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Adapted from “ How Will You Measure Your Life ?” by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon, published May, 2012 by Harper Business, an imprint of HarperCollins.
I’m always struck by how many of my students and the other young people I’ve worked with think they’re supposed to have their careers planned out, step by step, for the next five years.
High-achievers, and aspiring high-achievers, too often put pressure on themselves to do exactly this. Starting as early as high school, they think that to be successful they need to have a concrete vision of exactly what it is they want to do with their lives.
Underlying this belief is the implicit assumption that they should risk deviating from their vision only if things go horribly wrong.
But having such a focused plan really only makes sense in certain circumstances.
In our lives and in our careers, whether we are aware of it or not, we are constantly navigating a path by deciding between our deliberate strategies and the unanticipated alternatives that emerge. Each approach is vying for our minds and our hearts, making its best case to become our actual strategy. Neither is inherently better or worse; rather, which you should choose depends on where you are on the journey.
Companies experience this tension all the time.
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