> It is well known the drunken sailor whos taggers to the left or right n independent random steps will, on the average, end up about sqrt(n) steps from the origin. But if there is a pretty girl in one direction, then his steps will tend to go in that direction and he will go a distance proportional to n. In a lifetime of many, many independent choices, small and large, a career with a vision will get you a distance proportional to n, while no vision will get you only the distance sqrt(n). In a sense, the main difference between those who go far and those who do not is some people have a vision and others do not and therefore can only react to the current events as they happen.
Just a tiny bit of bias towards a direction will get you very far very fast.
I once modeled+visualised this with a bit of javascript[1] and it's quite surprising to see the huge difference from even a tiny multiplication factor on each random/probabilistic decision.
That's really nice, but the point where the vision is should move too. You learn as you progress. What you enjoy changes. The entire industry moves. Being focused on the goal you defined 30 years ago is almost certainly wrong for most people.
It is not something I share very often, because people assume a lot when I do, but von Braun[1] shared a similar idea. Ignoring for a moment his past, one cannot say that he had no achievements further supporting position noted by OP.
This is a lovely mental model and also makes me feel a host of existential dread. I had a semblance of vision before gen AI and I think that vision needs serious revision
Which is fine. Goals shift and can even completely disappear, forcing you to pick another one. But having and pursuing long term goals at most times is still the ticket for success. My 2c.
I also really treasure that quote. Your visualization really made it hit home again though.
It does make me reflect on this piece I wrote 9(!!) years ago though, which hasn't completely materialized. I think I'm due for a re-alignment of priorities.
I have generally had strong vision in my career but this year due to external forces at play at work I have been much more reactive to the chaos and generally felt off the whole year, this was a nice mental model to step through, liked the visualization.
Wait, are you saying that for a symmetrical random walk, the expected distance is of the order of sqrt(n), but even for a slightly biased random walk (like 0.5000001 chance to take right) it's of the order of n?
Edit: well of course it is. I was thinking expected position (which should be 0) not distance
"expected distance" is average abs(coordinate), so for biased walk (and big enough time) it's simply abs(bias)*time, and for unbiased it's deviation==sqrt(variance)
I think the beauty of this quote is working more than its content.
Most people, even when they do not sit down and think about it, follow one of the two career paths:
- Some people will actively pursue the next logical progression (senior, lead/manager, head/vp, exec).
- Some will happily stay in their position unless the next one is offered to them.
Being deliberate will always work better compared to being random, but it is not like all people who succeed in their careers deliberately planned to get where they are.
I would even guess that for the vast majority of successful careers, competency and luck played a much bigger role than being deliberate about it.
> would even guess that for the vast majority of successful careers, competency and luck played a much bigger role than being deliberate about it.
I think this is true. I had a while where my career was doing really well constant steps up, I was learning, getting promoted, was working on great projects and problems that were engaging and led to easy promotions. Then I got a new manager and it was downhill. Then I got a new job and the problems are insignificant and there's no room for growth of any kind. If my latest job was earlier in my career my career would be very different.
The main thing missing from this IMO is an element of chance or randomness, the ability to incorporate “unknown unknowns” into your life. The most interesting people I’ve come across have had a variety of jobs, many of which they knew absolutely nothing about when starting out. There is a genuine value add when you’ve worked beyond the same white collar profession your entire working career.
In other words, the problem in designing your life is that you’re almost always going to pick things you already know. Maybe that gets you to the peak of your current profession over twenty years…but maybe some other job is actually a lot more fulfilling to you.
I’m not sure how to incorporate this into a young person’s real life experience, but I do think gap years, varied internships, volunteering, etc. are probably a good start.
I recently listened to a podcast with a guy that wrote a book advocating that young people spend 4 years getting a pilot’s license, working on a ranch, becoming an EMT, and various other useful skills/jobs. That seems like a great idea, although I didn’t like the hostility to traditional college he had in offering this plan.
