Career Development
Self-Aware Career Growth
How I learned about the importance of self-awareness, humility, and mentorship before my career began to take off
About two weeks after I completed my undergraduate degree, I ran out to a used car dealership and bought my dream car. Having secured a job straight out of school, with an apartment all to myself, I believed I had already arrived. With the new car secured, I was already on the fast track to professional stardom — but only in my mind. I was completely out of touch with reality, with few skills to even ensure job security. I was painfully unaware of how people developed their careers. What justifies a promotion? was a question I began to kick around, without finding many answers. The only thing I seemingly had in abundance during those early days was my ego.
I tell a slightly less emphatic version of this story whenever I am providing a summation of my career. Right out of school I thought I knew everything about, well, everything. In particular, I simply assumed that my relative intelligence and newfound independence were enough to ensure that I’d be a vice president living luxuriously by the time I reached 25. I thought I was special. It was a wild miscalculation on my part, as less than a year into my first job, I was perplexed by my stunted career development. I suddenly felt like I was drowning under the weight of my own expectations, in addition to the brutal combination of my student loan payments and my newly acquired car loan.
The analogy I draw to a growing career is that of an airplane taking off. As the plane gathers speed down the runway, the pilot is actually trying to keep the plane from beginning to lift off prematurely. If your career hasn’t reached the required velocity, you run the risk of stalling shortly after takeoff. Instead, I find it helpful to focus on building up career momentum for the long-run. Most of us will have careers that span 40 years or more. Having this perspective early will enable you spend energy developing skills that will pay off in the long run, rather than chase unrealistic promotions and titles. But this process requires maturity and self-awareness.
I did not really care about self-awareness until I was about 27. By then, my career had at least started to take some shape. Most of this was down to acquiring tangible skills, gaining significant portions of maturity, and putting several humbling years on the books in entry-level positions. Those years put into perspective how little I actually knew or could do. Looking back on the first several years of my career, I often cringe at my youthful hubris. My unrealistic expectations of being a fast-tracked, business prodigy was borne out of some sort of misplaced belief that I was the smartest one in the room. In reality, I was — and usually still am — less intelligent than at least half the room.
As I begin to reach a point in my career where my mentoring is sought after, I try to relate these stories to others in a way that inspires. The reason young people today end up feeling the way I felt 10 years ago is because our educators and employers fail in one crucial place: the transition to the real world. There is an absolute dearth of education for young professionals entering the workforce. One day someone is in college and the next, they are in the workforce. In some cases, perhaps in larger institutions, there are better support systems in place for onboarding and nurturing entry-level talent. However, based on my experiences and observations, this is an area of great need for the current generation.
For those young people who are just beginning their careers, the focus needs to be on skills development. I recently wrote about this challenge for aspiring product managers. However, the same problems exist in many other types of roles. The maturity gap that exists for entry-level workers is impossible for them to bridge in isolation. As we graduate many highly intelligent, motivated people into the workforce, how do we make sure that they are given the proper guidance and perspective to have long, successful careers? More to the point, how do we make sure that our great minds of the future help us make this world a better place for all of us?
Schools, companies, and current professionals all need to commit to mentoring young talent. Mentorship is the part of an early career that is all too often missing. While many tangible skills are accompanied by classes and training, business etiquette and maturity are specific things that are rarely taught. In spite of my best efforts, my career didn’t truly begin to blossom until I found a company and a group of mentors that believed in me and invested in me. Now that I am in a similar position to my first mentors, I take every opportunity to teach someone else what I have painfully learned over my still-young career to date. This process should be seen as a constant investment, a mutual fund of ongoing education, for which we are all investors and beneficiaries.
About four years after I bought my dream car right out of college, I completed my loan payments on it. Owning it was every bit the dream it had always been for me. But it was also an education, in of itself, to possess and maintain the car. As I prepared to marry my dream girl, I traded the old dream for a better one and sold the car. In many ways, that car was symbolic of a period of my life in which my self image had outrun my actual status. Now, with a little self-awareness, I have a new car that belies my status— and even more still to learn.
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