Everything I know I learned from other people

Here are some of the resources that helped me navigate the first decade of my career

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Tools, Protocols and Templates

Informational Interview Google Sheet Tracker
Make a copy of this handy google sheet to track your outreach process. Who are you talking to? Why? What is the outcome? You can operationalize the whole process with this nice lil google sheet, courtesy of my boyfriend Greg.

Greg's Informational Interviewing Protocol
Step by step instructions for requesting and conducting informational interviews from my boyfriend Greg.

Informational Interview Follow-Up Email Templates
As few examples of emails you might send to someone after you’ve had an informational interview with them.

Salary Negotiation E-mail Templates
Asking for more money is hard. In my experience, most salary negotiations happen over e-mail, which is good for you because it gives you more time to pause, breath and think about what you really want to stay.

Resources

Millie Tran’s Viral Presentation: What am I doing with my life?
A picture (or in this case a presentation) is worth 1,000 words. Was this the first ever viral google slides presentation? I think so. It’s succinct, clarifying, cheeky and utterly useful. Highly recommend!

80,000 Hours
This is a non-profit organization dedicated to helping students and graduates switch into careers that effectively tackle the world’s most pressing problems. Your career is 80,000 hours long (or about four decades), how you use that time matters.

Books

The Defining Decade by Meg Jay
I read this book in my early twenties. It was exactly what I needed: a guidebook to the decade ahead. Now when I look back on my twenties, I feel a sense of pride at having accomplished most of the tasks that Meg Jay articulated in this book. I felt like a train-wreck almost every day, but somehow with significant help from this book, I managed to emerge with some of the puzzle pieces in place for an adult life.

The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America by David Whyte
If you think that the professional world isn’t personal, even spiritual, David Whyte will convince you otherwise. According to David Whyte your work life is an arena of spiritual conflict and, hopefully, self-discovery.

Articles

How to Do What You Love by Paul Graham
This article stuck with me because of what it has to say about Prestige: “Prestige is especially dangerous to the ambitious. If you want to make ambitious people waste their time on errands, the way to do it is to bait the hook with prestige. That's the recipe for getting people to give talks, write forewords, serve on committees, be department heads, and so on. It might be a good rule simply to avoid any prestigious task. If it didn't suck, they wouldn't have had to make it prestigious.” “