How to Build a Career Path

A career path is a shape you usually only see looking backward, which is what makes building one forward feel impossible. The method that works starts with the traveller rather than the destination.

A career path is a shape you can only see clearly when you turn around and look at where you have been, and this is the cruel little trick at the centre of the whole problem, because the people asking how to build one are standing at the start with nothing behind them to trace. They want the line drawn forward, from where they are to somewhere worth arriving, and every tool that promises to draw it tends to ask them to choose a destination first, as though the hard part were picking the town instead of working out who is doing the travelling. The method that works runs in the opposite direction from the one most people try, because it begins with the traveller and lets the destinations reveal themselves, instead of beginning with a destination and forcing the traveller to fit. I want to wa