Guides

Field notes

Shorter than the journal. How to read your map, and how an interest becomes work you can live in.

• How to read an Interest MapClusters, labeled lines, and a through-line. Here is what each part is allowed to claim.
• What a through-line isOne paragraph under the chart. A hypothesis about the plot, small enough to test.
• Holland’s codes, in plain languageRIASEC is a hexagon of neighboring interests. Most lives stand on a border.
• Four phases of interestHidi and Renninger’s model, from a spark to a practice you maintain on purpose.
• Two kinds of curiosityLitman’s split between the pleasure of exploring and the itch of a gap.
• Childhood interestsWhat you loved at nine is evidence. It is not a sentence.
• Circumscription and compromiseLinda Gottfredson on the fields people rule out before they choose.
• Career construction, brieflySavickas asks for the story under the jobs. We ask for the stations under the story.
• Working identityIbarra’s finding: people rehearse a next life in small experiments.
• Dark horse careersRose and Ogas on people who standardized poorly and still built a life.
• A fair word on multipotentialiteEmilie Wapnick named a real experience. The word is not a career plan.
• Flow, and the part after the glowCsikszentmihalyi on the fit between challenge and skill. Tharp on the boring ritual.
• Autonomy, competence, relatednessDeci and Ryan’s three needs, applied to a week rather than a personality.
• Side projects as evidenceThe thing you do after the job is often the cleanest data you have.
• Reading your way into the workLegitimate peripheral participation, which is a long phrase for hanging around the real thing.
• Place is part of the vocationSome interests are about a ground, not a subject. Scannell, Gifford, Solnit.
• Gift maps, and the consent problemYou can gather notes for someone. You cannot honestly chart a life they have not told you.
• Two charts on one tableA couple can compare maps. One map for two people flattens both.
• How clusters are drawnSix kinds of attention, then a rename when your stations earn a more specific title.
• The subway styleStations, routes, and transfers. A good style when the connections are the point.
• The explorer’s chartCoasts and regions. A picture of the territory, and where you stand in it.
• The botanical plateA tree of practices, with the through-line as the ground it grows from.
• When interests pull apartSome pairs share a Tuesday. Some pairs need a negotiated week.
• Careers at the overlapWe suggest roles where two of your stations already share a verb.
• Books that hold two fieldsA short shelf for people whose interests refuse to stay in one aisle.
• Sport as a kind of attentionA body practice is data about how you like to learn, not a costume.
• Archives and private historyOther people’s papers, and the smaller archive of your own attention.
• Teaching as a clusterTeaching rarely sits alone. It is usually a bridge with a subject on the other side.
• A living with several threadsPortfolio weeks, and the unromantic work of keeping the threads from eating each other.
• What the four levels askTwo minutes to a first map. Three optional sittings that make the lines more specific.