Summer reflections

It’s the summer, in the northern hemisphere at least, and a time for reflections on where we are and how far we’ve come. Here are some thoughts about my own career to date.

1. Resilience

We often think of our careers as a journey, with some future destination vaguely in mind, and milestones along the way. We aspire to be like others who are further along that path.

What we fail to appreciate when we are young is that those older people are on their own journeys, and their own future success is not guaranteed. Over time I’ve seen many of the people I idolized when I started out subsequently fall from grace. They’ve been knocked back in their careers, suffered personal tragedies, lost their way. As the ancient Greeks said, call no one happy until they are dead, because there’s always the potential for life to take a different course.

We could despair about this. I prefer to use it as a reminder to appreciate all I’ve done and achieved to date, rather than worrying too much about attaining something in the future. And I’ve learned to admire all the more those idols who have picked themselves up after a fall and created new lives for themselves. Resilience, above all, is what we need throughout our careers.

2. Focus

As the years pass we learn that focussing on small things is often the best approach. Voltaire would say this is the only way to have certainty in an uncertain world. That US admiral who a few years ago encouraged college graduates to make their beds would say it brings us self-respect. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi talks about the mental health advantages of attaining a state of ‘flow’.

I’ve taken the greatest pride in something when it’s been achieved step by step over a period of time: I’ve known its true value as something I’ve won by my own efforts. Conversely my biggest regrets have often been when I’ve daydreamed about something without investing much time or effort in it, without really knowing what it would have been like.

Successes are often hard to imagine because they lie far in the future (and regrets are often hard to shift because they are built on fantasies). At the end of each day, we should know we have spent our time well if we have achieved just one small thing.

3. Change

When you live in the city, you can lose sight of the changes in the world around you. Hedges and earthworks in the countryside shift and move but brick and concrete appear timeless. Big organisations, also, seem immobile. It all feels so unreal.

The truth though is that both cities and organisations do change over time. Where you started work looks very different decades later. If you stay in one place you’ll find yourself in a new environment after years have passed. But your priorities change as well. What was important to you then may be a lower priority now.

I stayed with one firm for 19 years and it changed a great deal over that time. However, the bigger shift for me came when I moved to a different firm, and I realised then how much I had changed too. My career path might seem to have been predictable but I know I have a perspective now that I never anticipated when I started out on it.

4. Passion

When we are young, we categorise jobs as creative or non-creative, the former requiring a more artistic temperament (and usually earning less money). Over time, we learn that the difference is not that wide. The artist must put in long hours to learn, and achieve their effects; the worker must find a creative spark to lift their efforts to the next level.

In my career I’ve found that there’s no substitute for hard work, which is necessary to achieve anything of note; but my best work has involved an act of creation, and artistry and inspiration.

The difference between jobs might instead be defined by the passion that you have for what you are doing. It is that passion that sustains you through the long dark hours and without it you become worn down over the years. We all need to find a job we are passionate about, whatever the industry.

5. Optimism

We live many lives throughout our careers, as junior, team member, administrator, leader, and everything else, and we encounter many people that have many different relationships with us. There is a process of continuous renewal as the years pass and as our circumstances change.

Over the years, the people that I’ve seen most successfully navigate these waters have tended to be those who have viewed things most positively. Optimism motivates others; optimism inspires goodwill; and optimism sustains our spirits. Optimism is a currency that can be used in all circumstances.

Few of us are naturally optimistic all of the time, and it can be hard to maintain optimism if things turn against us. But the more we try to find the positive, the more likely we are to win through in the end.

Pictures by Frank McKenna, Stephen Ellis, Elijah Hiett, Roland Denes and Tony Sebastian on Unsplash.