I never wanted to be a marketer.

Today I’m VP Marketing at Location Labs. Go figure.

Now, that’s not the same as saying I’m unhappy in my role. Quite the opposite — I love what I do. But when people ask how I got here, they’re usually surprised at my answer: I got here in spite of myself. In hindsight, I recognize that all my decisions hinged on my following an intense curiosity about how businesses work, not just a narrow interest in the aspect I hoped to work in.

This is pretty much the opposite of the approach you’ll find if you Google “finding a career you love:”

• Nine Ways to Find a Job You Love in 2015
• Do What You Love!
• 5 Steps to Find a Career You Actually Love

Finding a career you love isn’t always as straightforward as defining what you love to do or feel passionately about. I mean, I love to play guitar. I love to relax with a bourbon in front of a fire. I love to build complex spreadsheets. But distinguishing among love, lollygagging and the kind of curiosity that’s related to a career is tough and scary. And the fear is understandable — how do you know if you’re making decisions for the right reasons?

Finding a career you love isn’t always as straightforward as defining what you love to do or feel passionately about.

More than 15 years into my career, I’m realizing the biggest secret they don’t teach you in college or business school is: there are no right answers. What you should rely on, though, are guiding values. Here are the 5 that have yet to steer me wrong.

Make the best decision for right now

Like millions of college grads, my dream after graduation was to move to New York City. I locked in a job as a software consultant, designing custom CRM systems for businesses. It’s what I had trained to do and sounded like the perfect fit for someone with a brand-new computer science degree. But to be perfectly honest, my decision to move had almost nothing to do with career: my 2 best childhood friends were going to NYC, they needed a 3rd roommate, and, well … sometimes the obvious answers are all you need. You can only look so far down the road.

Know when it’s wrong to get somewhere right

As much as I enjoyed living in the greatest city on Earth with my best friends, discovering I actually didn’t like coding took less than a year. Still in love with NYC, I jumped quickly to Glocap, an executive search firm that finds venture capital and private equity jobs for investment banking analysts. The founders wanted me to create a new business, finding talent for their VC clients’ portfolio companies. At the time, I was just glad to be that much closer to the industry I wanted to be part of — venture capital. I envisioned myself eventually in the thick of funding high-tech startups. Learning how the industry worked from the outside and meeting people on the inside seemed a good start. And having the opportunity to run my own mini-business planted in me the seed of entrepreneurship, something I hadn’t necessarily been seeking. More on this later …

Don’t try to skip ahead

A couple years later, during business school, I was finally inside an actual venture capital firm. Just as with Glocap, though, I wasn’t quite in the role I had my eye on. Instead, I worked at Millennium Technology Ventures in market research. While it wasn’t an investment role, I was able to experience the daily ins and outs of the business, to piece together the puzzle of how the industry actually works, and what each person actually does.

Without experience working at the kinds of companies I might want to invest in, he said, how could I adequately judge early-stage investment opportunities?

This position might have been just another line on my resume had I not been lucky enough to work closely with Dan Burstein, a General Partner, who knew I one day wanted to be a venture investor. In a conversation I’ll never forget, he told me the best venture capitalists had worked at technology operating companies. They knew markets and products and technologies in a way you simply couldn’t without putting in the time on the inside. Meaning they could see opportunities before anyone else could. Without experience working at the kinds of companies I might want to invest in, he said, how could I adequately judge early-stage investment opportunities?

Get good at putting yourself in other people’s shoes

Once I came to Location Labs as a product manager, I again learned the “there are no shortcuts” lesson, a different way. Until this point, I’d thought of marketing as “soft,” so I’d disregarded it. Upon the advice of a mentor,Funambol’s VP Product Management, Mark Robinson, I wanted to be the entrepreneur, the GM who ran the business from conceiving product to shipping. Being a product manager, I thought, was more closely tied to the holistic workings of the business. And Mark was right to steer me down this path at the time.

This product-first mindset taught me a lot about how things get done, but I also veered into a pretty unevolved way of thinking about marketing. For instance, our customers at Location Labs are wireless carriers. We partner with them to distribute our mobile safety and security products, and I was focused on our Family Locator product. I assumed the best way to sell to carriers was to show how Family Locator helped them increase ARPU and reduce churn. Basically: how it could help them make more money.

Suddenly, marketing seemed a lot more interesting. In fact, it had been all along, I’d just not really taken the time to dig into what it could be.

Sure, this is a way to sell to carriers, but it’s by no means the most effective one. I began to develop a relationship with the product manager on the Sprint side, listening to how he talked about Sprint’s business, how they viewed their goals, how they made decisions. My black-and-white approach had blinded me to additional revenue opportunities, potential new products and a deeper understanding of the customer’s broader context and overall strategy. Suddenly, marketing seemed a lot more interesting. In fact, it had been all along, I’d just not really taken the time to dig into what it could be.

Remember that not everyone who wanders is lost

Revisiting the above example, maybe if I’d begun as a marketer, I’d have approached the Sprint account more strategically right off the bat. But without the VC and product management experience, I’d probably have been applying a “best practice” learned in marketing class, not an insight hard-won through deep product knowledge and a gradually built customer relationship. And a lot of listening.

By the time I did move into a marketing role, I’d spent years deep in the weeds of product features, articulating exactly what a product does and can do. That primed me to move from product features to the value a product brings to customers — the core of marketing — with richer, more sophisticated knowledge and practical experience.

If you tap into genuine curiosity and spend time nurturing it, the “getting there” will always outshine the endgame.

Today, when I interview candidates for marketing roles at Location Labs, I want to know if they can think — or will likely learn to think — about the world, not just our product, from the customer’s point of view. I want to know:

• Do they see the value in fact-finding, not selling, conversations?
• How do they think of end-user acquisition cost?
• How do they think of end-user lifetime value and engagement, particularly in a subscription business?

Marketing is so much more complicated than impressions and clicks. The perspective, flexibility, and curiosity a candidate — marketer or not — brings to a role is more valuable than the hard skills.

Ultimately, when it comes to choosing a career path, you’ll never know ahead of time if you’re going the right way. No one does. But you can know if you’re making decisions for the right reasons, at the right time. And if you tap into genuine curiosity and spend time nurturing it, the “getting there” will always outshine the endgame. Plus, you may be pleasantly surprised when what seem like detours turn out to be where you were meant to go, all along.