TL;DR: you’re never choosing a Mission; you’re choosing a Career Slice, all strings attached.

Since I’m working for a place with the rightfully earned reputation of “saving the world”, I spend an average of several hours each month talking to people who think about dropping whatever else they’re doing and joining the (unironically) noble endeavor.

Before the conversation becomes a recruiting one, I often go to great lengths to make sure the candidate understands one basic thing with the help of the two questions I’ll present next. It is to my amazement that most don’t.

To put it bluntly: for a fortunate person, a year of life is 2% of their time between their teens and their retirement. Thus a typical 2.5-year stint is actually 5% of one’s working lifetime.

It is especially true when it’s one’s first job (or the first job after a major pivot) – since a first job affects consequent positions as well, this one little step affects at least 10% of your working life, and perhaps even more!

Without further ado, these are the two basic questions that you need to be able to answer.

Question 1: What’s your general risk appetite?

From afar, people tend to look only on upside, and then become disillusioned once they face the details/consequences. Any comparison in which you compare “foresight” and “hindsight” knowledge is going to be impossibly skewed in favor of the exciting new option.

Yet when the time comes to commit to the exciting new option, a lot of people in the industry tend to the other extreme - they become exceedingly risk-averse! They never actually go ahead with that bold move that could be entirely plausible in foresight and obvious in hindsight.

Don’t take me wrong: there’s a lot at stake! It’s perfectly rational to be risk-averse in a calculated way. I am personally a risk-taker, but that’s because I can afford it! I’ve had a lot of bases covered thoroughly earlier in my career, which now gives me wiggle room.

What I ask for you is to do that calculus, as opposed to forever being reactive. Sometimes making a gutsy move is by far wiser.

Question 2: Is this specific career good for you?

Beginning any career slice entails the following:

Losing the status you’ve had before and beginning anew - it will take months, perhaps years, until your opinion is going to be considered valuable; you’re going to do rookie mistakes at any level from the technical to the political; you might look stupid and weak and struggling after many years of being able to look like a top dog.
Acquaintance with specific toolset and mindset. For example, computational biology means you’ll need to tinker a lot with genomic data stored in a certain way, specific kinds of tooling (e.g., gene mappers/aligners), specific quality metrics, etc.
Losing touch with whatever was your toolset and mindset before that.
Acquaintance with people - both specific individuals and types,
Losing touch with whatever people you were in touch with before that,
Adoption of a specific mental discipline - for example computational biotech is a highly team-driven process. You just won’t do well there if you go into the lone wolf/hero mode.
Losing touch with whatever mental discipline was making you successful beforehand.

To sum up: can you internalize becoming the professional and the person the new job requires you to be, for better and for worse?

Epilog

As the guy who’s going to be working with a candidate, it’s very important for me to have them face their own preferences early on instead of investing into them for a year and then have them sour and quit!

As I already mentioned, a vast majority of the people are unforthcoming to themselves on these two questions, and I think that this both fuels a feeling of existential anxiety on one hand, and a pattern of missed opportunities on the other. I hope that I can motivate you to reflect upon yourself from this perspective, so you’d be able to make an active and informed decision within a constructive dialogue with yourself; such a dialogue will also give you tools to face the inevitable FOMO which you’ll have when you see people who made opposite choices to yours.