Reflections on making commiting to a specific career path
Imagine Alisha is making a decision whether to pursue job X or job Y. She is currently leaning in favor of job X 55% to 45%, so decides to pursue job X. Over the next couple years, Alisha gains knowledge and expertise as an Xer, and is passionate and excited by her job. She’s finding new opportunities and collaborations, and things are going well. But she often wonders if things would have gone even better if she went with job Y.
I believe that you get a lot more value from committing to one path /​ area and developing deep expertise & knowledge there, rather than hopping around for too long. There’s a lot of implicit knowledge you gain, and therefore a comparative advantage.
I think it’s hard to see the hidden uncertainties behind lots of (small and large) decisions when you make a decisive choice and ruthlessly prioritize. It’s easy to read more confidence into decisions than there is—partly because it’s just easier to process the world in black and white shades of grey.
And it can be really hard to live with those decisions, even once you’ve made them. I think you probably need (to some extent) to shut that part off for some time so you can actually double down and focus on one thing. I struggle with this a lot.
What I want to keep in mind, as a result of this:
check in with the people whose careers i’ve subconsciously modeled my plans off of and check how confident they were when they made the pivotal decisions (if they did make a pivotal decision at all) about how confident they were.
I should expect many people to be uncertain.
I expect many people didn’t have a master plan, but instead took advantage of interesting and good opportunities
I expect the best people are good at switching between exploring and exploiting systematically
I want to develop better ways of switching between explore & exploit, or not worrying that I’ll miss something and stay in the explore mode longer than I should
I want to introduce a periodic review to help feel better about exploiting (because I know I’ll have an opportunity to course correct)
I want to introduce periodic slack into my system to do exploration as needed
(H/​T Steve Thompson for a good conversation that helped me crystalize some of this).
Reflections on making commiting to a specific career path
Imagine Alisha is making a decision whether to pursue job X or job Y. She is currently leaning in favor of job X 55% to 45%, so decides to pursue job X. Over the next couple years, Alisha gains knowledge and expertise as an Xer, and is passionate and excited by her job. She’s finding new opportunities and collaborations, and things are going well. But she often wonders if things would have gone even better if she went with job Y.
I believe that you get a lot more value from committing to one path /​ area and developing deep expertise & knowledge there, rather than hopping around for too long. There’s a lot of implicit knowledge you gain, and therefore a comparative advantage.
I think it’s hard to see the hidden uncertainties behind lots of (small and large) decisions when you make a decisive choice and ruthlessly prioritize. It’s easy to read more confidence into decisions than there is—partly because it’s just easier to process the world in black and white shades of grey.
And it can be really hard to live with those decisions, even once you’ve made them. I think you probably need (to some extent) to shut that part off for some time so you can actually double down and focus on one thing. I struggle with this a lot.
What I want to keep in mind, as a result of this:
check in with the people whose careers i’ve subconsciously modeled my plans off of and check how confident they were when they made the pivotal decisions (if they did make a pivotal decision at all) about how confident they were.
I should expect many people to be uncertain.
I expect many people didn’t have a master plan, but instead took advantage of interesting and good opportunities
I expect the best people are good at switching between exploring and exploiting systematically
I want to develop better ways of switching between explore & exploit, or not worrying that I’ll miss something and stay in the explore mode longer than I should
I want to introduce a periodic review to help feel better about exploiting (because I know I’ll have an opportunity to course correct)
I want to introduce periodic slack into my system to do exploration as needed
(H/​T Steve Thompson for a good conversation that helped me crystalize some of this).