In Quebec we have a sort of college between high school and university where you are forced to take "bullshit classes" along with the stuff you chose to study. Mine included philosophy, Spanish, photography, canoeing, and a few others. At the time it felt like a diversion, but it was a welcome introduction to something other than computer science.
In my first year of university, a senior grabbed me by the shoulders and told me that I _have_ to try an internship or semester abroad. One thing led to another and I have just celebrated 10 years in Germany. It led to my current career, which is not at all what I studied.
To answer your question, I think that it requires a certain curiosity, and an appetite for experimentation. I feel like the system is teaching kids the opposite of that.
>The main thing missing from this IMO is an element of chance or randomness, the ability to incorporate “unknown unknowns” into your life.
100% this. When I started working in recruitment, it was literally intended to be a temporary means to an end. I stumbled across Hacker News back in 2010 and accidentally uncovered a niche (tech startups) that has resulted in a career where over the past 15 years has evolved into holding VP level roles at YC startups to now running my own successful recruitment and HR advisory business for startups. I can legitimately attribute that entire path and growth to accidentally stumbling across this website and couldn't possibly have guessed the impact it would ultimately have on my career.
And that’s the tragedy. It should be viewed as a feature, not the bug. Curiosity and willingness to mix it up is where the serious innovation resides. Cross cutting concepts more easily happen when you’ve done/experienced/seen/felt different stuff … period.
I tell my son all the time that I couldn’t predict what I’m doing now … 3 years prior. I didn’t have this insight or awareness but after running the SW/IT marathon for 25 years here we are. Trust your instincts, they weren’t developed in a vacuum. The more you explore, the more insights pop in your mind and every 3 years or so, a change presents itself for you to affirm or deny.
Yeah and even if you’re totally uninterested in “having an interesting life” and just want to maximize income/job prospects, I think you can make the argument that a little bit of randomness is actually the optimal path because it increases your luck surface area.
For example - working in a well-rated fine dining restaurant over a summer while you’re studying computer science seems totally unrelated and not optimal. But maybe that unique experience is what stands out on your resume, and maybe the knowledge about wine or food you acquired there builds a connection with an investor or manager, years down the line.
Deliberate planning is great but serendipity is important too. Some of the richest people I know made most of their wealth as a consequence of being in a position to act* when opportunities presented themselves.
My guess is that it's important not to be overly focused on the intermediate goals and the more debt you have the less able you feel to take risks.
*it may be more appropriate to say start than act as in the two cases that immediately come to
mind they were both 10+ year journeys.
I do something similar for development of me as a human being. I ask myself how can I improve, what kind of person do I want to be, how can I help make the world a better place.
My "career" is just a means to an end to put food on the table. Also being in my 30s I think I have mostly maxed it out anyway. Sure I might increase my wage a little bit but all in all as for being an IC it is a good as it gets. Sure there is always room for improvement but I am already constantly the person with the most technical skills in the room so it would not grant me any benefit.
I don't think your "career" needs to be a major focus in your life once you are set up at least. Especially if you don't do any meaningful work that actually helps people like being a doctor or teacher or something.
In the end my work just makes someone else richer, it doesn't have any meaning. It does not make the world a better place. Probably a worse place sometimes. I just do it to not starve.
> In the end my work just makes someone else richer, it doesn't have any meaning.
This is something I struggle with a lot. I left companies before, because the job felt meaningless and making some rich guy richer doesn't sound meaningful to me. I am trying to come up with a business idea I can work on on the side, that actually is supposed to make the world a better place, but I am struggling to find anything I have enough experience in to pursue.
I am leaning towards activism now, because that is probably the most achievable thing to do for me. Just building info sites nobody reads, trying to make non tech people aware about how Amazon, Google and so on makes life worse for everyone. Or how anti privacy laws are probably a bad idea.
But that does not feel fruitful either. My everyday life is consumed by the desire of having some kind of impact, making the world better.
> trying to make non tech people aware about how Amazon, Google and so on makes life worse for everyone. Or how anti privacy laws are probably a bad idea.
I think a majority of people already know this, that's why it feels fruitless. Also more negativity ("these companies are bad because of x, y, z") will also make you feel negative.
