Ever look at your LinkedIn or résumé and think, this reads like three different people?
Same.
Sociology degree. Government project manager. Technical recruiter, and Product designer. If you squint, it looks like I just couldn’t hold down a story. If you talk to me for five minutes, you’ll hear how every pivot was the logical next step. The thing that made me good at job A was usually what made me great at job B. Every time. Didn’t plan it that way, but here we are.
I didn’t have a word for this until I stumbled across Arthur Brooks’ research on career types. He’s a behavioral scientist at Harvard who studies happiness, and he says there are four distinct career patterns. Not based on industry or role, but on individual psychology.
Most of us were told we’re linears. Climb the ladder, take the better offer, repeat until retirement. That’s the model business schools teach and the one our résumés are formatted for.
Brooks says that’s wrong for a lot of us.
The four career types (and the one I wish I’d known about sooner)
Brooks, building on research by psychologist Michael Driver at USC, breaks careers into four patterns:
Linear. You change jobs every 3–6 years, but only when something better comes along. More money, more prestige, more responsibility. Steady upward trajectory. This is the default narrative.
Expert. You stay in one role for decades. Compensation ticks up with cost of living. Your reward is security, predictability, and the ability to have a life outside work. Think tenured professor, career civil servant, your grandpa who had the same job for 40 years and was genuinely happy about it.
Transitory. You move every 1.5–3 years, and not always upward. Sometimes you make more, sometimes less. The point isn’t the career. It’s the life. These are the “I work to live” people. Brooks gives an example:Barista in Bangor, surf shop in San Diego, moving van out of Tucson. They follow life, not a ladder.
Spiral. You change careers (not jobs, entirely different fields) every 7 to 12 years. From the outside, it looks chaotic. From the inside, every turn is informed by the one before it. That thing you learned in career one? It’s the secret weapon in career two. That skill that felt irrelevant? It’s actually your differentiator in career three.
Brooks is a spiral. He went from professional French horn player → economics PhD → think tank president → Harvard happiness professor. People told him he was insane every time he walked away. He kept walking.
This is the career type I wish someone had told me about when I was 22, panic-applying to jobs that made no sense for a sociology major who’d just spent two years selling lift tickets in Vail.
My spiral, annotated
Let me trace it.
Turn 1: Government contracting. 2011. I moved to DC with a sociology degree and a prayer. Landed at A-T Solutions, then Inflow NS. Spent seven years managing complex government projects, fixing processes that had been calcified since the Reagan administration. I learned how systems work, how organizations break, and how to talk to stakeholders who don’t agree with each other. None of this felt like UX at the time. In hindsight, it was all user flows.
Turn 2: Technical recruiting. 2018. I relocated to San Antonio and fell into recruiting. For four years, my job was talking to people, hundreds of them, about what they wanted, what they were good at, and where they were stuck. I recruited UX designers, watched their portfolios, heard them explain their process. I was doing user interviews before I knew user interviews were a thing. Eight years of recruiting taught me how to listen. Real listening, the kind where you’re not waiting for your turn to talk, you’re just curious about what comes next. I still use it every day.
Turn 3: Product design. 2022. I enrolled in General Assembly’s UX bootcamp. Was I starting over? Kind of. Was I starting from zero? Absolutely not. My research skills came from seven years of government operations. My interviewing skills came from four years of placing engineers and designers. My ability to work through ambiguity came from every single job before this one. I was 34. I was terrified. I was also more prepared than I’d ever been.
A quick note: if you’ve been in design long enough, you know the industry swapped “UX/UI Designer” for “Product Designer” somewhere around 2023. Same job, new label. I’ve been a product designer since my first role at Ronin & Co. The title just caught up later. Sortly. Bowtie. Veeva. Each pulled from a different previous turn. The recruiter in me knew how to interview users. The PM in me knew how to ship. The designer in me knew how to make it usable.
Brooks says spirals change every 7–12 years. I’m at year 15 of my professional and I can feel the next turn coming. Not because I’m unhappy. I love what I do. But because the spiral doesn’t stop. That’s kind of the point.
