Don't "Focus"
As a hat-tip to my 20s, I am sharing a series of posts titled Epic 20s — capturing lessons from navigating my career in my 20s. This is for folks graduating from college or are a couple of years into their careers wondering what to do next. Hope you find it useful. 🙂
This first post is about how to think about what to do right out of college.
Looking for the right work/job is a function of what your conception of success is. Generally, our conception of success is influenced by our immediate physical surroundings and social groups. Those influences are more overpowering than we acknowledge — a lot of these choices come with implicit prestige and signal attached (eg., working for Amazon must mean you’re smart etc.).
If I were a mountain climber, my goal should be to find the highest mountain to climb (global maxima). The hill in my town maybe the highest in a 200 mile radius (local maxima) - but you can’t let it give you the illusion that it is the highest in the world. Absence of evidence (especially when you’re not looking for it) is not evidence of absence.
In the context of career, here’s a few examples of the local maxima from my life.
Family/Bangalore. My family/Bangalore’s version of success was for me to study at an IIT, become an engineer and find a well-paying job at a big company. Pretty mainstream middle-class India. I broke away from it to go to law school (being poor at science definitely helped).
Law School. At law school, the pop-culture choices were between litigation and corporate law. I broke away from law entirely and went to do comedy and later work at a startup (being poor at following instructions helped).
Uber. After Uber, it was a choice between working at another up-and-coming startup or starting your own company (most early colleagues didn’t view working at a big company as an option). I chose neither and have now broken away from “working at a place” altogether. This is WIP - more on this later.
Forget focus. Look for your global maxima.
Here’s my argument.
In your 20s, your goal should be to find the global maxima for you. Unlike Mt. Everest, global maxima for careers are dynamic - the answer is different depending on the time, place and person.
The longer you spend exploring yourself, different social groups and places - the better your chances of finding something made for you. A set of options outside those handed to you by the immediate society around you.
It is impossible to avoid being influenced by people around you — just insure yourself by exposing yourself several influences rather than handing that power out to a single group (eg., your family or your university).
Typically, society will oversimplify your options.
Engineering or medicine. Litigation or corporate law. Amazon or startup. You should be skeptical of these exclusive, binary choices and focus on putting as many options on the table as you can during your process.
Pushing past this helped me not be a miserable, below-par engineer working a job that I hate with an outsized college debt.
One corollary - if you peak at your job (eg., you win employee of the year), then unless you are Jeff Bezos - you have likely peaked at a local maxima whether you knew it or not. This should be cue to leave (even better so you leave at the top), and pursue a something bigger.
4 ways to find your global maxima.
If you’re trying to find your global maxima - you’re essentially deploying a search function into the real world. So start looking... along the axes of time, space and people.
Travel. Obvious, yet underrated. Doesn’t count if you travel with family/friends. Traveling alone or with a group of people not from your city forces you to create shared experiences with strangers. In the process, I learnt things about yourself and the world I didn’t know. One hack to travel without paying for it is to find a job that requires you to travel.
Work in a new city. Each city will place a certain industry on a pedestal. Engineering in Bangalore; art, music, finance in NYC; tech startup in San Francisco. Work at the altar of a few different pedestals so you’re in the catchment area of options in that industry. These tend to be at the frontier of innovation — and gave me a chance to be a part of something bigger than myself.
Work many roles. Titles and roles are ways to organise a company’s workflow - they are not meant to limit your professional identity. Break past the silos of “marketing”, “sales”, “operations” etc. Instead focus on what you’re naturally good at and keep exploring roles till you eventually break.
At the risk of oversimplification, you’re either left brained (analytical) or right brained (creative). I am a right brained -- so I tried everything that fit into that spectrum at my last company. I started with operations; then customer support; then marketing/BD; PR; public policy and finally brand. This helped me figure out what I wanted to double-down on.
Twitter. Twitter is a place where strangers connect with each other over shared ideas. If you follow the right people and ignore politics/trolling - you will find it is an incredibly valuable learning and networking tool. As someone said, Twitter is used for whatever LinkedIn was meant for.
Until next time… good luck!
Cover image credit: https://www.mediabistro.com/get-hired/job-search/how-to-find-a-job-before-its-posted/
