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Picking your Professional Path

e2eml.school · 1,474 words · saved by 1 readers

Picture your many career options as a landscape. Every location is a potential goal. Getting there requires time and heart and you have finite quantity of both. There are many many places you could go. Which do you choose? These aren't weekend trips. Most of these places take years to reach. Some of them, decades. The anxiety this provokes is intense. What if I spend most of my life getting to a place only to figure out I didn’t really want to go there? What if I loiter too long trying to make up my mind? What if I get distracted by a comfortable rock next to a creek, and by the time I decide to get up and move it’s too late to get where I wanted? The fear of missing out is very real. Our peers can be brutal. Pressure to publish. Pressure to get first round funding. Pressure to make our first million, then our tenth, then our hundredth. Use blockchain. Learn large language models. Reform health care. Cure hunger. Fix homelessness. Get stock options. Get tenure. Get a Ph.D. Which way do

The Landscape Picture your many career options as a landscape. Every location is a potential goal. Getting there requires time and heart and you have finite quantity of both. There are many many places you could go. Which do you choose? These aren't weekend trips. Most of these places take years to reach. Some of them, decades. The anxiety this provokes is intense. What if I spend most of my life getting to a place only to figure out I didn’t really want to go there? What if I loiter too long trying to make up my mind? What if I get distracted by a comfortable rock next to a creek, and by the

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