This content is locked. Please login or become a member.
I’m often asked by my students, “Oh, you know, what’s my life plan? What should I do?” And they want to see it all laid out in some kind of map. And in reality, if you ask anybody who’s been successful, it’s a series of zigs and zags, and unexpected things that happen in between.
So I think in your own life, one should be always thinking about, well, is this an inflection point that could benefit me in some way? And this is actually backed up by a study that I think was Korn Ferry did with LinkedIn looking at career paths of people who had ultimately been quite successful. And what they found was that rather than a linear ladder kind of career path, it was actually a series of zigs and zags.
So as a person, I think what you want to be doing is always be looking at the decisions that you’re making with two thoughts in mind. The first one is, is what I’m doing, expanding my range of options. Is it increasing my choices or is it constricting my options in some meaningful way? And secondly, is – does this next step in my journey, have the potential to teach me something? And if the answer to those two things are, yes, that tends to be a choice that’s a higher quality choice than choices to which the answer is no. And I think a lot of us are kind of afraid sometimes of inflection points in our own lives. And yet, a lot of times those are where the best opportunities really come from.