OlaDapo

Just be you. A small note to young people trying to figure out their careers. There is so much pressure now to become something very early. You are told to pick a niche, build your brand, position yourself, become known for something and make sure every internship, course or new skill contributes to the story you are trying to tell about yourself. I understand why. Careers require some intentionality, and it is useful to have a sense of where you might be going. But I also think we can become so concerned with constructing the person we think the world will reward that we stop paying attention to the person we actually are. Some of the most useful things you will learn about yourself will come from simply doing things and noticing what happens. You take on an assignment and discover that you are unusually good at it. Someone gives you a difficult problem and, while everyone else is frustrated by it, you find yourself enjoying the process of figuring it out. You enter a new environment without any grand plan and, after a while, people begin coming to you for particular things. Someone trusts you with a little more responsibility, then a little more, and before long you realize that there is something others have been seeing in you that you may not even have had the language to describe yourself. Pay attention to those things, especially to what people repeatedly trust you with when you haven’t told them who you are supposed to be. I also think there should be room in a young life for things that don’t immediately contribute to a career plan. Read something because you want to understand it. Learn a language because you are curious about another part of the world. Take an opportunity because it sounds interesting even if you cannot immediately explain how it fits. Go into rooms where you know very little and listen. Apply for strange things occasionally. Some of them will become important later and some will lead nowhere, but you don’t need to know which is which before you begin. We often look at successful people afterwards and imagine that they must have understood the direction of their lives all along. Usually, we are looking at a story that has become coherent in retrospect. Living it is different. You make decisions with incomplete information, follow some interests, abandon others, meet people you could never have planned to meet and occasionally walk through a door without knowing that it will change the direction of everything that comes afterwards. Perhaps we spend too much of our early years trying to become the person we imagine we should be at 40 or 50, when we haven’t lived enough yet to know who that person will be. Do good work wherever you are. Become useful. Keep learning. Take responsibility when it comes and see what you do with it. Protect your curiosity. Notice the work that gives you energy and the problems you seem able to handle. Notice what people ask you to do again after seeing you do it once. Notice the subjects you keep returning to even when nobody is paying you or requiring you to care about them. Over time, those things begin to tell you something. A career may eventually emerge from them. You may discover an area in which you want to become exceptionally good. You may even look backwards one day and find a remarkably coherent story connecting things that felt completely unrelated while you were living them. But you don’t need to manufacture that story before you’ve had the chance to live it. There is value in planning your life, but leave enough room in the plan to discover yourself too. Just be you, and give yourself enough time and experience to find out what that actually means. P.S. Sometimes when I write these notes to young people, I am talking to myself too. I haven’t figured out many things yet. We are all still a work in progress. #YouWillNotFail