Farouk Dey - Exploring Curiosity

Farouk Dey teaches life design for a living which he said is the opposite of career planning. “It’s trying to create a culture where we no longer ask people, ‘what do you want to do with your life,’” said Dey. “We’re essentially asking them, ‘what are you curious about?’ and getting them to act on that curiosity.”

There can be a natural tendency to adjust their narrative based on presented opportunities in one's career. But Dey believes that people will end up defaulting back to their passions sooner or later and that career step forward could be a step backward.

"It comes back to the bottom line of what life design is about, which is getting lucky in these things, but you create luck by committing to the work that you do and then positioning yourself that you're in the right place at the right time."

Through the years and the multitude of conversations Dey conducted with people in their mid-careers, he realized people are given the wrong advice at the beginning of their journeys. "We're trying to predict what they will be in the future. We're giving them all these types of assessments to try to get them to understand who they are. But they're barely learning these types of things. It's not a matter of predicting the future or predicting where we will be, but it's a matter of acting on our curiosity."