Most careers, like most lives, do not proceed in a linear fashion. We imagine a progression of school to job to promotion to finally being the big boss of them all, but very few of our stories eventually read that way. Instead, it’s all fits and false starts, back to square one, life lessons, and then finally some tremendously successful years followed by some years bald on excitement or advancement. So here is the wisdom of the ages – and of the internet – on six common career mistakes you’ll be lucky to avoid.
1. Settling into career cruise control– As human animals, we want comfort and security, and it’s natural for us to seek a nice period of “plateau” where we can stretch out and enjoy our career accomplishments without facing any new challenges. Sure, you can do that for a week or two, but as a famous man once said, “rust never sleeps.” Meaning if you stop evolving you’re going to be left behind. And when you begin to stagnate, people will begin to hold their nose.
2. Not keeping your eye on new skills– One essential way to avoid stagnation is to make sure that there never comes a time when you stop learning new and better ways to do your job. Every year brings new programs, applications, gadgets and iterations of ideas, all designed to make work go faster, smoother, and more easily. You turn off alerts to these developments at your peril. The set of skills you hold at 25 will most certainly need to be adjusted by 35, no matter how quickly you’ve ascended the corporate ladder.
3. Burning bridges– When you leave a job, no matter how sure you are that you’re turning your back on all that’s gone before, always leave the proverbial trail of breadcrumbs back to worthwhile resources and individuals from that work era. The truth is that you never know what the future holds for your career, or who else you’re going to meet again on the road to your career destiny. So don’t burn those bridges just because you’re turning the page.
4. Not following your passion– We’re not saying you should head back to your bedroom at your parents’ place and learn to play guitar, but make sure the career you choose is at least tangentially related to something you have an actual real-life passion for. Nobody should settle on the idea that their job is something they only do to pay the bills. Case in point: if you can’t stand dogs don’t go to work for a dog food company, as the disharmony between you and your work will inevitably bring down the quality of that work.
5. Not negotiating your salary– We often feel so grateful to land a job that we forget that some negotiation over compensation is expected. In capitalism, it’s everyone for himself, and someone who doesn’t attempt to squeeze a little more money out of a new job is more often seen as lacking self-respect than as being too cocky. The assumption when you don’t ask for more money is that you would have done the job for less, which is a bad early impression to make.
6. Forgetting to balance work with life– Always a big one when older people look back over their careers. Your career should feed your life and vice-versa. A career is a concrete thing, with clear goals, and it’s easy to sink your teeth into it and make advancement and success the eternal goal in your life. Life is a bit harder, with less clear goals, a lot less rules, and a lot more uncertain outcomes. But you’re only one being, just one system of input and output, and just like it’s hard to pay the rent without a paycheck, it’s hard to make meaningful contributions at work when the heart and soul of your life have been left unattended.
