To Find What You Love, Think of Your Tolerance for Risk
A career-planning strategy I learned from ‘Dilbert’ creator Scott Adams
To figure out what you truly love to do, one common piece of advice encourages you to think back to the activities you liked as a kid. Childhood is typically free of the constraints that come with adult life — bills, deadlines, the pressure to hit life milestones like getting married or owning a home — so the way you spent your time at age 10 can be a solid indicator of the kind of work you might enjoy now.
In practice, though, this advice is also a little too vague to be that helpful. Unless you were the type of child who obsessively made up new recipes, or spent hours taking apart electronics in the garage, or had some obvious world-class talent, you probably remember your childhood as a jumble of various, short-lived pursuits.
There’s a more effective way to clue into your talents, and I learned it from Dilbert creator Scott Adams: Trace back your tolerance for risk.
In his book How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big, Adams explains that it was his “risk profile” that predicted his future. Starting in grade school, he would draw comics involving his classmates and teachers, which often got him in trouble when an adult found them. Still…
