Owning your career

How to identify what a good path-forward is for you, career-wise? How do you find your life’s work?

Two parts, second part first.

Your life’s work is the work you did over the course of your life.

First part: how do you identify your career?
A career is either a series of short-term panic decisions, where you take the best available offer on the day you ran out of money, or on the day you get fired. Or, it’s a series of thoughtful pauses, where you wait for panic to subside, you wait for a better opportunity. You take that instead. And while you are waiting, you do the work to earn you the next gig. That’s what makes it a career.

We all know people that waited a year between jobs. For that year, they could have worked in Starbucks, or they could have worked as an assistant manager somewhere… They didn’t. They waited for the thing that would next bring them forward. And hopefully, if they were smart, they didn’t spend the whole year waiting for the phone to ring. They spent that year building their portfolio. They spent that year earning trust and attention. They spent that year doing work that people were proud of.

That cycle is what makes you have a career.

— Seth Godin, on Instagram (2020-04-22) talking about ownership.