The world outside my doorstep is a really complex net of chaos and I am effectively blind to most of its existence.
Say I’m looking for a job. And I know what job I want to do. I can search for it on a job listing site, but there will still be many such jobs that won’t be cataloged on the site and that I’ll hence be missing. How can I find the rest? What are some alternative approaches?
Also there are two ways you can end up with a job: either you find it (going on a job search), or it finds you (headhunters etc.). Obviously the latter possibility is much better as it’s less tiring and it means you end up with an over-abundance of opportunities (if people message you every week). What are some rules of thumb for life to make it so that the opportunities come to you? (and not only for jobs)
Often I don’t even know what opportunities are on offer out in that misty unknown (and my ADHD brain finds it straining to research them (searching 1 job site feels almost futile because you don’t know how many of the actual opportunities you aren’t seeing)), so the strategy I resort to is imagining what I concievably expect to be out there and then trying to find it. This has several weaknesses: firstly I could be imagining something that doesn’t actually exist and waste hours beating myself up because I can’t find it. Or, almost even worse, my limited imagination might be limiting what sorts of opportunities I look for which means I miss out of the truly crazy things out there.
Here’s an example of an alternative approach that worked for me once:
Last month I wanted to visit a university in another city for a few days to see if I liked it, and I needed a place to stay. I first tried the obvious approach of searching AirBnB for rents I could afford, but none came up. Hence I had to search through the unmapped. What ended up working was: I messaged the students union -> they added me to their whatsapp group -> sb from my country replied to my post on there adding me to a different WA group for students from my country -> sb in that WA group then DM’d saying I could crash on their couch.
I would have never thought of trying an approach like this when I set out, and yet I must have done something right because it worked. What? The idea to message the students union and join whatsapp groups took quite a lot of straining the creative part of my brain, so I’m wondering whether the approach I took here can somehow be generalized so that I can use it in the future.
TL;DR: Search engines don’t map the world comprehensively. You might not even be searching for the right thing. What are some other good ways to search among the unstructured unknown that is out there?
What are some other good ways to search among the unstructured unknown that is out there?
The word “search” implies you are looking for something specific. It doesn’t sound like you are though. You’re trying to learn what exists. What you want to do is “explore”.
You explore by going beyond the things and places you know and experience them. You see things first hand you haven’t seen before with your eyes, you hear things you haven’t heard before with your ears. You communicate with others that have also explored and learn second hand. You then take the things you’ve learned and cross reference them with your own prior existing knowledge. You can project and extrapolate what else may exist. Then you go there and see if it does. Try things. Make mistakes. Learn from them. Try something else. Rinse. Repeat.
When people say “get out and live life” this is what they’re talking about.
This is great advice.
So essentially throwing a ton of things at the wall and seeing what sticks (when you don’t know what thing (eg. job) you actually want to aim for)? Hmm I can imagine that being the best approach at times
Specifically in the context of job searching, there are SO MANY JOBS that don’t have a specific study path. Rather they are niche needed for the specific industry or even geographic locality that there’s no curriculum that would be worth building to train someone off the street to do it. Most of them are behind the scenes and not generally in public view. Not because they’re secret, but they are taken for granted. Go somewhere where people go, sit down, and start watching. Look at all the things that are the result of humans direct action. Now understand how many jobs occurred for the person that finally “did the thing” you’re looking at.
Say you’re sitting in a park on a bench. The most obvious is the landscaping; the manicured grass and flower beds. Sure its easy to understand the hands that did that work, and likely even the tools they did that work with. Now, start extrapolating:
- who decided what flowers to put there in those beds? What kind of skills does that person have that makes them qualified for their work? Did they go to school for design to know which flowers in what density in what layout would be appealing? Perhaps they came from the agricultural side? Perhaps they have business knowledge to know how to get low priced flowers that will last the season, so perhaps they have logistics background?
- So we’ve thought about the landscaper and the person choosing the flowers. Where did the flowers come from? Its unlikely the landscaper grew them from seed, so they likely came from a greenhouse. Think about all the jobs in the greenhouse business. Laborers for moving lots of soil to and fro, truck drivers for moving raw materials and finished goods, marketing people for signage/branding/promotion, HR for keeping all the humans paid and managing their benefits.
- Don’t forget. You’re sitting on a park bench. Who put it there? How was it decided to put it RIGHT THERE? Who made the bench? What are the origins if the materials of the bench? Where do those materials come from? How are those materials found in nature? Who thought to use THAT MATERIAL this purpose?
These are simple examples that most everyone can connect with. Now try with one you likely don’t. What jobs are needed in a civil water treatment facility? There. You have no firsthand or secondhand knowledge of it. You likely not even the scale or scope of the work. You need to explore. Contact your local water treatment facility. Find out where the water you depend on everyday for drinking and cleaning comes from. They likely offer tours. Thats a great place to start.
I can give you one shortcut I’ve learned in my many years is that many of the best jobs are an intersection between two (or more) skill sets. Example: A computer programmer is a moderately difficult skill set, however there are literally millions of them in the world. Knowledge of healthcare regulation in the USA (HIPAA/FDA) is also a difficult skill set, but there are still hundreds of thousands of people with this knowledge. However, what is the intersection of Computer Programmers with HIPAA/FDA regulation knowledge? Now you’ve got a MUCH shorter list maybe 10,000 or 20,000 people? So there are employers that want programming done that takes into account HIPAA/FDA regulation, you’ve only got this small set of folks which can be lucrative for those programmers. Yet I doubt there is a college degree program for Computer Programming for USA Healthcare.
These intersectional jobs are ALL OVER the place. Logistics/marketing, hospitality/design, engineering/art. Yet you’ll only find them if you start looking under the hood about how society works. So get out there, keep you eyes open, and so importantly be curious. Ask questions. Volunteer to do work others don’t want so you can experience it. It leads to interesting places.
The world outside my doorstep is a really complex net of chaos
You are right. Another word to describe it: it is lacking structures. That’s where man comes into the picture: You. You can create structure.
Having that wonderful and powerful ADHD brain too, I found that I need to find and create structures within myself first. Then I can go on and give structures to the world outside.
One important step is to describe structures in explicit words. Often write them down or draw them on real paper, in order not to forget on the next day, or after an eventful weekend (for me it’s always the weekend - Monday morning I am so empty and I need to start with reading all that I have done at the end of last week).
Another good approach is to describe and define goals and strategies. A goal is where I want to get. A strategy is the order of steps needed to get to the goal.
Somebody explained it to me like climbing the mountains. You can’t just wander around there and hope to find a way sooner or later because you would get lost inevitably, and your force is limited and your day runs out etc. So you have to look at a specific point and say “There it is where I want to go!”. Then you look and think and decide and say “This is the way, and these are the steps to get there!”. And you cannot start before you know the way. But when you know it, you can go and start your climbing.
You are right that being delibarate about picking a strategy and constantly returning to it so it structures your ADHD brain is a very helpful approach. What I’m looking to hear about is people’s alternatives to the strategy of googling when the goal is finding real-world opportunities like jobs or housing. Ie. other methods for traversing that net of chaos.
Best bet?
Figure out what you want to do, then look for those locally.
Say you want to work in industry “x”. Search for that in your town, hit up individual web pages and see what opportunities are out there. Go there in person if you have to.
Here’s an example… Say you’re in the Portland area and you want to get into knifemaking.
https://www.google.com/search?q=portland+knife+manufacturer
Sub in your own city and industry of choice.
