Why a Messy Career is the Path to a Great Career

Plus, 3 steps to getting there

Scott Bradley
Aug 8, 2017 · 6 min read

There is a process you have to go through, a right of passage if you will, that’s required of you to find and build your dream career.

It’s like learning how to ride a bike for the first time.

At first, you had training wheels to help you along the way (i.e. school). Then, your parents took off the extra set of wheels and let you cruise down the street on your own (the first 10 years of your career).

Unless you could magically channel Lance Armstrong’s biking skills, you most likely fell down a few times and scraped your knee.

I painfully remember riding a bike with handlebar brakes for the first time (which is very different from the bikes where all you had to do to stop was to just peddle backward).

My friend and I were messing around in our neighborhood with his new bike and I decided to give it a spin.

Unfortunately for me, I didn’t ask him how it worked, I just hopped on and started riding. That was fun until I realized that I had no idea how to stop.

I frantically peddled backward but luck was not on my side.

I couldn’t stop and was headed straight for a garden of cactus (this is a thing living in Arizona).

10 hours later, I was still in the hospital with the doctors pulling thorns from my entire body.

As painful as that was, I didn’t stop riding bikes.

In fact, I was back on a bike within days.

I needed to scrape my knee a few times, get knocked down, and fall into a cactus before I could learn how to ride my bike.

You need to do the same thing in your career.

But, most people don’t want to scrape their knees or fall down — they want to succeed all the time, at everything, because that’s what we are “supposed to do.”

The truth is, just like riding a bike for the first time: your career is supposed to be messy.

Your Career is Supposed to Be Messy

No matter how much you want your career path to be drama free, there will always be hiccups along the way. But it’s the drama that makes your career interesting and helps you get closer to your dream career.

How many times have you been asked, what do you want to be when you grow up? Like it was a guarantee that if you wished it, it would come true.

When I was little, my answer was confidently a firefighter; 5 years ago, my answer was:

“Uhh….no idea.”

But if you ask me today, my answer is completely different.

And that’s okay!

Your career is supposed to be messy. You’re not supposed to get it right the first time. You’re not supposed to know exactly what you want to do. You’re not required to have a cookie cutter career progression.

No one does (and how boring would that be?).

How to Embrace the Messiness

Next time you have a problem come up, or you get stuck figuring out what to do next, understand that the messiness is what helps you grow.

Here are some specific things to help you along the way:

1. Give up perfection

There is no such thing as perfection and yet we see it every single day through perfectly filtered Instagram posts and YouTube videos that take days to curate.

While everyone else around us is shouting that we need to be perfect, it’s therapeutic to realize that even those people we look up to are still just figuring it out.

2. Experiment, try, do

The first decade of your career is going to be all over the place — and it’s supposed to be.

The path to discovering the work you were meant to do doesn’t begin with thinking or taking an aptitude test. You figure out what you want by actually doing it.

That’s why it’s so important to embrace experimentation into your career.

If you’re working full time right now but love art — go volunteer at the local museum to learn more about it. If you’re struggling to figure out what you want to do and have no idea, join a bunch of different groups on Meetup.

You don’t have to commit to anything, just keep experimenting and don’t stop trying.

3. You mess will be your message

You will botch a presentation. You will screw up a sales meeting. You will get crushed in an interview.

These experiences, however, will help shape your decisions down the road.

Your mess right now will be your message later.

You will tell your friends and family stories about how you told a hiring manager that you couldn’t define success for yourself (like I did) and he laughed at you. These things happen and they will help you learn and grow.

You might as well embrace it and just laugh at yourself when you make stupid mistakes because it’s those mistakes that are going to help you succeed in the long-term.

Get Scrappy

In college, I had a good friend who was 6"7' — almost an entire foot taller than me. He called me “scrappy” because while he had the height advantage, I was more agile, embracing my scrawniness.

And that’s exactly how you should approach your career (especially in the first 10 years).

As a young professional, you don’t have the advantages of experience, time, or income, so you have to get scrappy.

What are the things you can do right now — today — that are different than how you would approach your career 10 years from now?

Maybe you have extra time now so you can volunteer to work on the weekends.

Maybe you pitch for extra projects, or stick your neck out and suggest a progressive idea.

If it doesn’t work, that’s okay — keep going.

Stay scrappy and embrace the messiness that will come from it.

The Success Toolkit

If you are struggling to figure out what you want to do for work, or are looking to give your career the jump start it needs, grab a copy of my Success Toolkit.

In there you will get the best strategies, tools, and resources to take your career to the next level.

Until Next Time,

Scott


Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com on August 8, 2017.


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Scott Bradley

Written by

Leadership enthusiast, creative writer, and career coach. Get my free Ultimate Guide to Landing Your Dream Job here: http://bit.ly/2B6H3DC

Mission.org

A network of business & tech podcasts designed to accelerate learning. Selected as “Best of 2018” by Apple. Mission.org

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