biographies of your heroes

How to Pick a Career (That Actually Fits You) — Wait But Why

If you look at the biographies of your heroes, you’ll see that their paths look a lot more like a long series of connected dots than a straight and predictable tunnel. If you look at yourself and your friends, you’ll probably see the same trend—according to data, the median time a young person stays in a given job is only 3 years (older people spend a longer time on each dot, but not that much longer—10.4 years on average).

So seeing your career as a series of dots isn’t a mental trick to help you make decisions—it’s an accurate depiction of what’s actually happening. And seeing your career as a tunnel isn’t just unproductive—it’s delusional.

Likewise, you’re limited to focusing mainly on the next dot on your path—because it’s the only dot you can figure out. You don’t have to worry about dot #4 because you can’t anyway—you’re literally not qualified to do so.

By the time dot #4 rolls around, you will have learned stuff about yourself you don’t know now. You’ll also have changed from who you are now, and your Yearning Octopus will reflect those changes. You’ll know a lot more than you currently do about the career landscape and the specific game boards you’re interested in, and you’ll have become a much better game player. And of course, that landscape—and those game boards—will have themselves evolved.

Sheet Names From A Workbook

In this post we’ll find out how to get a list of all the sheet names in the current workbook without using VBA. This can be pretty handy if you have a large workbook with hundreds of sheets and you want to create a table of contents. This method uses the little known and often forgotten Excel 4 macro functions.

These functions aren’t like Excel’s other functions such as SUM, VLOOKUP, INDEX etc. These functions won’t work in a regular sheet, they only work in named functions and macro sheets. For this trick we’re going to use one of these in a named function.

1. Go to the Formulas tab. 
2. Press the Define Name button. 
3. Enter SheetNames into the name field. 
4. Enter the following formula into the Refers to field. =REPLACE(GET.WORKBOOK(1),1,FIND("]",GET.WORKBOOK(1)),"") 
5. Hit the OK button. 

In a sheet within the workbook enter the numbers 1,2,3,etc… into column A starting at row 2 and then in cell B2 enter the following formula and copy and paste it down the column until you have a list of all your sheet names.

As a bonus, we can also create a hyperlink so that if you click on the link it will take you to that sheet. This can be handy for navigating through a spreadsheet with lots of sheets. To do this add this formula into the column C.

=HYPERLINK("#'"&B2&"'!A1","Go To Sheet") Note, to use this method you will need to save the file as a macro enabled workbook (.xls, .xlsm or .xlsb). Not too difficult and no VBA needed.