As a high school student, I worry a great deal over my future profession. According to Cal Newport, career satisfaction for any choice of occupation often won't materialize until you've become "so good they can't ignore you" at what you do. Based on this, Newport recommends directing your nervous energy towards building skill in whatever you choose, rather than choosing the "right job". While I found his advice useful for framing the issue, it opened a new box of concerns: What if you chose something you have little innate ability in – or what if the point at which your improvement slows down is not exceptional? How do you even know whether you have talent in something before you've invested effort into shadowing or interning? Sometimes talent doesn't appear initially – what if the thing you have the greatest potential in is something you'll have to struggle at for a long time? And there are so many jobs! We have to narrow the search space! 

There's another panoply of concerns related to your worth to the world: if you care about the world and your impact in it, don't you owe it to those who worked hard to give you the opportunities you have to find the thing you'll be the best at? But what if the thing you'll end up being the best at is something that doesn't always scale well – like medicine? (Of course, you could go into research, but what if you're only mid-tier at that?) You'll end up positively affecting the lives of many fewer people than you could have! And how do you avoid choosing work dry of meaning?

People tell me I over-think these things – the answer to most (if not all) of my what-if's is "nothing interesting will happen in this case or the counter-factual one - you are ultimately insignificant in the greater procession of the world, and you live a cushy live in the developed world, meaning that no matter how badly you screw things up, as long as you don't get addicted to heroine, you will still have access to food, water, and shelter." While I think that answer is probably the right one, it looks like most young people don't think about this much at all! I have a seriously useful bone to throw them from my side of the anxiety fence!

To provide more information, I'm compiling a database of rationalist-inspired interviews with members of various professions over at careerscouting.substack.com.

Below is my first interview with a general dentist. 

Object-Level

What does a normal day in your field look like? Can you give me a “day in the life” kind of run-down? 

“I start early in the morning. I leave home at 6:15. My first patient is seated at 7:00. Then it’s non-stop until 1:00, when I have a fifty minute lunch. After 1:50, I continue until 5:00. Some days I work through lunch.”

How does this differ from the average practitioner?

“It doesn’t differ – almost every dentist works the same way.”

How does your time split across different kinds of activities?

“Aside from operative work, I have patient notes, lab work (e.g. pouring models of people’s mouths), hygiene exams, and treatment conferences (consulting the patient about what is going to happen during their treatment).”

What does a bad day in your field look like, and how does your definition differ from the average person’s?

“Every dentist faces a bad day where nothing is going right. I can’t even begin to explain the parameters of a bad day – patient anxiety, patients crying in the chair (because they’re deathly afraid of the dentist), etc.”

What is your physical environment like?

“Very stressful. There’s the operating room, exam room, hygiene room, the lab, sterilizing room, and my office.”

Meta-Level

Do you find your work meaningful? Is meaningness contingent on specific things, or is it intrinsic to the work? 

“I find dentistry very meaningful. And yes, meaningness is intrinsic to the work.”

If you were trying to dissuade someone from becoming a dentist – or to test their will to become a dentist – what would you tell them? 

“I would tell them it’s a physically demanding profession. You need to have high energy to be a dentist. I spend pretty much the entire day on my feet.”

On the other hand, if you were trying to persuade someone to become a dentist, what would you say?

“It’s rewarding to put a smile on people’s faces.”

What is the rate of change of information, important paradigms, and established thought in the field? How often do earth shaking things get introduced? 

“The rate of change is quite high, but providers don’t always have a lot of pressure on them to keep up with the field. Every year new innovations and research change the field. We used to take physical impressions of people’s mouths. Now we only take digital impressions. Crowns and dentures are now 3D printed, which is quite new.”

How often do you need to buy new textbooks?

“Never. But I regularly attend continued education classes.”

If you had to distill the process of acquiring skill in this field, how would you do that? What’s the eat/sleep/repeat loop that you go through to get better? 

“Hundreds of hours of continued education.”

Domain

To what extent does talent matter for succeeding in your field? This could be a very vague question, but it’s known that journalism and athletics require a high amount of initial talent, and some like dog walking does not. Where does your field fall in between those two extremes?

“Talent does matter in dentistry. Specifically, it requires high dexterity, intelligence, and focus.”

What factors – besides the obvious ones like engaging in lots of deliberate practice, being disciplined, being intelligent, etc. – can enable someone to become a top performer in dentistry? We could start with personality traits, but it would also be interesting to expand the scope of this question.

“Good communication skills and empathy certainly help. In general, you have to be a people person.”

What kinds of interests or hobbies usually indicate someone will be good at or enjoy working in dentistry?

“Painting, sketching – really anything that requires a steady hand.”

What prevents talented people with a good fit to the field from becoming top performers?

“Sloppiness and burnout – but that applies to most fields. It’s not clear cut. There are fraudulent dentists with little ability who succeed. I’m not saying you should commit fraud, but there are certainly hacks who never get ousted.”

Relatedly, what traps do people fall into in dentistry? Why do people fall into them?

“Taking up too many procedures. Aggressive treatments. Thinking you can do everything. Resistance to referring patients. Really anything to do with ego. But there’s no blaring chasms people fall into that you can’t foresee.”

What traits do different subfields favor? 

“The only thing I can see that would make someone a good prosthodontist that wouldn’t make them a good endodontist is their interest in prosthodontics. This isn’t like athletics, where small differences in body type can make someone a stellar marathoner but a mediocre sprinter. If you have a special interest in something, that’s just about the best predictor of how well you’ll do in it.”

If you consider yourself to be a top performer, what was your path to getting there like? If not, what does the average path look like to becoming top percentile? Could you take that skill-acquisition loop we mentioned earlier, and expound on it?

“It boils down to treatment planning, correctly diagnosing patients, acting quickly, and most importantly, managing the team you work with. Maintaining a good mood makes a huge difference in productivity.”

Contrarianism

What is something you believe about dentistry that other dentists don’t? 

“That investment in continued education is crucial. The dentists in my office that produce less than me are stuck with the knowledge and tools they learned in school, and refuse to adapt to newer, better technology.”

How does public perception of what it’s like to be a dentist align with reality? What do lay people definitely get right, and what do they get wrong?

“People are right about how lucrative dentistry is, but they don’t tend to understand how intense and physically taxing it can be.”

What is the most common useful fiction dentists have, and why do you think they have it?

“The belief that you’re better than you are. I don’t know how exactly people arrive at it, but it helps when things go wrong”

What is one reason people go into dentistry that they don’t talk about?

“Money.”

Related to an earlier question, what will stay the same about dentistry? Are there universal constants or paradigms that you just don’t see budging? 

“The structure of the way dentistry is practiced. It differs from country to country, but I’m certain that the American structure is not going to change.”

Conclusion

What parts of the job do you find make up for all the dark, bad, evil things you need to go through? Is there an element of romance or thrill or existential importance to it that you find? What about your job captures the heart?

“Relieving pain. It’s the most gratifying thing to watch a patient in suffering experience a moment of catharsis as you numb them.”