Why not make those sites, talk to those non-techy people, but provide _some_ form of thing they can do to make an impact in a tangible way, not just "don't use amazon", links to sites that put together local info for small areas, catagories of smaller online sites that you can use instead of amazon or something.
> My everyday life is consumed by the desire of having some kind of impact, making the world better.
Do you have something tangible you can look back on that you did last week that helped achieve this vision? If not, what small thing can you do this week?
I’ve spent my career chasing jobs that had kept me employed for over 20 years so I can support a family. Unfortunately I have had to let the ‘system’ take me where I am needed so I can pay my bills. It is life.
Disagree. This kind of comment is furtively pulling up the ladder behind you. Do as I say not as I do. Junior is the time to learn as much as possible and take risky bets (and suffer accordingly). When I was in a junior in a factory, the night shift knew me well. Nowadays, I've pared it back to 50 or so hours per week, because I now have a family, which is fine but it came at the cost of basically zero time to learn or do things other than what my manager asks.
We work in different timezones so it's a mess. Either people give up their morning or they give up their evening time.
I'm at the bottom of the chain here and have no authority to change this. Given that I'm being let go soon there's not much reason for them to care about my mental state either.
But from the time I've been here, yes, you need to set boundaries or they'll do it for you. It seems like most PMs are used to talking to robots, because that's how they talk to us lately.
Statements like this one come for a position of privilege, which is to be expected on a forum like this one targeting techies who are most probably solidly middle-class, but just wanted to point that out. More exactly, most of the (normal) people are NOT in the position of designing their lives, believing otherwise is, again, tainted by said position of privilege.
You either misunderstood or we disagree fundamentally. Everyone can and should design their life. Of course richer people have a lot more choices, and poorer people a lot more constraints, but everyone can make informed choices.
Believing "most of the normal people" have no agency is condescending.
I don't think it's condescending to believe a large number of people mostly cannot design their lives. At best they can try to make it better for their children, if at all.
Why is this condescending? It's not their fault, it's how the system works and their bad luck in not being born into a more privileged position.
What it is, in my opinion, is terribly unfair. I agree with the GP commenter that us here mostly ignore this reality. And that's OK, clearly TFA is aimed at privileged people like us, not most people.
Oh they have agency. They also have bills to pay, families to take care of and many other obligations that folks of privilege do not need to be bothered with. It is immediately obvious how privileged we are compared to many others who are not a liberty of designing their lives or careers.
What helps me is keeping around my TODO.txt month by month, as well as a lot of screenshots and images of the things I find relevant for sharing in stand ups and meetings and such (as well as presentations).
So if I need to review the past month/year (e.g. when I want to update CV/site or catch up with management), it’s just a matter of going through a bunch of text and images without a lot of unnecessary fluff, like digging through Jira. Maybe if I want to get the approximate time/effort spent on particular stuff, based on the amount of activity there.
Alongside that, it’s also nice to document stuff that was particularly good, or all the ways software broke in (and what broke how often), as well as stuff that pissed me off and made me want to quit (sometimes people/mindsets, sometimes tangible code or practices).
When the default is just going with the flow and not documenting anything and doing no self reflection, every improvement upon that helps.
GPT was actually pretty good for this use case until 5.2 kneecapped its long term memory and now its more aggressive about pruning ( very annoying as wide recall now has to be explicitly invoked ).
Currently not really, at least not for the weekly status meetings.
Typically I'll have a folder with a bunch of numbered files in the order that I want to talk about them, since it's easier to just quickly share my screen and run through then when I want to let others know what I've done, for example along the lines of:
If I need them for like a yearly performance review, then I'll probably do a pass where I group them into named folders and write a doc loosely following those topics, given that I might work on similar improvements and fixes across more than just 1 week. Pretty low friction daily and also when I need more structure.
