<aside> đź’ˇ Boundless - feature article from Pam Hobart

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How To (Not) Plan A Career | #149

Highlights

The Bottom-Up Career Strategy

The way we think about searching for jobs is based on a certain mental model of work that is outdated.  We assume that life is about finding the right "career," track, or path and then working backward.

Our to-do list becomes the long and winding set of tasks that will deliver us to that pre-determined goal. The main virtues required for top-down career planning and job-searching are conscientiousness, diligence, and rule-following.

This top-down approach is oversold and overused. Having a “plan” is supposed to make you strong, but it actually makes you fragile. If you don’t like the thing, you’re ill-suited for it, or your personal life changes, you end up “behind,” or you have to switch plans altogether and start fresh. Ouch.

Planning backward, taking a path of related steps towards a goal, is a valuable skill that you may need locally, in a certain project. But it’s not a good way to think about your job or career writ large. And if you’ve learned that this is the only responsible way, it’s time to unlearn that.

The Hidden Costs of "Plans"

'What do you want to be when you grow up' fantasy plans don't end in childhood.

I spent tens of thousands of dollars and years of my life studying various forms of philosophy. Meanwhile, I took jobs in teaching, curriculum design, business development, operations management, freelance writing, and as an executive assistant.

Virtually none of the value of this 15-year “journey” came from any of my stated plans. They were more of a distraction. Generating tasks that I couldn’t or wouldn’t complete, stoking the inner critic who asked “what are you doing with your life?!”, and opening identity doors that my gut wanted to slam shut.

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The top-down approach affords clarity, vision, and motivation to those who can actually follow a strict path. In fact, it works almost too well for a small number of people that succeed with this approach. This is probably why we pay so much attention to it.

The main cost, however, is that the entire approach depends on picking one path. This means the costs of failure are high. If you need to switch from one top-down plan to another it can cause a lot of disruption and agony in your life

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