Screw Your Career Path. Live Your Story.
I wrote this in 2009. The message still resonates with me—so here it is again. You can download an outline of the main points here.
The classic story arc. This will come in handy when you get to the bullets down below.
Are you stressing about your career path? Worried that a recent job change may have set you back? Wondering if you’ll be selected as manager (or partner) at this year’s review?
Knock it off.
Are you debating which skills to develop to reach the next level? Thinking about the relationships you’ll need? Looking for a mentor?
Stop it now.
You don’t have a career path. You never have. What you have is a career story, and the sooner you wrap your head around that, the sooner you’ll start having success like you can’t believe.
Career Paths: Pure Myth
There are no such things as career paths. Career “pathing” is a fiction, invented by HR practitioners and bosses trying to make their own jobs easy—for legitimate reasons I’ll explain in a moment—and reinforced by the technology vendors who support them. Think about it: if you were in HR, responsible for the professional development of every individual in the company (amongst other things!), how many of those individuals’ “stories” could you keep straight in your head before they’d started to blur together? I don’t blame HR one bit for trying to put some parameters on their work. In fact, any time you put a collection of people together, there should be a tension between peoples’ desires to act as individuals and the organization’s desire to have them act as a single group, and I applaud the people in HR for taking the oft-unpopular role of representing the collective.
Unfortunately, somewhere along the way, we on the individuals’ side dropped the rope, and now the tension’s gone from the line; The collective has all the momentum. Now we talk how they talk, without giving it a second thought. We covet career path opportunities like “high profile assignments” and “high-potential programs” as if those are the only things that matter. We have fallen so in love with the path, we have forgotten what the destination looks like. We seem to have forgotten that the “path” isn’t about us, it’s about someone else trying to keep us in place, to get us to conform so that managing us is easy. For them. Today, we race to take personal assessments and to collect our gold stars… and when we get them, we just ask for more:
“What’s my next career step after that?” we want to know.
Instead of pursuing success, we pursue the path. Instead of focusing on a meaningful end game, we focus on gaming the system. We approach our careers like we’d approach a video game: when we get frustrated, rather than turning off the machine and simply living our lives, we blame The System for not letting us do it Our Way and then poll our peers for cracks, hacks, and anything else to help us reach the next level. We’re blind to the tragic reality that we did do it Our Way, and that Our Way was to give up control and follow someone else’s dumb rules.
We Suck
Newsflash: you can’t game your career development when following someone else’s rules. Ever. You will lose, because in this game, the people who determine whether or not you succeed are the incumbents who get displaced when you win. This isn’t conspiracy theory stuff. It’s human nature. Give me a good person who I like and respect, and when I give her power, I will I trust her to do the right thing.
I will also trust her to be a human being.
Human beings generally do not—repeat not—give up power once they have it. Moreover, human beings, once placed in a subordinate role, generally adopt a self-limiting mentality that keeps them in that subordinate role—without any coercion from their superior. I’m not going to get into the (many well known) psychological studies that show this. Instead, I’m going to share a moment from my own life that highlights this dynamic and how difficult it is to break it:
I was in high school, there was a job to do in the house, my dad and I had very different ideas about the best way to get that job done, and right or wrong, I held firm against him and did it my way. I caught hell for it, and deservedly so, but my little act of defiance also changed our dynamic in a positive way. Forever. In light of all the things life has thrown at people, standing up for myself was a simple thing, not remotely difficult in the scheme of things, yet at the moment, it felt… vulnerable. Stand up to my dad?! Surely, that’s not what I was supposed to be doing, right? In that moment, I was totally off-script. I went from seeing my dad as having all the answers to seeing him as someone who’s opinion I could disagree with. I didn’t know up from down. And despite all the lessons I learned from books growing up, it’s the lesson from that moment that I remember best.
Despite teasing me mercilessly about it, I think my old man was proud of me for making that stand, too. See, he couldn’t ever tell me to disagree with him. He couldn’t give me permission to fight him. He couldn’t help me fight him. Yet, he had known since the day I was born that such a day would come, and when it did, he’d want to know that as a dad, he’d raised a son who could hold his own under pressure. Sure, on the issue itself, my logic was a clusterfudge of poor judgment, and he let me know that without pulling any punches (figuratively speaking). But in a different part of his mind, he was busy assessing something else: my ability to make a decision and to have the courage to stand by it. The way in which he tested my reasoning also tested my mettle. None of this was conscious, but looking back, the test was unmistakable.
When we go along with prefabbed career paths, we lose—entirely—this test-your-mettle half of the development equation. Courage only gets tested in the face of doubt, but when everything is organized as it is with a career path, there is no doubt. When we’re given a scripted path to follow, we face tests and choices, but they are bounded, controlled. We cannot learn to keep moving forward in spite of that sickening fear of not knowing which way to go and having no one to ask. We cannot learn to stick to our guns in the face of grave doubts, because support of some kind is always there. We cannot learn the meaning of true resilience, because the guard rails of these programs prevent us from ever failing spectacularly. (Oh, you didn’t hit your stretch goal? BFD. Oh, you bet everything on a new program that didn’t work out and you’ll have to lay off 350 people—including good friends—whose only mistake was to believe in you? Now let’s see you get out of bed tomorrow.)