Wondering if working as a contractor is any different. you won't stay longer than 6-12 months on a project and you can safely say goodbye without having to explain a gap in your resume
This reads a bit like classic self-help, but there's a solid point hiding underneath the platitudes. Most careers do get shaped by inertia: the projects you say yes to, the skills you accidentally accumulate, the expectations other people quietly set for you
I find that's a good reason, other than looking for an increase in salary, to seek out new employment opportunities every few years, while nudging your resume more towards the career you want rather than the career you've experienced.
I have a really hard time designing my career in tech because I believe that people already have more options than they need or can afford.
What people need aren't more options. What they need is MONEY; which is the ability to obtain the options which exist. And the only way to give people more money is through political means. This is why I was interested in crypto; it seemed to get straight to the point...
I later quit crypto due to too much corruption in the space and launched a mainstream startup with a co-founder centered around helping people find 'the perfect job' but I quit as co-founder because the idea of it almost makes me want to vomit now.
The system is firing people en masse. The system itself doesn't want people to have jobs... So me, trying to work against the system by offering a solution that operates within the system feels futile and like gaslighting users and myself. It's selling a dream. There is no perfect job. Reality is our socio-economic system doesn't even have a shitty job for you... Let alone a perfect job... And most jobs seem like bullshit jobs anyway.
It's extremely hard to find an idea that's both truly useful and profitable these days. That's a shame because that's exactly what I want to do with my life but I feel like this does not align with what is possible within the current system. I cannot find any such opportunities in the tech sector.
Someone told me I should get into politics but again if I think about what the typical politician does, I feel nauseous. The only kind of politician I could possibly be is the honest kind that gets assassinated... And of course I don't want that. Besides, nobody would fund me... My hitman would probably have an easier time raising funding to 'take me out' of politics than I would raising funding to get into it.
I resonate so much with you. I'm in the middle of getting my product out for people to use and naively kept thinking that a good product means people are interested.
I need to integrate with tools that prematurely deny me because I'm not a big company. I basically already lost, despite my tool being much more reasonable and maintainable (I've worked at the competitors and it was a mess).
The world doesn't care about good products, they just care about how it looks. Big companies look good, you don't. It got me demotivated early on. You really need thick skin to start selling a product.
“The crime which bankrupts men and nations is that of turning aside from one’s main purpose to serve a job here and there.”
As a former career contractor who took probably 7 commercial jobs I didn’t care about for every 1 creative job I wanted to do but for which I was underpaid, this feels deeply true.
A lot of us live our lives according to the expectations of others (our parents, society, etc) because this is all we know how to do at first and what the "system" reinforces through school, career, etc. and this difference between what we want to do and what we actually end up doing can end up causing lots of suffering to ourselves (and to others).
I've seen fear as the primary obstacle to trying something different when the current route is not working. It's really hard to step outside the comfort zone in those situations.
My 2c as someone who has ended up in a non-traditional career track, mostly doing my own thing and getting paid for it.
While you definitely need a higher than average tolerance for uncertainty, the big thing is just not seeing all the options. Many choices are occluded by the options presented to you by employers, the educational system, etc. The spectrum of careers, which is a continuous higher-dimensional blob of "things you can do to make money", is systematized in such a way that while there are paths to unusual career outcomes, most of those paths can not be expressed.
You may on some level want to reach some career or lifestyle goal, but often the path to that destination isn't obvious, and it's definitely never presented to you as an option among the things you can choose, and more than likely you'll have few if any role models or people to ask for guidance if you find yourself on that track.
Not just fear of failure, but fear of disappointing people, losing status, or admitting (to yourself and others) that the plan you’ve been following isn't actually working
I enjoyed this article and think it's good advice, and I also think that the punchline (title + last sentence) is wrong. Not that it makes a big difference, I just treasure texts more that I feel the author thought through to the last detail.
If you don't design your career, in most cases I guess no one will. In the comments are good examples, like the random walk of the drunken sailor. The cases in which you could use the phrase "someone else designed it for me" in a meaningful way seem rather rare to me.
