What is my only career plan? If you’d ask me six months ago, or 4 years ago, or 7 or 9 or 12 years ago, each time I’d have given you a different answer, because I’ve come to realize — I don’t have a career plan.
When I finished my military service, I worked in sales, and I was pretty damned good at it too. I knew I was going to work in sales for the rest of my life, it was what I was born to do. Until I landed in a sales job where I actually got to use the line “Free is a relative term”.
When I started university, I knew I was going to do economics. I’m a rational person, I read Freakonomics more times than I’m willing to admit, and economics make money. I knew I was going to be an economist, until I realized that I’m very rational, but numbers and I just don’t get along.
I then opened my own translation business, branched out into content writing and proofreading, worked in online sales, and even in pro-Israel advocacy with some former senior members of the Foreign Ministry, where my messages were seen by hundreds of thousands of people each week. I knew that marketing was what I was going to do with my life.
Then I got a job at a startup which needed me to build and run the “international department” (one client in England), and for whom I was forced to learn what being a project manager was. Then I worked for another startup and had nothing to do with project management, until someone left and I was suddenly responsible for managing 7–8 projects at a time.
And now I’m here, at another company where I manage the entire marketing department. What did I learn from all this? I learned two things: 1) That each and every time I KNEW what it was I was going to be doing for the rest of my life, and each and every time, that changed faster than a 99MPH fastball thrown directly at me by a starting pitcher from the New York Mets; and 2) The learning never stops.
In each position I found myself, each next step of what I was sure was my only career plan, I found myself thrown into the deep end, forced to sink or learn very quickly how to swim. When you’re forced to hit the ground running, you’re also forced to learn a tremendous amount in what is usually a small amount of time.
How did I do it? By shutting up and never stopping to ask questions. When starting something I knew nothing about, I would start off by letting the people in the know do the talking. But at the end, afterwards, I’d go to my superior, or a colleague, or even to Google, and then I’d ask about every single thing I’d heard which I didn’t understand. If it was something like ROI or SQL when I started out, or how to plan a webinar or even participation in a global summit, I’d listen and then ask questions.
(Not) surprisingly, once I found myself getting into my groove, I saw that I was learning much more than just the things I needed to know. I was expanding my horizons and learning about things that were only tangentially related to what I was doing now, but could be related in the future. And that’s also why I’m joining Zest Enlight — because the learning never stops, and Zest Enlight is the embodiment of that philosophy.
