If I Were 22: Accept That the Most Coveted Jobs May Not Be Right for You

This post is part of a series in which Influencers share lessons from their youth. Read all the stories here.

I really can’t complain about the way my career has gone thus far. This has certainly not been due to a lack of mistakes or ignorance on my part. I have had plenty of both, and only thanks to an incredible amount of luck have I ended up where I am.

Here are two lessons I've learned over the last decade:

1. Don’t choose a job just because it’s the most sought-after.

Like many of my classmates during my senior year in college, I interviewed with the top management consulting firms. I did everything I could to prepare and was devastated to not get an offer, especially as some of my closest friends did.

I recently noted the irony of this as I walked on stage to give a keynote on innovation at the global partners meeting of one of these firms. I wondered how my life would have been different if I had joined at age 22.

The point isn’t to rag on the firm (it is obviously an excellent one) but to say that, at the time, I didn’t actually know what management consultants did and had only applied because everyone else was applying.

Now that I better understand management consulting as well as my own strengths, I can safely say they made the right call on me — I would not have been very good at the job and would have been miserable. Thanks to their accurate candidate assessment process, I took a job at Google instead.

2. Don’t choose a job based on pay (unless you absolutely have to).

That said, I almost didn’t take the Google opportunity. I had a competing offer from another search engine company, which on paper seemed better in every way: higher salary, more equity both in terms of number of shares and percentage-ownership basis, and a fancier title. With student loans to pay off and a bruised ego from being rejected by the consulting firms, this offer seemed like a no-brainer.

Thankfully, one of my mentors intervened, urging me to take the longer-term view and go with the better company and team: “You don’t have any dependents or a mortgage,” he told me. “Now is the time in your life to take calculated risks, and the people you will meet and learn from a great company versus a mediocre one will change your life.”

He was right. LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman echoes this advice in his book, The Startup of You, written with Ben Casnocha:

Many people defer collecting full-time wages by spending twenty-three consecutive years in school. A high school drop-out can make more money in the short run than the guy stuck studying chemistry. But in the long run, the logic goes, a person with a foundation of knowledge and skills will make more money… Unfortunately, for far too many, focused learning ends at college graduation… They compare their cash salary to their peers’ instead of comparing lessons learned… Prioritize plans that offer the best chance at learning."

I agree with Reid. As a fresh college grad, be highly suspicious of offers that seem too good to be true and especially of employers that bestow lofty titles. Titles and responsibilities should be earned. At 22, most of us have not proven ourselves yet. I felt like I had dodged a bullet when this other company got in trouble for shady accounting practices and went bust a couple years later.

Especially when you are early in your career, one of the worst things you can do is sacrifice learning opportunities, growth, and valuable connections for ego and — in retrospect — paltry sums of short-term money.

You owe it to your future self to make decisions today for the right reasons and the long term.

In my next post, I’ll cover a third lesson: optimize for experience over ego and entitlement.

Photo: Clara Shih (second from left)