But your opportunities depend partially on what you can actually do. In other words, optmize for your strengths, refine what works, remove what doesn't. Opportunities will come, but if you are not prepared based on your own predispositions, they are wasted on you anyway. Direction of the sailor of the sailor is but one factor in this.
> Many years ago I followed this process and, without exaggeration, it changed the course of my life. The insight I gained led me to quit law school, leave England and move to America and start down the path as a teacher and author. You’re reading this because of that choice. It remains the single most important career decision of my life
That "decision" required a safety net most will never have
Designing your career isn’t about self introspection, it’s about leverage
And leverage is stolen from the invisible hands that keep your world running while you journal
The problem isn't individual, but systemic: why is the freedom to choose rationed so narrowly?
For a lot of people, work isn't a career to design, it's survival math
> It is well known the drunken sailor whos taggers to the left or right n independent random steps will, on the average, end up about sqrt(n) steps from the origin. But if there is a pretty girl in one direction, then his steps will tend to go in that direction and he will go a distance proportional to n. In a lifetime of many, many independent choices, small and large, a career with a vision will get you a distance proportional to n, while no vision will get you only the distance sqrt(n). In a sense, the main difference between those who go far and those who do not is some people have a vision and others do not and therefore can only react to the current events as they happen.
Just a tiny bit of bias towards a direction will get you very far very fast.
I once modeled+visualised this with a bit of javascript[1] and it's quite surprising to see the huge difference from even a tiny multiplication factor on each random/probabilistic decision.
[1] https://swizec.com/blog/your-career-needs-a-vision/
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Aim_at_the_Stars
It does make me reflect on this piece I wrote 9(!!) years ago though, which hasn't completely materialized. I think I'm due for a re-alignment of priorities.
https://www.jrishaug.com/Who-do-you-want-to-be/
Edit: well of course it is. I was thinking expected position (which should be 0) not distance
For a binomial distribution of probability p and (1-p), after N steps the expectation value of right steps is Np.
The Variance is Np(1-p), so the standard deviation (or Root-Mean-Square) scales as Sqrt(N).
"expected distance" is average abs(coordinate), so for biased walk (and big enough time) it's simply abs(bias)*time, and for unbiased it's deviation==sqrt(variance)
Also, I find it hard to believe that people don't move into the general direction they want to be in. So I'd like to see some examples.
Or someone else that “can’t get their stuff together?”
A lot of people never even “move”.
Most people, even when they do not sit down and think about it, follow one of the two career paths:
- Some people will actively pursue the next logical progression (senior, lead/manager, head/vp, exec).
- Some will happily stay in their position unless the next one is offered to them.
Being deliberate will always work better compared to being random, but it is not like all people who succeed in their careers deliberately planned to get where they are.
I would even guess that for the vast majority of successful careers, competency and luck played a much bigger role than being deliberate about it.
I think this is true. I had a while where my career was doing really well constant steps up, I was learning, getting promoted, was working on great projects and problems that were engaging and led to easy promotions. Then I got a new manager and it was downhill. Then I got a new job and the problems are insignificant and there's no room for growth of any kind. If my latest job was earlier in my career my career would be very different.
In other words, the problem in designing your life is that you’re almost always going to pick things you already know. Maybe that gets you to the peak of your current profession over twenty years…but maybe some other job is actually a lot more fulfilling to you.
I’m not sure how to incorporate this into a young person’s real life experience, but I do think gap years, varied internships, volunteering, etc. are probably a good start.
I recently listened to a podcast with a guy that wrote a book advocating that young people spend 4 years getting a pilot’s license, working on a ranch, becoming an EMT, and various other useful skills/jobs. That seems like a great idea, although I didn’t like the hostility to traditional college he had in offering this plan.
In my first year of university, a senior grabbed me by the shoulders and told me that I _have_ to try an internship or semester abroad. One thing led to another and I have just celebrated 10 years in Germany. It led to my current career, which is not at all what I studied.
To answer your question, I think that it requires a certain curiosity, and an appetite for experimentation. I feel like the system is teaching kids the opposite of that.