In this instance, I don’t think switching to another career is the next turn. I think it’s a pivot within this one. I think it’s a new skill, a new team, a new way to contribute. I don’t know what it is yet. But I know it will be informed by everything I’ve done before. I genuinely enjoy being a product designer, and the challenges I’ve had to solve. But I also know that if I don’t pay attention to the spiral, it will pay attention to me, eventually.
What the research says about actually pulling it off
A really interesting point around Brooks’ data on job satisfaction is humbling. Job changers rate their old job at a 4.5 out of 7 on average. The new job jumps to a 6 in the first two months (the honeymoon effect). Then it drops to 5.5 by month 12. People panic. They think they made a mistake. Some bail and go back.
Don’t bail.
The people whose satisfaction keeps going down after year one are what Brooks calls self-centered, they evaluated the job purely as “what does this do for me.” The people whose satisfaction curves back up are organization-centered, they thought about the team, the mission, the culture, the growth.
Brooks’ advice: when changing jobs, ask “do I want to be part of this team?” not “is this good for my career?” If the team is right, the career takes care of itself.
The other thing that hit me: happiness outside work bleeds into work. The single biggest predictor of job satisfaction is life satisfaction. People who scroll Instagram when they’re exhausted burn out faster than people who read, make things, spend time with people they love. Brooks calls it “leisure hygiene.” Stephen Covey called it “sharpening the saw.” I call it the reason I bake cakes and ride my bike with a women’s cycling group and play my trumpet when I remember where I left it.
I learned this one the hard way. Summer 2023, I temporarily lost 70% of my eyesight from stress. My body said stop before my brain got the message. I don’t recommend that as a learning method. Oh, I also got laid off from my job that summer. That was a different kind of stop. But the lesson was the same: if you don’t take care of yourself, your career will take care of itself, and it won’t be pretty.
Four rules for the next turn
Brooks lays out four rules for job changes, and they’re worth writing down:
1. Manage your expectations. Spirals are optimists. I am deeply guilty of this. New job = everything will be perfect forever. It won’t. The honeymoon ends. Satisfaction dips. That’s normal. That’s not a sign you messed up.
2. Find happiness outside work first. Not as a backup plan. As the main plan. Your job will change. You come home to you every night. That ecosystem needs to be solid.
3. Jump before you’re pushed. Pull motivation (you choose to leave) is psychologically easier than push motivation (your boss chooses for you). Most people see the signs coming and ignore them out of optimism. Brooks says: that’s not hope, that’s denial. Hope is active. Something good can be done and I can do it.
4. Don’t be afraid. This is the one I repeat to myself. Brooks tells his Harvard Business School students: it’s okay to quit your job. Don’t do it every six months. That’s a different problem. But if you’re a spiral and the turn is coming, walk away. Walk toward the thing that scares you. The French horn player who became a happiness professor sends his regards.
The question I’m sitting with
At the end of the episode, Brooks recounts a student asking: you tell us to walk away from careers when we lose interest. Why don’t you tell us to walk away from marriages every 7–12 years?
His answer: the people around your deathbed aren’t your coworkers. They’re the people you built a life with. That’s a different category of relationship. Aristotle called work relationships “friendships of utility.” They can be wonderful, meaningful, deeply satisfying. But they’re not the same as the person who knows where you keep your passport and how you take your coffee.
I think about this a lot. I’ve left jobs I loved. I’ve formed at least one work BFF at every company I’ve been at. The relationships mattered. The work mattered. But the person I am outside those jobs, the one who bakes cakes on weekends and rides her bike up to Golden, CO completely unprepared for the ridiculous hill climb and has opinions about dishwasher loading. That person doesn’t reset when the job changes.
She just gets to bring more to the next turn.
What I would do differently
Nothing, honestly. I used to wish I’d found design earlier or had a traditional design background. I used to feel behind. But everything I did before this. The government contracts, the recruiting, the 241 applications and 156 ghostings and 5% screen rate. That built the designer I am now.
If you’re a spiral and you don’t know it yet, here’s the test: Do you feel bored in a way that expensive lunches and internal transfers can’t fix? Do you have a skill from a previous life that nobody on your current team has? Do people tell you your career “doesn’t make sense” but it makes perfect sense to you?
Congratulations. The spiral is turning. Let it.
Shoutout to Arthur Brooks and his “Office Hours” show for the framework.
