Are you over-engineering your career path?
- Have you ever taken an opportunity because of the exposure it gave you—or was supposed to give you—to the higher ups?
- Have you ever taken a job because it seemed like a great stepping stone to bigger and better things?
- Have you ever carefully plotted out a complicated plan for achieving some goal?
Many people seem to want to over-engineer their paths. Rather than treat their career paths like the organic stories they are, they try to manufacture their paths as if a career path were something entirely within a single person’s control.
Silly rabbit, it’s not the plan that moves you forward, it’s your attitude toward the plan! You make the plan, but you execute the flow. Like a plant: you can see it take shape in your mind’s eye, but you can’t force it; you can’t pry those leaves open or stretch the stalk to make it grow faster. You have to work with it.
Make sense?
No?
As usual, Elle to the rescue:
Unscripted, one take.
Flow.
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Most of my work has been taken on intuitively. I liked the person I was going to work for and felt I could learn a lot from them. I’ve never been afraid to take a risk. Well, maybe just that one time when I interviewed with an insurance company and saw a huge office populated by pale people at a sea of grey desks…that was a definite opt-out.
This helped me, because I’ve always felt I somehow wasn’t doing the ‘career’ professionally enough – thanks for assisting me, Jason and Elle, as I drop that one off the cliff!!