Work consumes most of our lives, particularly if you're working 40, 50, or more hours per week,

that is a lot of life. Over time, what you do for work can shape not just how you spend your

days, but how you think about yourself. And yet, for something that takes up so much of our lives,

most of us are basically improvising when it comes to deciding what work we should do.

Early in my career, I was definitely in some kind of race. It was a race to prove myself, to get

recognition that I was good at things. That recognition came in the form of titles and

promotions and compensation and all the visible signals that I was winning. Even though it was

somebody else's race and somebody else's rules, for a long time, I let it guide how I made

decisions about my career. And then at some point, life made me pause and ask a much

harder question. What do I actually want? What does success mean to me? What matters to me in my life?

What do I want my life to be about? And how does work fit in to all of that? Most of the big decisions in our careers don't come with clear answers.

They come with trade-offs.

Prestige versus meaning.

Scale versus proximity.

Money versus time.

Safety versus growth.

So when all the options look good on paper, how do you stay true to yourself?

And how do you decide what's actually right for you?

I'm Molly Graham, and this is Work Life, a show where we untangle the messy human side of work.

Patty Stone Seifer is one of the people I have turned to most often when I've

made decisions in my career. I admire her so much, not just because of what she's done, but because

she's always seemed to know how to stay true to herself. It can be so easy to let things like

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