Make time to explore the playground
How treating your career like a playground can open up possibilities
First of all, welcome to all the new subscribers who have joined - I’m so glad to have you!
Imagine this - you’re a mid level professional. You’ve spent 5-7 years in the work world, and you’re thinking about what’s next. But the thing is, you don’t know what’s next. You aren’t sure you want to stay in your current industry, but you’re afraid to try something new because you’ll miss your opportunity to climb the corporate ladder.
I’ve got good news for you - the world is changing, and the idea of a single career path is a thing of the past. Sure, you might get some flack from people who’ve seen the traditional career paths work well. And they do work well for people who work in niche fields that require specific skills and experience. But the vast majority of work doesn’t and shouldn’t require the same old experience from all it’s candidates. The future is coming whether we want it to or not, and the people with a variety of skills, emotional intelligence, and the ability to be versatile in an ever changing world will win.
Here’s why - varied experience and adaptability create an incredibly valuable employee. This is because someone with a wide variance of experience sees problems (and hence solutions) differently, and their adaptability means they can be put in any situation and figure it out.
And that’s where the playground analogy comes in:
A single, focused career is like a slide or a swing set. With focused practice, you get really good at it.
A flexible, varied career with a plethora of experiences is like playing on the whole playground. With exposure to so many experiences, you get really good at taking on new challenges.
When it comes to building a career, I’m sure you’ve all heard of at least one of these:
Climb the ladder
Scale the jungle gym
Swim / stay in your lane
Step up to the plate
Ride the wave
They all reference to sport or play. Why? There are probably a lot of reasons, and chief among them is the relevance of play to career. Most people understand what it means to climb a ladder or to scale your way through a jungle gym. And when it comes to building a career, there is so much similarity.
What I mean is this: building a career doesn’t have to be linear. It doesn’t have to mean climbing a ladder or playing on the same piece of equipment over and over again. It could mean trying stuff out and getting good at playing across the whole playground.
In future newsletters, I’ll dig deeper into how I found success through a wide range of jobs + adaptability. For now, try this: if you’re unsure about what’s next or where to go, start to pay attention to how you feel when you learn about a job or a project. If you get really excited and eager when you hear about something, that’s a clue you should pay attention to.
See you next week!
Links I loved this week:
How to tackle a to-do list if you have poor executive functioning skills
“You’re not the protagonist in your company’s story—the CEO is. Your job isn’t to get your ideas implemented but to brilliantly operationalize the CEO’s vision. Find where you can add unique value within that framework.” - source
This 1-minute rule is a cleaning game changer
Waymo costs more than Lyft or Uber, but people are still happy to pay
The Ad Industry is going through a reckoning thanks to AI