What I do

Do you know what you do?

I don’t mean your job. You’ll change your job from time to time.

I mean what you do. What you’re good at, what you enjoy, what people will pay you for.

My career — and what I do

This is what my career looks like (I promise, this is short).

• 2 years as a technical writer on a project with a lot of autonomy
• 10 years in startups where I was one of the first employees, but not a founder
• 10 years as an technology analyst
• 10 years as an author and mentor to analysts
• 11 years as a freelance writer, editor, and ghostwriter

The first two years were about learning what work is about. After that, here’s what these jobs all had in common:

• Lots of writing.
• Lots of problem-solving.
• Lots of creativity.
• Lots of collaboration.
• Lots of logical thinking, often including mathematics.
• Creating something worthwhile.
• A fair amount of self-promotion.
• A very large degree of autonomy — meaning I mostly got to define my own tasks and how to execute them.

These jobs sometimes included other elements that I either wasn’t good at or didn’t enjoy.

• Managing people. Although at one job I managed a department of 12, managing people is not my strength. I tend to micromanage and be too lenient.
• Full responsibility for a startup. I don’t build companies.
• Selling. I don’t like it.
• Maximizing my own compensation. I get paid fairly for doing good work; I don’t tend to take high-paying jobs just for the money.
• Public speaking. I’ve given hundreds of speeches. I got decent at it. But I’m much more of a writer than a speaker.

The absurdity of trying to hire me

I now get regular solicitations to join companies. They’re nearly all scams.

But if you look at what I’m good at and what I enjoy, me working for a company seems absurd.

You mean I’d have to work on what you say is important, not what I want? Ludicrous.

Collaborate with the same set of people all day long? Boring.

Define success by somebody else’s criteria? Ha!

Work the hours you say instead of whatever hours I want? Why would I want that?

Go to an office five days a week? Inconceivable.

What do you do?

Building a career doesn’t mean climbing ever-higher in a set of roles in companies. It can, but that’s not the essence of it.

Building a career means finding out what you’re good at and what you enjoy that people will pay for — and what you don’t like or aren’t good at — and then finding ways to do as much of that as possible.

Young people tend not to take advice from old people like me. But if you’re not thinking about what you want to do on a regular basis, you might end up in unhappy in a dead end.

Don’t quit. Yearn. And act on your yearning. It will pay off eventually.