Website Source: blog / career
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Pending synthesis from local website source.
Original source title: Career
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Note: I'm about to graduate in like 2 weeks, and one of the most challenging problems I faced was that of finding a career where I thrive. I picked up many life-skills along the journey to finding the ideal career. The following blog is very much a collection of learnings that I gathered, so they might not be applicable to your case, but I've made sure to make them as general as possible for all audience to take something with.
The Career Identity
I have a problem with hiring. The thing that I don't really like about it is the fact that we tend to make our career identity our entire identity, and that too at when we are teenagers and don't really know how to navigate in the world. We tend to take one of the most important decision(but not THE most important decision) of our lives of what we want to work on when we don't even know how things work in the first place - as if being a teenager in itself isn't challenging enough(at least for me, it was). You are dealing with your own issues, and the same time life comes at you at full speed and throws 20 things at you, and you need to somehow make the right decision in all of them? This isn't ideal, but that's life.
Making a career(not getting a job, there's a big difference) is such a convoluted field that any advice you receive is probably of no use in your case - the "gotcha" case of the survivorship bias. There are things you need to figure out on your own, and no amount of advice is going to cut it. I feel with the right approach and being educated about things makes you stand out in a system that doesn't really care about you.
For me, your career is something from which: you can make money, satisfy your curiosity and provide value to the society. If you are able to find an intersection in all three factions, you are sorted, but let me tell you a hard truth(if you haven't figured till now), that finding this intersection is REALLY, REALLY, REALLY HARD. One of the first people that come to my mind when I think about people who have find this intersection is [Chris Olah](https://colah.github.io/about.html) - who figured this pretty early, and is someone I look up to for inspiration.
The college experience taught me a lot about life. The "trial period of adulthood" I had in my college prepared me for life in ways I didn't really imagined. I learned a lot about how to be a good social citizen(I'm a really really really shy person), have good health, how to prioritize my time, how to draw boundaries etcetera. Learning all of these is very complicated, and there's no way someone could've taught me this. I needed to step outside my comfort zone and tackle these on my own. Most importantly, I developed this great habit of having honest one-on-one conversations with myself about things that I want and things I don't. I carefully weigh in the pros and the cons about things I care deeply about, and usually don't make a rash decision - and career is certainly one of those important decision. I don't want to work in specific fields because all of my peers are doing that, but do them because I can find the intersection. Sometimes things work in your favor, and sometimes they don't, but what you can do is at least take the driver seat in the decisions that are going to impact the next phase of your life.(also, just to point out, I'm a big believer in the fact that you can always change things in your life, so it's not that you can't redo things, it's just being prepared about what life is about to throw at you). Career is said to be one of the three/four biggest decision that one has to take in their life, and letting fate roll a dice on that one is not ideal for me.
The Hard Conversations
Anytime the topic of career is brought up - suddenly the word "passion" rises from the ashes. Many people have different notion of passion, but for me passion is the thing from which you derive creative satisfaction. In the context of career, passion is something from which you can _continuously_ derive creative satisfaction _for long periods of time_. You need to be able to enjoy learning things(learning is not supposed to be enjoyable, but still bear with me), and not chicken away when things get tough. The hard thing with making a career solely based on your passion is that the age(the age is just a placeholder for lack on experience) in which you take these decisions(for me, it was 16), we are often myopic with how things are going to pan out in the future. Questions like "Will this be relevant 5-10 years down the line?" and more importantly, "Will I still enjoy working in this field 5-10 years from now?" have no clear answers, but an informed, educated "guess" is more valuable than a "YOLO" decision. Learning what you like is another exploration pursuit few people take seriously.
I'm a huge believer that the world around us is a passion project made by people who loved their craft. These "craftsmen" weren't the chosen ones because they were naturally good at it, but they picked up things along the pursuit of honing their craft. This is generally the advice I like to give to people, is to not think of career as a roadmap, but rather a treasure hunt. No craftsmen were world class experts in one thing, but were adventurous polymaths who were jack of all trades. They didn't restrict themselves to a particular discipline, but rather allowed themselves the freedom to explore and let curiosity drive them to hone their craft - and that for me is the essence of passion which translates into really well in the context of career. There are these hard conversations you need to have with yourself to understand what you are passionate about?(and whether you can sustain it or not), and then how much depth you are willing to go to quench your curiosity?.
As per my limited experience, you can basically go to any field with these two learnings in your arsenal. If you able to convince the right stakeholders about these two, I can guarantee that there's no organization in the world that is going to reject you(unless you are affected by the aftermath of a global pandemic, honestly, for which even I don't know what to do). Anything unrelated to these two comes under the umbrella of "skill issue" and that is much easier to overcome. The hard pill to swallow is that no amount of Ted Talks, Podcasts, YouTube videos are going make things easier for you. You need to have these hard conversations with yourself, and honestly, my recommendation is that if you have to swallow a frog, do it first thing in the morning. I've learned that if you don't solve these two learnings early in your career, you'll often end up in places where you'll feel like an imposter.
Integration Notes
- Source section:
blog - Local source:
/home/yashs/Desktop/Programming/yash_blog/yash-srivastava19.github.io/blog/career.md - Raw copy:
raw/website/yash-srivastava19-github-io/blog/career.md