100% this. When I started working in recruitment, it was literally intended to be a temporary means to an end. I stumbled across Hacker News back in 2010 and accidentally uncovered a niche (tech startups) that has resulted in a career where over the past 15 years has evolved into holding VP level roles at YC startups to now running my own successful recruitment and HR advisory business for startups. I can legitimately attribute that entire path and growth to accidentally stumbling across this website and couldn't possibly have guessed the impact it would ultimately have on my career.
I tell my son all the time that I couldn’t predict what I’m doing now … 3 years prior. I didn’t have this insight or awareness but after running the SW/IT marathon for 25 years here we are. Trust your instincts, they weren’t developed in a vacuum. The more you explore, the more insights pop in your mind and every 3 years or so, a change presents itself for you to affirm or deny.
For example - working in a well-rated fine dining restaurant over a summer while you’re studying computer science seems totally unrelated and not optimal. But maybe that unique experience is what stands out on your resume, and maybe the knowledge about wine or food you acquired there builds a connection with an investor or manager, years down the line.
https://www.artofmanliness.com/people/fatherhood/podcast-108...
The book itself is called The Preparation.
My guess is that it's important not to be overly focused on the intermediate goals and the more debt you have the less able you feel to take risks.
*it may be more appropriate to say start than act as in the two cases that immediately come to mind they were both 10+ year journeys.
My "career" is just a means to an end to put food on the table. Also being in my 30s I think I have mostly maxed it out anyway. Sure I might increase my wage a little bit but all in all as for being an IC it is a good as it gets. Sure there is always room for improvement but I am already constantly the person with the most technical skills in the room so it would not grant me any benefit.
I don't think your "career" needs to be a major focus in your life once you are set up at least. Especially if you don't do any meaningful work that actually helps people like being a doctor or teacher or something.
In the end my work just makes someone else richer, it doesn't have any meaning. It does not make the world a better place. Probably a worse place sometimes. I just do it to not starve.
This is something I struggle with a lot. I left companies before, because the job felt meaningless and making some rich guy richer doesn't sound meaningful to me. I am trying to come up with a business idea I can work on on the side, that actually is supposed to make the world a better place, but I am struggling to find anything I have enough experience in to pursue.
I am leaning towards activism now, because that is probably the most achievable thing to do for me. Just building info sites nobody reads, trying to make non tech people aware about how Amazon, Google and so on makes life worse for everyone. Or how anti privacy laws are probably a bad idea.
But that does not feel fruitful either. My everyday life is consumed by the desire of having some kind of impact, making the world better.
I think a majority of people already know this, that's why it feels fruitless. Also more negativity ("these companies are bad because of x, y, z") will also make you feel negative.
Why not make those sites, talk to those non-techy people, but provide _some_ form of thing they can do to make an impact in a tangible way, not just "don't use amazon", links to sites that put together local info for small areas, catagories of smaller online sites that you can use instead of amazon or something.
> My everyday life is consumed by the desire of having some kind of impact, making the world better.
Do you have something tangible you can look back on that you did last week that helped achieve this vision? If not, what small thing can you do this week?
I'm at the bottom of the chain here and have no authority to change this. Given that I'm being let go soon there's not much reason for them to care about my mental state either.
But from the time I've been here, yes, you need to set boundaries or they'll do it for you. It seems like most PMs are used to talking to robots, because that's how they talk to us lately.
Turtles all the way down
So, I guess it would be "Turtles all the way up"
Believing "most of the normal people" have no agency is condescending.
Why is this condescending? It's not their fault, it's how the system works and their bad luck in not being born into a more privileged position.
What it is, in my opinion, is terribly unfair. I agree with the GP commenter that us here mostly ignore this reality. And that's OK, clearly TFA is aimed at privileged people like us, not most people.
What helps me is keeping around my TODO.txt month by month, as well as a lot of screenshots and images of the things I find relevant for sharing in stand ups and meetings and such (as well as presentations).
