TLDR: Optimizing for your purpose or reason for being is a powerful career conversation.
I had three people last week ask me about an old career plan I made c. 2015.
It was actually pretty simple. Four steps.
First, I wrote out a job I wanted in 10 years, and in a Venn diagram, I overlapped the skills I thought I would need to do that job
Next, I copy and pasted the diagram to a new slide, and I replaced the skills with all of the corresponding available jobs I thought would help me develop those skills
I repeated that process on the following slide and added all of the people who were influencers of those roles—people I knew or should get to know
From there, I set up conversations with each of them—there were about 20 people on the list. I showed them how I was thinking about my career, and where they fit in
That simple personal workshop led to a handful of sequential promotions, and reflecting back, it turns out it was at least somewhat aligned with the Japanese concept of Ikigai, or how it is often translated with the French phrase: raison d’être.
That is, I was outlining what I was good at, what I could be paid for, and what I loved—or at least what I was optimizing for.
I think if you add to this the intentionality of the networking conversations, giving others the clear and direct path to helping you in a thoughtful way, while having the work and results to back it up, you really can’t go wrong.
See you Monday.