Through the morning fog

Lessons from the Long Haul

My graduate school campus stretched for miles on the mesa, the Pacific Ocean to the west, the dusty canyons to the east with their slopes of ice plant, scattered scrub brush, and the occasional pile of rocks. Most mornings I rode the campus shuttle from student housing just west of the 5 and walked from the south end, threading through tree groves where the smell of eucalyptus flooded my senses for a few steps, then let go. The diamond of glass and concrete that was the Geisel Library hovered in the thick white fog that settled over that stretch of coast. My lab desk waited in the mesa’s far northwest corner, where the ground fell away to the cliffs and the ocean below. A small dependable part of my day, as steady as the chilly gray fog that always burned off to 70℉ and sun.

What was changing was the question I carried along with me.

From inside a graduate program, the career path can look like a single corridor. The people around you all walked it: professors who went to graduate school, spent years as post-docs under a pre- or post-tenure advisor, then left to start their own line of research somewhere new. No one posts the real number on that corridor wall, the vanishingly few faculty positions that actually wait at the end.

So that fall I was doing something closer to standing in a maze than walking a corridor, reading the signs, feeling for the next turn. Maybe a deeper focus on teaching. Maybe building science-based outreach programs. Maybe a move toward a place where science meets policy and starts to shape what people actually do. Maybe I would leave that work behind for something else entirely.

You know this feeling. Every option arrives freighted with the sense that the next choice will set the course of your whole career (it likely will not), or that saying yes to one option quietly closes several others (sometimes a relief). Issue 020 walked through the values filter, a way to name what matters most before you decide. But the values filter cannot tell you everything. It names what is worth doing without telling you what will keep you whole while you do it. If a decision like that is sitting in front of you right now, the filter I was slow to trust is yours to borrow.

Field-Tested: The Happiness Filter

“Do what you love and what makes you happy.”

That was the whole of my advisor's guidance. At the time it struck me as too simple, close to a bumper sticker. Years later, it ranks among the best counsel I have ever gotten. It has become the second filter for new opportunities, right after values, cutting cleanly through the noise of expectation and career pressure.

Once a choice clears the values filter, I put it to four questions:

Energy. Where will this work give me energy, and where will it take energy I do not have to spare?

Joy and support. Where in it will I find joy, and who will I lean on along the way?

People. Who will this put me alongside, and what do I want to learn from them?

Process. What about the day-to-day of it, not just the outcome, would keep me engaged?

This filter still asks a lot of you. What it offers back is work that lands where it resonates and gives something in return, so the effort adds to your wellbeing instead of quietly borrowing against it.

Signals & Shifts

On The Happiness Lab, Dr. Laurie Santos talks with Barry Schwartz about how to choose well, reframing the question from “is this the perfect choice?” to “is this a good enough choice?” That small shift that takes a surprising amount of weight off a decision.

In The Importance of A Workplace That Aligns With Personal Values, Forbes makes the practical case for choosing work that fits you, pointing to gains in mental and emotional wellbeing and in personal and professional growth. Keep it in mind the next time an opportunity is in front of you.

Question for reflection: Think of a choice you are weighing this week. If it passes the values filter, run it through the happiness filter. Which of the four questions is the hardest to answer, and what might that tell you? I read every reply.

Take good care of yourself and the work that's yours to do. Both matter more than you know.

Nikoosh

Work That Lasts arrives every other Wednesday. Forward to a colleague who might need these tools, or reply and let me know what's working in your own practice.

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