have in your toolbox. For me personally, this is: DEI expertise, Data Analytics and Communication.

I want to provide another practical example of what this looks like in the real world. Before deciding to start Lunar Ventures, my colleagues talked to many frustrated startup founders who were unable to find investors who understood their technology enough to make an investment. This realization encouraged them to assemble a new type of VC for Europe that solved this need with a team of technical experts to scout, invest in and add value to the most innovative technology startups in Europe.

They were able to successfully fund many startups that previously failed to find a match. The team already had most of the skills to run the best deep tech VC in Europe, they just needed to collectively point those skills in the direction where there was the greatest need. Only after substantial research into the field and its shortcomings did they understand the opportunity.

Take some time to document all of your findings for this question by creating a list of your strongest skills and a list of in-demand skills in different fields. This will help you start making connections and seeing opportunities before you even move on to the next step.

This concludes the question and answer portion of the formula. If nothing else, at this point I hope you've been able to take some time to think about and document what you've discovered about yourself.

Even if you stop here and go no further, I hope you still find value in this self-discovery. We rarely give ourselves permission to be so candid and honest about our strengths, weaknesses and wants.

Bringing it all together

So you have the answers to the three questions, now what? The next (and final) part of the formula is about taking the insights from the questions and figuring out where to go next. Here are the eight steps to help you find your new path:

1. Document. Make sure the answers to those questions are written down and clearly articulated in simple and brief language. To do this, use the Career Blueprint Template. You will use your Career Blueprint as a reference to see if new fields or jobs are a match for you. You can add to it as you discover new information.
2. Gather Information. Collect real-world insights about different types of jobs by talking with friends and family: ask about their jobs, what are their days like and what kind of problems do they solve? Even if you don't think you'll ever be interested in their fields, it gives you perspective on what's out there and what's unique or compelling to you about different types of jobs.
3. Hunt for Jobs. Look at many, many job postings and job descriptions online. What sparks your interest? What partially or completely fits your Career Blueprint? Save the text of interesting job postings. Highlight key words that are intriguing to you. This step is not about figuring out what to apply for, yet. It's about gathering as much information as you can and broadening your perspective about what's possible.
4. Analyze. This step is about bringing all of your research together to start pointing you in the right direction. I actually suggest using ChatGPT to help you analyze your Career Blueprint. You can ask ChatGPT for advice on what skills to build that would complement your current set and give you an "unfair advantage". Most importantly, you can ask for suggestions of job titles or fields that would match your Career Blueprint. It may even suggest jobs that you have never heard of before. Ultimately, you want to narrow down the list of potential job titles matches into five or six to start with.
5. Inquire. Start looking for job openings with these titles. Are they interesting to you? Would you be a competitive candidate based on your skills and the job requirements? Talk to people in those positions and see how far away you are from being eligible for a role. LinkedIn is a good resource for this. Try a message like "I'm interested in transitioning into x field, I'd love to ask you some questions about your experience in the field and what skills I should work on to set myself up for success."
6. Craft your Story. Think about your narrative. What is your story that describes the thread that connects your previous experience to a future opportunity? Practice telling this story in a concise and clear way so your interviewer can really understand how seemingly unrelated previous roles gave you valuable skills for the future. Before you have the chance to tell this story in an interview, you need to include it in the cover letter or email you send when applying for jobs.
7. Apply. Apply for roles and gather feedback, discover what skills you are lacking or how you can better tell your story. You probably won't be successful right away, but hopefully you will get some feedback that you can use to iterate on your application or determine how you can improve your skills for the roles you have in mind.
8. Get Hired. This is not so much a step, as a destination. But it doesn't have to be your final destination. After six months or a year in your new role, take the time to reflect to see if it's still a good fit. Stay curious about the future of the industry and how you can continue to grow your skills to meet future demands.

Final thoughts

While putting this formula together, I had a lot of time to reflect on the daunting though life-changing opportunity of a career change.

I am writing with optimism nestled between my words. I am hoping that we live in a world where career changes are possible and employers have the ability to recognize and value people who start a new path later in life. I think this is becoming more common, especially with remote work opening doors to opportunities for more people and AI changing what jobs are available.

Sadly, I think the appetite for recognizing non-traditional backgrounds varies by culture and geography. In my experience, in traditional German companies, there is so much emphasis on credentials and years of "relevant experience" that it is relatively rare for people to make a big jump without formal "retraining." In the US, on the other hand, I think it's more common.

Employers can be skeptical of non-traditional backgrounds or unwilling to connect the dots of previous experience in a different field. For this, I have one important tip: I've found it much easier to explore a different path within your current company first instead of looking externally.

Your current employer is more likely to give you the opportunity to try out a new role because you've already built up trust with them. So be sure to look internally first, even asking for mentoring or guidance from colleagues in roles that are interesting to you.

You also need to set your expectations correctly. If you were a senior manager in your previous role, you may be starting at a more junior position in a new career. This could mean a dip in salary or title. If you are in need of some guidance on how to rationally assess an opportunity that may feel like a demotion but could have a long-term payoff of higher salary or satisfaction, I highly encourage you to check out the blog: Think Like an Investor: Finding the right job for you and other big life decisions.

And lastly, we need to be realistic. It may not be possible to find all the things on your Career Blueprint in a new career opportunity. The formula I've described here is not about finding a perfect match, but trying to find something that is a better fit for you.

You may ultimately find that you are only able to partially match your preferences and instead supplement with hobbies or side projects that bring you more joy and gratification. This journey of self-discovery can lead you to many different realizations. Embrace the opportunities to grow and adapt as you refine your path. And I hope each step forward brings you closer to a fulfilling and balanced professional life.

Further Reading

Here are some interesting resources that can support you along this journey:

• How to do what you love by Paul Graham
• Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell
• Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
• Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It by Chris Voss and Tahl Raz

Sarah Cordivano is a DEI expert, writer and advisor working with startups and companies, helping them to integrate DEI into their strategic plans. She spends her time in Berlin and Zagreb.