You never control the arc of your career
samestuffdifferentday.net
samestuffdifferentday.net
An old business mentor gave me some excellent words of wisdom about starting and running a business:
When you start a business, you should have a clear idea of what you want to do and you'll have a vision of the path it will take. That's important. But it's also important to be willing to let all of that go.
Once your business starts running, it will have its own ideas about where it should go and what it should do. And the business knows the right path better than you do. If its trying to go a direction that you didn't have in mind, you're smarter to go with that direction than to try to force the path to the one you had planned.
I think career management is pretty much the same. Your career, after all, is really just a business in disguise. There are too many unknowns -- unknown risks and unknown opportunities -- for you to be able to lay out what your career arc should be in advance. Nimble is the key word here.
But I'm just stating what the article said in different words.
What is most important, essential, or profitable is unlikely to be perfectly represented by the initial plan or thesis.
The reality is that all of us are surrounded by opportunities all the time. Most of them aren't ones of interest to us and so we don't even notice them. It's also easy to not notice the ones that should be of interest to us.
I don’t get it. If your business slowly goes down the shitter, it might be either because it follows the path you planned, or because it doesn’t. If you’re smart you should be able to recognize both of these realities and correct accordingly.
I'm also reminded of Mike Tyson's quote: "Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face".
Things rarely go as planned, so you should favor following leads and taking advantage of opportunities, instead of sticking rigorously to some plan you put together when you were less experienced.
Unless there's evidence the original plan is still viable, oftentimes, being attached to it and ignoring what's the market is telling you is just your ego speaking.
My late dad hated insurance. He told me it was a scam, so I hated it too. My first job after graduating was in an insurance company.
I hated MLM because they're scam. My second job was building an MLM system.
Before smartphones were popular, premium SMS (that charges a dollar for 1 "fortune teller" SMS) was a booming business that preyed on gullible people. I hated it. My 3rd job was building a backend for that SMS thing.
I never intentionally go for that kind of company (except the insurance company because I had just graduated and scrambled to get any job), but somehow, the company I work for always does projects in the things I hate.
Talk about the law of attraction...
That's an important qualifier. You can still direct it towards the right path.
If you don't do anything, you won't get anywhere (generally speaking).
A while back there was an oped from a former Fox News staffer who said lots of people in the FN newsroom were liberals.