How a Wind-y Career Path Can Actually Help You
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Know what you want to be when you grow up from a young age. Pursue an educational route that leads you there. Enter your dream job. Stay there for 40 years until retirement age. Be perfectly, 1950s happy and content.



Wouldn’t it be nice if our careers worked that way?



For some lucky souls, it does—but for the majority of us, career paths are wind-y, twisty things that often have several starts, stops, and do-overs before we finally settle on “the career of our dreams.”



And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.



Frustrating? Yes. Pointless? Not If You Look at It the Right Way



Of course, we’d love to just fall into the perfect job straight out of college and live out our days full of passion and ’50s happiness. But the reality is that career paths (like anything else in life) are rarely as simple as an episode of Leave it to Beaver.



We run through several less-than-perfect jobs before we finally find one we can get excited about.



We find the “perfect” job, only to realize once we’re in it that it’s not what we thought it would be.



We reach our 20s and 30s and still have no idea “what we want to be when we grow up.”



For many people, the ups and downs of discovering your true calling can seem like wasted time. I know I certainly thought my 12 years in the legal world were the gravest waste of my very life and soul. But, in hindsight, I learned plenty of lessons and developed plenty of skills that have actually served me well now that I’ve finally “figured things out.”



And wherever you are on your own career roller coaster, you can, too. It’s all a matter of perspective.



The Benefits of a Long and Winding Career Road



Sometimes you need to know what you don’t want in order to discover what you do. In theory, being a teacher might seem like the perfect fit for you. You love kids, you love all your early childhood education classes, you long to make a difference in the world. But once you find yourself trying to balance a classroom full of first-graders with staff meetings and paper grading and state-wide testing expectations, you realize the reality of teaching just isn’t right for you. So be it. The only way to know was to give it a try.



And if you worry about all that “wasted” education it took to land your not-quite-right job…



…Experience is never for nothing. Even in the most ill-fitting of jobs, there are skills you can learn that will help you in future positions. If you pursued a goal that wound up not working out, chances are you gained skills that can be parlayed into something that’s a better fit. Not suited for the nuts and bolts of teaching? You’ve still learned things like how to relate to children, how to present information and hold the attention of an audience, and how to motivate and inspire. How can you use those skills, combined with the interests that drove you to teaching in the first place, to pursue a new branch in the path?



And if you realize your initial goal was totally, 100% off—or you find yourself in a “just a paycheck” job that has nothing at all to do with your goals…



…Soft skills are always valuable. In my decade-plus as a legal secretary/paralegal, I learned plenty of things I’ll never need again: how to write a brief, how to conduct legal research, the procedure for filing pleadings in district court. But I also learned lots of “soft skills” that are extremely useful to a self-employed freelancer: how to handle clients fairly but professionally, how to review agreements (like project contracts), how to multitask under strict deadline without falling apart entirely.



As long as you approach each job you’re in with a determination to give it your very best and learn everything you can from it, you may be surprised how many of your totally “useless” daily tasks wind up making you a better whatever-you’re-going-to-be down the line. Learning how to handle certain situations and how to carry yourself in the world is just important as having a laundry list of qualifications.



You’re growing your network. Sure, having a contact list full of CPAs may not seem very useful when you quit the accounting firm to become a professional dog photographer, but in today’s hyper-connected world, you can never underestimate the importance of a growing, diverse network. Just like the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, every person you come in contact with along your career path links you to their own diverse network of colleagues, friends, family, church group members…you name it. And you never know who in that network might wind up being a vital career ally (or client!) down the line.



Has your career path been wind-y? What lessons can you learn from it?