Career Ladder, Rethought
When you’re searching for a job, it can be very difficult to determine what level to consider. Would a job with a lower salary limit you? Would a job with a higher salary involve more pressure and time than you want to commit?
Sometimes your career is not a ladder, to be climbed one level at a time. Sometimes it is more lattice-work, with sidesteps and pivots along they way. Remember that there have been career pivots that have been life-changing for people.
Oprah Winfrey was famously fired from a news anchor position, and had to take a less desirable position as a talk show host. She called it the moment her “job ended and her calling began.” Additionally, this was the path that led Winfrey to developing a communications empire, and eventually becoming a billionaire.
So, what felt like a step back, moving from news anchor, to hosting talk show fluff piece, was in fact the pivot that set Winfrey on track to not only earn incredible amounts of money, but also to live out her life’s passion.
In her book Tiny Experiments, Anne-Laure Le Cunff discusses the difference between career ladders and career loops. “You think You’re supposed to achieve A, then you’re allowed to graduate and go on to pursue B. In our complex world that doesn’t make any sense; you can actually jump over one (or several) steps as things evolve, without needing permission.”
This idea that your career does not need to be a ladder that will be climbed one level at a time, but a loop that can become self-fulfilling is interesting, and will hopefully give you permission to think outside the box when it comes to the next step in your career.
“At a society level,” Le Cunff says, “when everybody is pursuing linear goals it creates a collective mental model where we’re all climbing a ladder, which comes with second order consequences. If everybody is climbing their ladders next to each other, you can look right and left and ask yourself, “Am I going fast enough? Am I being productive enough? Am I being successful enough? How come this person is already there, and I’m still here?” This is damaging to actually achieving your goals.”
Our advice this week is to stop thinking about your career as a race, with a clear beginning and a clear end, and to start to think of it as a treasure hunt - starting down all kinds of new paths, perhaps to find they are dead ends, then rerouting. You never know what you may discover along the way. Take a moment to remember all the people who experienced a ‘setback’ that was actually a career pivot that resulted in huge success.
One famous example of this is Alex Ohanion. Alexis Ohanian was told by a Yahoo exec that Reddit “was a rounding error” because the traffic was so small. Alex wrote ‘You are a rounding error’ and put it on the wall at Reddit as negative reinforcement. Today, Ohanion is worth $150 million, and he attributed his motivation, in part, to the rejection from Yahoo, which made him determined to succeed.
