According to the website 80,000 Hours, the typical career is just that: 80,000 hours long. That’s an almost unfathomable amount of time. But life is long too. The typical person is alive for slightly more than 4,000 weeks, and awake and conscious for the equivalent of 3,000 weeks. When you do the basic math on 80,000 hours, you discover that the average career is roughly the equivalent of 480 sleepless weeks of labor. A little bit more math, and you realize that the typical person has five waking hours of not working for every one hour of their career.
Careers are not the mere linear progression of titles ascending toward the “C” acronyms: CMO, CTO, CEO. Better to think of your working life not in one dimension, but in two: the horizontal exploration of ideas, skills, and tasks, and vertical commitments to a single line of work that really fits.