Set Your North Star

"If you have a true perception of how things lie, abandon any concern for reputation, and be satisfied if you can live the rest of your life...in the way your nature wishes. You must consider then, what those wishes are, and then let nothing else distract you." - Marcus Aurelius

Imagine this scenario: you're sitting down to dinner with your family and you get an email from someone at work. Do you respond to the email immediately? Do you wait until after dinner? Do you wait until tomorrow? Your work and your career are important to you, but so is your family and your personal time. 

Here's another scenario: you have two competing job offers. Picking Job A would make you an employee of a company you've dreamed of working for, and whose mission is meaningful to you. The pay, however, is very low, and it would require you to make some big changes to your financial plans. 

Job B, on the other hand, has excellent pay, but is in an industry that you don't find interesting. When visiting the company, however, you are impressed by the way team members work together, and you can feel the energy in the organization.

Which job do you choose? 

In all of these scenarios, there isn't a "right" choice. All options could be viable depending on the context, your values, and your goals.

You Can't Follow Every Star

One of the biggest and most important lessons in life is that you can’t do everything. People often burn out because they try to balance too many things. We fool ourselves into thinking we can build a life that perfectly balances ambition, creativity, financial stability, freedom, recognition, impact, joy, rest, novelty, and safety. And when we inevitably fall short, we feel like we’ve failed.

When everything matters equally, we:

• Say yes to too much
• Feel guilty about saying no
• React instead of choose
• Measure ourselves against competing standards
• Constantly question our decisions

Trying to follow every star saps your energy and destroys your ability to build a sustainable career and life. It makes it difficult to make decisions when there is no single ”right” answer. In attempting to avoid putting one value above the others, you are eventually forced to make reactive trade-offs that betray the things that matter most to you. It may take years to manifest, but living this way erodes your motivation and self-trust until you feel like a shadow of your former self. 

Finding Your North Star Will Help You Find Clarity When Faced with Ambiguity

There’s a kind of emotional relief that comes from developing clarity around what really matters to you. You stop hedging your bets. You stop spreading your energy thin, saving a piece of yourself for different eventualities that will likely never come, hoping the universe will do the prioritizing for you. You make peace with not having it all, because you’ve chosen to pursue what matters most to you.

 Triangulating Your North Star

"You know from experience that in all your wanderings, you have nowhere found the good life....Where then is it to be found? In doing what man's nature requires. And how is he to do this? By having principles to govern his impulses and actions." - Marcus Aurelius 

Triangulation is the process of determining the location of a point in space by measuring it from multiple vantage points. By taking several fixed reference points and calculating angles and distances, you can determine exactly where something is, even if it’s not directly visible.

The same principle applies to finding your North Star for your career. When you identify a handful of key data points, you can find a meaningful, impactful, and fulfilling direction for your life and career.

To triangulate your North Star, you need to understand:

1. Your strengths
2. Your values
3. Your work style
4. How you work with people
5. The amount of structure and ambiguity you need

Step 1: Discover Your Strengths

Most people move through their careers without a clear understanding of what they’re actually good at. They may feel confident about their strengths, but that confidence is often built on assumptions rather than evidence.

Two mistakes show up again and again when people try to assess their own strengths:

• They confuse enjoyment with competence. Just because you like doing something doesn’t mean you’re especially good at it. Enjoyment can be a useful signal (it often points toward intrinsic motivation) but it isn’t proof of strength. Some of the things you’re best at may feel almost invisible to you because they come so easily to you.
• They adopt borrowed strengths. Many people unconsciously decide what a “successful” person in their role should be good at, and then assume those traits apply to them. Designers do this all the time: I’m a designer, so I must be creative. I’m senior, so I must be strategic. These labels often say more about cultural expectations than about your actual abilities.

Developing an accurate picture of your strengths is surprisingly hard. It can be difficult to see clear patterns in your work. Our brains are excellent at rewriting history, convincing us that outcomes were always obvious, that we always made the right choices, and that our success was inevitable rather than situational. This makes self-assessment difficult and unreliable.

Discovering your strengths requires you to stop relying on introspection alone and start gathering external signals. A few methods I’ve found consistently useful: