Who do you want to be?
A few years ago, I heard the following piece of career advice, though I can’t remember who said it or where I first read it:
A few years ago, I heard the following piece of career advice, though I can’t remember who said it or where I first read it:
When evaluating a career opportunity at a particular organization, don’t ask yourself “Do I fit in with these people?”. Instead, ask: “Do I want to be more or less like these people in 3 years?”.
The point here is that we (implicitly and explicitly) adopt the values, mores, taboos, and temperaments of the people and organizations we spend time with. Since we spend 40 (or 50, or 70) hours per week with our colleagues, we had better be certain that these colleagues are people we’d like to increasingly resemble.
And if we spend 40–70 hours per week behaving as [a startup founder / an investment banker / a social worker] behaves, the job of acting out that role is going to rub off on our actual personalities in a serious way, given enough time.
Whatever your job is, you should ask yourself: Am I glad that I’m becoming more like this kind of person? Every job enforces a certain worldview, including who its declares are its protagonists and its antagonists. Most police officers think that cops are protagonists and criminals are antagonists. Most defense attorneys think (accused) criminals are protagonists, and cops and the government are antagonists. If you wanted to enter either of these fields, you should consider whether either position is one you’d like to hold much more strongly in 1–3 years from now than today.
Most people approach their careers from a different direction. They think (to borrow some examples from my field), do I have what it takes to be a startup CEO? Do I have what it takes to be a venture capitalist? This is sort of a pointless exercise because
If you’re smart and you work hard, you’ll figure out how to do either job.
Choosing jobs based on having “what it takes” isn’t optimizing for learning.
It ignores how the job & the organization will mold you over time.
The third point is especially relevant if you’re considering taking a job at a company that is well-known for having certain strong cultural characteristics. Most people evaluating these opportunities ask themselves, Do I really fit in with these [workaholics at Amazon / brainiacs at Palantir / frat boys at ZocDoc]? …. but what they should be asking is: Do I want to become this kind of person? Do I want to adopt their values and customs? Do I want to speak and walk and behave like them?
I’ve been in the venture capital field for 1.5 years, and even in that short amount of time I can feel myself changing, morphing. Not dramatically (yet), mind you, but steadily. I assess whether a situation is good or bad based on the criteria that a venture capitalist uses (which you can collapse to “if we make more money, it’s good”). My slang is a little different than it used to be, and the people I spend time with are the denizens of the venture capital and startup universe, which means that our conversations continually reinforce that same worldview, which leads to more discussions on similar topics with similar people… and so on. There’s a flywheel effect at play. And it can be hard to see until you step away from it, go somewhere away from the echo chamber (like the Chicago suburbs, at my parents’ house, where I’m writing this from), and find yourself insufferably blabbing in-group aphorisms like Disruption is a great thing and Businesses exist for the benefit of their shareholders to a completely different sort of person who doesn’t see the world in that way at all, and you acknowledge and study their expressionless stares and realize to yourself Oh my god, I’ve actually become a f*cking venture capitalist*…
Whoops, got a little carried away there.
But the point remains. Your work will change you. Make sure you’re changing into someone you’re proud of.
* (not that there’s anything wrong with being a venture capitalist**)
** (that’s exactly what a venture capitalist would say!)
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