Young creators,There are three things that you can do that will lead to a meaningful career, and thus, a meaningful life.

• 1

  Find your fit.How many people do you know who really found their fit in life? I feel like the luckiest guy in the world, because I found mine. It’s a daunting task, and it doesn’t happen easily. Most of us don’t have a broad enough experience base to know where to find it. When I found mine I was an engineer. A particularly bad one. But the day I walked into my first design studio and talked to the people there, I knew I had found my calling.Society forces you to pick—you have to get a job. And it has to be the right job, one that pleases your parents and fits societal expectations. All those things force you to quickly pick and defend your choice. Finding your fit is about discovering what the choices are. The good news is, when you do experience it, you will quickly figure it out. Your intuition is really good about knowing, Is this me? Or is this not me?

• 2

  Build your confidence.Confidence in your ideas is a series of small successes. I often talk about how planning is overrated. It’s never too soon to start prototyping, and I don’t have any fear about showing an idea to someone 15 seconds after I’ve dreamed it up. When an idea is fragile, you might choose a like-minded person to be the first or second person you share it with. But you need to show it to someone who is not like you very quickly. If I designed a new pair of shoes, I might first show it to a friend who designs shoes. But the next person might be someone who doesn’t wear shoes at all. And then someone who wears them to climb telephone poles. Go to the extreme. Who has a totally different point of view than you have? And then who is the opposite of that? Invariably you will pull your idea back from the extreme to a more meaningful and appropriate solution. But you’re pulling it back from a place of real innovation. That’s how you get into the business of making new-to-the-world ideas, not just a better widget.Many people are precious about their ideas. But ideas are cheap. It’s good ideas that are hard to find. I’m quick to test an idea and dump it to move in the right direction. Those on the inside know that even Steve Jobs had lots of bad ideas. He just killed them quickly. My confidence comes from building something 15 times, and showing it to people 15 times. Even writing an email is important to me. I write it a lot of times, with a lot of people helping. And I have no fear of sending it, knowing it’s the best we could do.

• 3

  Lean into the heart.I’m afraid I’m radically on the side of the heart rather than the money. I’m not sure I’m right about this. But let me say, when you’re my age, and you’re sitting around smoking cigars and drinking brandy (metaphorically— I don’t do either), I get to say that I’m the luckiest guy on the planet. I found something I enjoyed doing every day. And people who went the other way say, I made a lot of money. I took a job that pleased society, and I provided for my family. Those are reasonable things. But I can see it in their eyes—they wish that they had done something with a little more heart in it. A little messier. That’s where the meaning and fun lies.

  Even within your own job, you can find a way to do something that is meaningful to you. It can be hard, because there’s a problem in most companies. They provide the solution set with the problem. If you do just what’s assigned, there’s not a way to shine. Instead, you have to say, here’s the solution the company asked for. And here are some other ideas I did on my own time. You can do the stuff you want to do, by double delivering. And you can find meaning where you are.

Find your fit. Find your best ideas. And find what matters to you,