adminDoes this sound familiar? You reluctantly plodded through school feeling completely empty, like none of it actually mattered. Your parents wanted good results, and pictured you as a doctor, a lawyer, maybe a dental hygienist. Maybe you even got the results, kudos to you. But at the end of it, you had a limited number of career paths in front of you, all of which sounded about as much fun as peeling potatoes.
That was my experience. Graduation arrived and I still had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. So I picked the least awful subject on offer and called it a career path. Genius system, really.
If only someone had told me back then that it was okay to have no idea what I wanted to do with my life. Instead you spend years chasing salaries and titles. None of it means anything if it doesn’t bring you joy and fit what you’re actually built for.
If you think the next promotion is the answer, get it, then tell me if you still feel that way in six months.
The advice you actually got
Climb the ladder. Don’t ask too many questions about whether it’s leaning against the right wall. Business strategist Dan Sullivan calls the alternative your Unique Ability, the narrow set of things you do better than almost anyone, that energize you instead of exhausting you. Build your career around that, not a checklist of skills you think you’re supposed to have.
Six years and one great meeting
I did that grind for six years. Fought my way into one of the best jobs in my college class after being overlooked and passed by more times than I want to admit. From there, I kept fighting. Promotion after promotion. Title after title. I was winning, on paper.
Then one day I looked up and realised I was a guy alone in an office, staring at a monitor, counting down to Friday like it was the only good thing left in my week. Nothing was wrong exactly. That was the problem. I’d built a life I was supposed to want and felt nothing for it.
It hit me mid-sentence in yet another promotion meeting. Someone was talking about my next step up, and all I could think was, life is too short. Six months later I was on a plane to the other side of the world with no plan, just a mission: to try as many paths as I could (and have fun while doing so) until I found something I enjoyed, was good at, and was made for.
What did I find out there? Well, that is a story for another bedtime.
Where you actually start
You don’t need to fly to the other side of the world to figure this out. That’s just what it took for me to stop making excuses (travel as much as you can, though). What actually matters is taking action, instead of waiting for a performance review or someone else to hand you the answer.
Ask yourself:
- What would you do for free?
- What would you do with your life if money were never an issue?
- Sitting in a rocking chair on the porch as an old man or woman, looking back, what are you most proud of? You’ve lived a full life you’re happy with. What did you do?
If you’re anything like me when I first did this, chances are you’ll have no fucking clue. And that’s fine. You’re just starting on your own path, adventure, mission. You might have just found your first clue, and that’s probably a thread worth pulling on. Finding your Unique Ability takes time. It unravels through experience, not certainty. What matters is learning more about yourself along the way, and starting to see everything else through that lens.
Pick the direction, not just the next rung
Careers built around Unique Ability compound instead of drain. A promotion into a role that doesn’t fit you is just a raise with a slower burnout attached. The real career advice isn’t “climb faster.” It’s “make sure the ladder’s against the right wall before you start climbing.” Know what you’re actually built for first. Everything after that gets easier.
