I read the post differently – the point of the exercise is not that you need to know the answers to the questions. It's to gauge your emotional reaction to the question itself.
By examining the types of tasks you will be consistently faced with, you can ask yourself, "Do I actually want to do that?"
When you break down anything into its subtasks there's basically nothing that anyone wants to do. Sometimes the ends help justify the means too.
I always wanted to program games. I programmed games as a hobby. When I graduated university there were no gamedev jobs in my region, so I went to work at Boring B2B java company.
After a while I moved to a bigger city and I started having friends who work in gamedev. They told me about crunch, bad salaries etc. I decided to keep doing Boring B2B stuff. But I went to a few job interviews in gamedev companies.
Every time the questions on the interviews were FUN. Like doing 3d math, some low level C, writing a collision detection function or simple pathfinding.
Just solving these problems made me giddy.
Maybe it's the nostalgia for the time I've learned these things as a teenager with no stress, or maybe it's just that it's something completely different to what I'm doing normally - but I felt great during these interviews.
But I'd have to get a huge salary cut and abandon work-life balance and I'm too old for this.
TL;DR: I think there's a lot of value actually looking at day-to-day problems you need to solve in your dream job, even if you decide it's not for you for different reasons.
I think your story is about a person who wouldn't take their dream job because they want more money and don't want to change.
Or perhaps someone who has learned that there is more to life than their job, and is making a prioritization decision accordingly.
Perhaps. There is also more to life than your job, family, friends, and finding love. There's things like grocery shopping, washing dishes, and going on vacation. That doesn't mean we should settle into occupations we don't like. Like it or not, your work is going to consume a lot of your time, and we should strive to do something we enjoy and find meaningful if possible. In the parent comment it sure sounds like it is possible for them to pivot, and that they might find much more happiness and meaning if they do.
What makes you think that?
Do you think nobody wants to write and debug code, or tend to plants, or write books, day in day out?
You're claiming that any subtask that is unappealing automatically makes you not want to do the whole thing. Which is silly.
I read their comment as saying that we shouldn't expect every subtask to be fun, but the overall task can still be fun. Do I want to sand wood? Not really. Do I want to grab sand paper from the drawer? No... Do I want to use a saw? A little bit. Do I want to build a chair? Yes! But if I break it down too much the overall big picture gets lost.
and the comment is saying that such emotional reaction might be to complexity and scale itself, rather than the specific individual details
I think the questions in the article did the article a disservice. It's not about whether you know the answer to business-related trivia right off the bat, but about whether finding out the answer to such trivia seems interesting to you, because that's going to be your life from now on.
I'd argue the questions are simply a tool to force a person to confront the reality of a profession vs. a fantasy they've built in their head.
I think the problem is that when confronting all future plans you might find out you don't like any of them.
But you have to do something, choose something. So it's almost better if you don't think too hard, just do it and find out, learn to become content with it.
I really don't think it's better to choose your life path based on lack of understanding of your plan's consequences, rather than choosing the least unappealing option.
So, now you need to study choosing so maybe a career in philosophy?
Yea, it's about confronting yourself. I'd agree. I think the whole thing about investing into a store isn't really what this article is about.
Exactly. I certainly recognized myself in the story. I wanted to be professor, until I learned what they do.
similarly i wanted to be an entrepreneur until i met the daily grind of it. no questionnaire would have dissuaded me. the highs were high and the lows were low; even in retrospect i’m not sure it was the wrong choice. but it would take abnormally high certainty for me to do it again now that i know the score first hand.
Had a similar experience.
It was what they DON’T do that put me off.
Silly me, I thought they spent most of their time doing research!!!
>"Do I actually want to do that?"
There's no reason to believe you can be any more confident about your answer to this then the person in the article is about their hazy idea about what something is like.
If people "unpacked" marriage or childbirth to the extent suggested in the article everyone would be frozen in dread. That's not because they're smart and have just disovered what those things are truly like, it's because they overestimate their current emotional state and underestimate what they can grow into.
In fact the article I think is far removed from how people live. We don't chose professions because of our secret "true" interests, we make decisions based on circumstance, luck, financial security and then we adapt our emotional state. And that's a good thing, the emotional state of a young person isn't a good yardstick for anything.