I guess I'm off-put by something more specific in the article than "taking your career seriously." I know lots of people who take their career seriously in a certain sense. They devote a lot of hours to their career and see it as a source of meaning. However, the center of their focus tends to be "internal" in the sense that, at the end of the day, they are most concerned with the value that their career adds to their own lives.
This article seems to have a very different focal point. It's not about making your career more fulfilling for you. It's not about how to have a career that fulfills your own desires of pursuing your curiosity or doing the sort of good that you enjoy doing (like being a doctor or teacher). Rather, the article is written as if from the perspective of an outside person viewing this person's career. It's about having a career that will please other people. Crowdsourcing your decisions will make you choose the things that other people find worthwhile. Taking on many projects will help you build a diverse resume to impress other people. The last point even specifically says not to spend too much time looking for a job that you find pleasant because there might be jobs that can "do more good" in the world that aren't pleasant.
The whole emphasis on taking a job that benefits the world without necessarily being pleasant for yourself just seems so robotic to me. At the end of the day, why do you care about being altruistic? Presumably because it's a path towards creating a world where people can enjoy life more. If you accomplish this by living a life that you yourself don't enjoy, it just seems antithetical any motivation for improving the world that I can imagine.
I know people who are spending the better part of their youth working hard to become doctors or something similar. They are working very hard and (like the author) thinking about ways of impressing others in pursuit of getting into med school and getting into competitive specialties or whatever. But there are two differences. (1) They know that this sort of impressing others is something they only need to do at the beginning of their career, and (2) they actually like helping others so they will eventually reach a point where their own pleasure and their altruism is aligned. This article seems to be suggesting that we live a life where these things are not aligned, and make no attempt to align them. I understand that there are jobs that aren't fun, and someone has to do them, but I don't expect ambitious people to work hard to find these jobs.
The point of a job should be to improve the world. The point of a career is to be able to do more impactful jobs by increasing skill and understanding.
Personality and job fit are only important as far as they allow you to do the job better.
Do you understand why I would call this perspective robotic though? I could never live like that. The reason I take a job is because I think it will improve my life. A paycheck is obviously part of that, but so is doing a job I enjoy. I would prefer a job that does 10 units of good and gives me 10 units of pleasure to a job that does 20 units of good and gives me 2 units of pleasure.
That makes sense. But do you see why it might be conflicting to some people if they have the chance to do, say, 40 units of good for 8 pleasure instead of 10 for 10? Where do you draw the line?
