What would you say to the younger version of you?
The choices we made, and didn't make.
“Do what you love” is terrible career advice. What would you say instead?
This prompt on LinkedIn got me thinking a lot. We usually think of career advice as something passed down from more-experienced to less-experienced people. In other words, what wisdom would I share with a younger generation?
I’ve been working for 24 years, starting with my first part-time job as a bank teller when I was 16. A lot of people don’t include their early career experiences, but I do. Because I never left the banking industry. Six years working at a bank, followed by fifteen years working at a software company, followed by three years (and counting) as a financial technology writer.
Younger me wanted very different things. A title, a management role, money. Current me has a different perspective.
It’s ok to change. In fact, I talk about career pivots a lot (because they’re hard and scary). But also, my younger self was surrounded mostly by mentors who chased the same things. I wish I’d had access to people with a different perspective.
When my perspective started to change
I can point to some specific periods of time in my life when I began to think about work differently.
The first was in 2015, when I had a stillborn baby, Nelle. Then I lost another baby, Iris, in early 2016. Iris’s birthday is in a few days. I always think about how much my relationship with work changed after she died.
When I first became a parent in 2009, I set more boundaries. I had been working at 125%. Suddenly, spending time with my son was more important. I didn’t work in the evenings anymore and I needed to juggle my infant’s demands on my time. But I still cared about my work.
When my babies died, I stopped caring.
I remember a colleague arguing with me over some little thing. It was a few weeks after Iris had died. I was numb and my brain was a swirling mess. I replied to him, “This doesn’t matter. My daughter died, that’s what matters. Make a decision and move on, because I can’t have this conversation.”
Even though that rawness didn’t last forever, it permanently altered my relationship with work.
The second time was after I’d been promoted to an executive role. It was in 2016, about six months after Iris died. I was relieved. It was something I’d wanted for so long. I thought it would be a welcomed distraction from my grief.
There were many things about the company I didn’t like. I thought that if I gained a position of power, I could influence change.
I couldn’t.
The CEO was stubborn and didn’t care about anyone’s opinions except his own. The COO, who’d always been a leader in my eyes, pandered to the CEO’s moods and whims. She gave me the advice, “Make him feel like your idea was his idea; that’s the way to get him to agree with you.”
I’d worked so hard to get to the top, only to realize that it wasn’t what I wanted.
What I would tell the younger me
I was talking to someone recently and told him that I’ve always wanted to be a writer. I wrote my first story when I was five years old about a cat that got stuck in a tree and needed to be rescued.
But as I got older (young adult, college age), I didn’t believe in myself enough. I looked at writers I adored and felt that my work paled in comparison. I was never going to write the next great novel. I didn’t have that type of imaginative narrative power in me.
Now I realize that there is an audience for the type of work I do. I just had to find them. And, in part, it didn’t exist back then. I have more avenues to connect with people. I would tell my younger self that it’s possible.
But I also have to tell my current self that this is the right time and the right place. I don’t know that I would have been happy with something like a local journalism job, working long hours for pennies in hopes of working my way up to some national publication.
And when my kids were little, I had no energy. I’ve read stories from other women, writing for long hours after their kids were asleep to fulfill their dreams. That wasn’t me. The creative part of my brain was so stunted when my young children absorbed most of my time.
It had to be now.
Better career advice
“Do what you love” is terrible career advice. What would you say instead?
Work doesn’t love you back. Most of us work for 40+ years.
My advice would be:
So find a job that gives you freedom and flexibility (and maybe money) to do what you love outside of work.
For me, that was a career pivot. I love writing for clients. Do I love everything I write? No. I still have to write what they tell me to write. But it gives me the time and space to work on my own writing.
What would give you the time and space to do what you love?
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