Our leaders—those with power—cannot help us with these lessons of courage any more than my dad could help me that night of our fight. It’s not because they’re not rooting for us—they often are our biggest cheerleaders—it’s because they have a specific role to play in our stories, and when these lessons happen, their role is no longer to protect us, but to test us. They become dangerous adversaries with advantages in both knowledge and experience. And once in that role, they will not take it easy on us. Which is OK: we need to know where we stand when the only thing holding us up are our own two legs. Greatness is not a club that lets us in. We have to earn our way in, and those inviting us to apply are often the very same ones guarding the gates.
Of course, all this stuff about courage is almost irrelevant: by the time we’re on a career path, we’re already living in some fictional world where we can pretend such tests are unnecessary anyway.
Write Your Career Story
It’s time, as individuals, to remember that we are each protagonists in our own stories—not fictional ones, either, but real, live, actual, here-I-am-in-the-flesh-stories. We are all currently living our own life stories, of which our careers are subplots. For some of us, these are major subplots, for others, not so much. But for none of us should this subplot overtake our bigger life story—especially if the subplot is reduced to a predictable, formulaic progression.
In fact, I defy you find any good story in which the main character lives his life start to finish in a predictable, formulaic way, as if led by a guide wire.
Stories don’t start until those guide wires break. When you’re on a guide wire, you can’t have a story. You’re nothing more than a supporting character. You’re a flat, boring, two-dimensional device that exists only to highlight someone else’s excitement. Only protagonists can know surprises, friendship, obstacles, twists, victories, villains, daring, love, temptation, loss, luck, setbacks, choices, laughter, tears… only protagonists can know success.
So screw your career path. Cut your guide wire. C’mon; let’s write your story.
Start by picking a goal. Actually, do this:
Take a sheet of paper and on it, draw the classic story line curve (known as Freytag’s Pyramid, which I like to adapt by putting the resolution above the exposition. Because if you’re going to go through all the trouble, the result should be something better than you’re starting point!
At the end—not at the climax, but at the very, very end, at the conclusion/resolution—write your ending. This is what you used to call your “goal.” Make it a good one.
Have you written it? Yes? Congratulations: you have now just written the ending to your story. This is not a wish, not a maybe, not a conditional desire. It is the ending to your story. You have scripted the last scene of your movie, so to speak. It is written, and so it shall be. All you have left to do now is to get there.
At the left side of the page, draw yourself as a stick figure. You have now begun your journey.
Put a dot on the curve where the rising tension starts. This point is called the inciting moment, and it’s where the guide wire snaps. As with any story, you can’t possibly know what this trigger might be. Often, it’s a small thing you don’t think twice about. Sometimes, it’s even out of your control. Just know that it’s out there somewhere, and that someday, you’ll look back and recognize it. Then stop thinking about it. Seriously. You couldn’t possibly create that moment if you tried (unless you are one of life’s specialists and are living a pre-ordained life a la Owen Meany).
In Rocky, Balboa’s moment comes when he gets chosen to fight the world champ in an exhibition fight—out of his control. In Star Wars, Luke’s story starts when the droid his uncle chooses from the Jawas breaks, and they pick R2-D2 instead—at C3P0’s urging. In Charlotte’s Web, a book filled with important moments, the turning point is an innocuous scene in which Fern sells Wilbur to her uncle for $6—a move the pig knows nothing about. None of these scenes feels terribly important when they happen, yet these are the moments that unlock the stories as we have come to know them. What unlocks your story will likely surprise you. Don’t fight it. Let your life unfold.
Rising conflict. Look at that slope you have to climb. Have you ever enjoyed a story where the protagonist whined the whole time about the tasks ahead of him? Of course not! Even in Romeo and Juliet, a tragic tale filled from start to end with regret, the characters are always pushing forward.
Rest assured, there must be conflict. No conflict, no story. Be the protagonist who embraces his journey and relishes the obstacles he faces—whatever they may be—as natural and expected parts of the story.
Look, I don’t know if your story has a happy ending. I have no idea how steep your path will be to your ending, or how spectacular your climax will be.
But I do know this: humans are not meant to follow career paths. We are not built to follow guide wires. Birds are. Fish are. Ants are.
Humans. Are. Not.
We are meant to live our stories. It’s when you let go of trying to control the path and simply live the story ahead of you that—win, lose, or draw—you ensure your own success.
Because when it comes time to walk out of this theater, regardless of whether it was a comedy, tragedy, adventure or drama, you will turn to the people around and say:
“Wow. Did you see my life? Now that was one helluva story!”
And you will, at that moment, know what it means not just to have lived but to have loved, too, even if the only thing you loved was your story, and you know sure as you’re sitting there reading this that there is no greater thing you can achieve in life than that.
Here’s to your life story.