I joined the workforce just over a decade ago. In 2012, I “began my career”, whatever that means. Three years as a business journalist with Forbes, two as a Yale teaching assistant, three more as a reporter with Power Finance & Risk, and the last three as a marketer & researcher with RMI. Overall I think I’ve done OK: I get paid to live where I like and do what I love. 2012 me would gladly accept 2024 me. And yet I’ve made some poor decisions that have set me back, slowed me down, or limited my options. Here are four career mistakes I made that you may want to avoid.
1.
1. Conversational in several foreign languages, “business
fluent” in none
This first one is a no-brainer. I learned French in school
for nine years and got pretty good by the time I’d graduated high school. Instead
of continuing it at university in England, I gave it up. Perhaps worse still,
when I suddenly found myself doing a study abroad year outside Berlin, I studied
German twice a week and tried to speak the language to locals as much as I
could. I’d accidentally use French grammar in my German classes, but I picked
up basic German quickly. On that study abroad year in Germany, I also tried to
do informal weekly language exchanges with Spanish and Polish students. Despite having
multiple languages floating around in my head, I left Germany able to carry a
conversation at a Kreuzberg beerhall. I continued studying German, albeit
halfheartedly in my final year of university in England. Then I forgot about
German for three years. Then I spoke and studied it again for a year as part
of my Masters program requirements and haven’t touched it since. Last year I
took a beginner’s Spanish class in New York but again, my interest has waned
because I haven’t found friends to practise it with. I like learning languages, not mastering them.
The result is that I can talk to taxi drivers, McDonalds
cashiers, and confused tourists in Hindi, French, German and Spanish. I can even
discern a newspaper headline here and there. But I can’t use any of those languages
to further my career. It feels like effort wasted. I can’t write memos in any foreign
language nor negotiate a commercial contract. I should have
stuck to French—the language I’d invested nearly a decade learning—and taken it
to full, “business fluency”. Le subjonctif be damned. I should have deepened
my language skills, not broadened them. French fluency could have opened up a
life in France or Europe more broadly. I wish someone had told me at 19 to do
study abroad in France, so I’d have learned to love French culture and make
French friends—two parts of my study abroad year in Germany that endeared
German to me. In foreign language, perhaps more than any other professional skill
sets, the world values specialists rather than generalists.
2. 2. Picked the wrong monetizable skills
Speaking of specialization, I think I sadly picked the wrong
skills to develop all the way to “monetizability”. My most monetizable skills,
I’d posit, are research and writing. Those are things I can do better than a
competent, educated generalist and better (for now) than a machine. But, tragically,
they are skills that few employers want to pay for and those that do, pay
towards the bottom end of the salary spectrum. Media & communications, NGOs,
government, maybe some consulting. Beyond that, there aren’t really research and writing careers. I
should have picked different, more monetizable skills and acquired the credentials
to monetize them. No one really wants to pay for good writing. Writing doesn’t make
businesses money any more.
If you want to work in finance,
you probably need an MBA and/or a CFA—not to mention securities licenses—to
signal your monetizable skills: financial modeling, contract negotiations, closing deals. Doctors specialize early with medical degrees and so on. Lawyers have
to pass the bar. Project developers—whether it’s real estate, energy, or infrastructure—build
and showcase their project management skills by pointing to steel in the
ground somewhere. Accounting firms hire accountants, tech giants hire coders.
People who specialize to acquire discrete, monetizable skills get placed into high-paying,
stable careers. I guess being a generalist, on the other hand, is more fun and
intellectually stimulating. I did my Global Affairs Masters degree—a generalist
degree if ever there was one—because I got a scholarship from Yale and I had to
stay in journalism after I graduated because it’s the only job I could get a US
work visa for. I’m only now starting to build different, more monetizable skills
like people management and fund-raising; I should have begun this process years
ago. Indeed, it’ll be years till I have achievements to show on those fronts.
3.
3. Applied for jobs when I was stressed
A colleague once told me never to change jobs simply to leave
an employer, but rather to go toward something exciting, worthy, better.
Twice in the same summer, I forgot that advice. I wanted to leave my job at the
time because I was stressed and over-worked. Both prospective jobs were different to what I
was doing at the time, meaning I’d need to prepare extra hard for the
interviews. In practice, though, I didn’t really have the mind-space to pass
those grueling job interview processes. In fact, I messed up two promising final round
interviews because I was so stressed and frayed that, in one instance, I
misread the final assignment prompt and, in the other, I submitted a simple writing
exercise with a glaring, unforgiveable typo.
I felt so ashamed right after I'd hit submit. The one thing I’d
been trained to do was read prompts, interpret briefs, write well, and edit
better. I’d back myself to do that better than most. But now for both job
interview processes, which happened months apart, I did the writing assignments
late on weeknights or through my weekends, short of mental, physical, and emotional
rest. I’d rushed through them, making simple mistakes. I wasn’t fully present
when I was at work, nor when I was at home doing the assignments; when I was at
work during the day, I was thinking about what I’d write in the assignment that
evening or weekend – and vice versa. In truth, my day job wasn’t that bad, I
simply hadn’t put in the effort to remedy it. I was eventually much happier at
work just weeks later. Those two sets of job rejections were medicine: bitter
and necessary.
4.
4. Comparing myself to others
This last one I need to get tattooed on my forehead so I never
forget it. I habitually compare the weakest aspect of my job/career the
strongest aspects of my closest friends’. For example, my best friends from
grad school are now directors at tech giants, associate partners at consultancies,
VPs at global financial institutions, making probably twice what I do, managing
entire teams, bringing in millions or budgeting even more. Comparing myself to
them is human nature and folly – a surefire way to diminish many of one’s own
achievements while ignoring other wins altogether. Most importantly, what your
friends do or earn also... doesn’t matter. They are operating within very different
constraints—not my immigration & visa handicap, for one. They are older. They
have different stressors and working hours. But even that does not actually
matter.
I’ve found the best approach for a chronic seeker of self-development
like me is to compare myself to where I was a year ago. Or better yet, where I
was yesterday. That exercise surfaces so many of my own achievements (big and
small). That’s the stuff that matters because that’s what you can
control. That’s where to focus. I ended 2023 with an unimaginable new array of knowledge,
accomplishments, networks, and competencies compared to where I’d begun it. And
now I know what I need to do in 2024. As long as “last year you” is proud of “this
year you” and “yesterday you” is proud of “today you”, you’re doing fine.
Conclusion
By the way, there were also some other things which didn’t
go as planned, but I wouldn’t call those mistakes per se. I had no
control over them. For example, I picked the wrong countries to try to emigrate
to: first the UK and now the US both have disastrous immigration systems offering
me little near-term hope for stability, never mind residency. I should have
moved to Canada and gotten permanent residency like many friend, but I’m
now too many years invested in America to ponder leaving for anything other than
the “job of a lifetime” elsewhere. Another example is doing my grad school summer
internship with an awesome little start-up that couldn’t offer me a full-time
role upon graduation, rather than biting the bullet and getting a corporate internship that would almost guarantee a cookie-cutter, well-paying career eventually. I
made those decisions with the best information I had available at the time, so
I’d call those fair decisions with bad outcomes rather than mistakes.
So, to the students who reach out on LinkedIn for career
advice every week: please make notes. To my friends and colleagues who’ve learned
from their owns mistakes along the way, please share your wisdom and experiences
too. I think career mistakes that teach you things are bitter medicine but
medicine nonetheless. What medicine will the next decade of work hold? Nothing
tattoo-worthy I hope.