So if I need to review the past month/year (e.g. when I want to update CV/site or catch up with management), it’s just a matter of going through a bunch of text and images without a lot of unnecessary fluff, like digging through Jira. Maybe if I want to get the approximate time/effort spent on particular stuff, based on the amount of activity there.
Alongside that, it’s also nice to document stuff that was particularly good, or all the ways software broke in (and what broke how often), as well as stuff that pissed me off and made me want to quit (sometimes people/mindsets, sometimes tangible code or practices).
When the default is just going with the flow and not documenting anything and doing no self reflection, every improvement upon that helps.
Typically I'll have a folder with a bunch of numbered files in the order that I want to talk about them, since it's easier to just quickly share my screen and run through then when I want to let others know what I've done, for example along the lines of:
If I need them for like a yearly performance review, then I'll probably do a pass where I group them into named folders and write a doc loosely following those topics, given that I might work on similar improvements and fixes across more than just 1 week. Pretty low friction daily and also when I need more structure.The job market and my visa status meant that it's either impossible or I need to make significant sacrifices.
So that's life.
What people need aren't more options. What they need is MONEY; which is the ability to obtain the options which exist. And the only way to give people more money is through political means. This is why I was interested in crypto; it seemed to get straight to the point...
I later quit crypto due to too much corruption in the space and launched a mainstream startup with a co-founder centered around helping people find 'the perfect job' but I quit as co-founder because the idea of it almost makes me want to vomit now.
The system is firing people en masse. The system itself doesn't want people to have jobs... So me, trying to work against the system by offering a solution that operates within the system feels futile and like gaslighting users and myself. It's selling a dream. There is no perfect job. Reality is our socio-economic system doesn't even have a shitty job for you... Let alone a perfect job... And most jobs seem like bullshit jobs anyway.
It's extremely hard to find an idea that's both truly useful and profitable these days. That's a shame because that's exactly what I want to do with my life but I feel like this does not align with what is possible within the current system. I cannot find any such opportunities in the tech sector.
Someone told me I should get into politics but again if I think about what the typical politician does, I feel nauseous. The only kind of politician I could possibly be is the honest kind that gets assassinated... And of course I don't want that. Besides, nobody would fund me... My hitman would probably have an easier time raising funding to 'take me out' of politics than I would raising funding to get into it.
I need to integrate with tools that prematurely deny me because I'm not a big company. I basically already lost, despite my tool being much more reasonable and maintainable (I've worked at the competitors and it was a mess).
The world doesn't care about good products, they just care about how it looks. Big companies look good, you don't. It got me demotivated early on. You really need thick skin to start selling a product.
As a former career contractor who took probably 7 commercial jobs I didn’t care about for every 1 creative job I wanted to do but for which I was underpaid, this feels deeply true.
I've seen fear as the primary obstacle to trying something different when the current route is not working. It's really hard to step outside the comfort zone in those situations.
While you definitely need a higher than average tolerance for uncertainty, the big thing is just not seeing all the options. Many choices are occluded by the options presented to you by employers, the educational system, etc. The spectrum of careers, which is a continuous higher-dimensional blob of "things you can do to make money", is systematized in such a way that while there are paths to unusual career outcomes, most of those paths can not be expressed.
You may on some level want to reach some career or lifestyle goal, but often the path to that destination isn't obvious, and it's definitely never presented to you as an option among the things you can choose, and more than likely you'll have few if any role models or people to ask for guidance if you find yourself on that track.
"If you don't have your own story, you become part of someone else's."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MofDRVtRec
If you don't design your career, in most cases I guess no one will. In the comments are good examples, like the random walk of the drunken sailor. The cases in which you could use the phrase "someone else designed it for me" in a meaningful way seem rather rare to me.
If you guide your own direction too strictly you will both risk moving yourself into a dead end, but also miss out on unexpected opportunities.
That "decision" required a safety net most will never have
Designing your career isn’t about self introspection, it’s about leverage
And leverage is stolen from the invisible hands that keep your world running while you journal
The problem isn't individual, but systemic: why is the freedom to choose rationed so narrowly?
For a lot of people, work isn't a career to design, it's survival math