Time of writing: 21:45
Time taken: 130 minutes

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I was stuck. I did what I thought I needed to do as a junior designer. My plan was to take part in projects, create an enticing portfolio, and apply. I believed that was the recipe to land my dream job.

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Instead, I was met with waves of disappointment and dreadful silence from recruiters. Increasingly desperate, I did what was only natural. Be less picky and apply more.

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However, this approach didn’t sit well. I was torn between finding a perfect job and finding any job. There is no way I can be less picky and expect to find the right job for myself. Do I really want to work at a company I don’t enjoy working at? But what else can I do?

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I felt helpless. The added pressure of making the right career move made me stiff to the bone. I felt stuck.

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“Not good. Something needs to change.”

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A book that helped me get unstuck was , “Designing your life” by Dave Evans and Bill Burnett. In the book, it reframed a dysfunctional belief that I had.

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Dysfunctional belief: I have to find the right career path.
Reframe: There are many career paths that are right for me.

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‍‍I was so focused on the one career path that when things didn’t work out after multiple failures, I got stuck. My career plan was simple but didn’t include alternatives; apply for design internships and land a full-time job offer at a big tech company.

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Having this rigid career plan made me turn a blind eye towards equally great opportunities. If “design” is not in the job title, it was an automatic “no, thank you”. This approach was inflexible and ironically, the opposite of design thinking.

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The book suggests exactly what designers should do if we reframe the problem of finding a fulfilling career path as a design challenge. Find a meaningful direction for your career, and prototype towards it. There is no perfect prototype and there is no perfect career decision.

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An example that resonated with me was using wayfinding as an analogy to navigating career decisions. Searching for a perfect job is equivalent to entering a destination into a GPS device, expecting a turn-by-turn instruction of how to get there. But nothing in reality works as such. The reality is closer to sailors setting sail to find undiscovered land.

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How can sailors be sure that they are in the right path to find undiscovered land? They need a compass and a direction. A compass to periodically reorient themselves toward a direction. Similarly, all I need to navigate my career is a compass that can tell me if I am on the right direction. Then, I can be certain that the gap between where I am and where I want to be is closing.

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I began to believe that a good career is not about finding the perfect job but making the job perfect. Starting point matters but only so much. As long as I have control of the steering wheel, I can always steer towards the direction I want to head. After all, there are multiple ways to get to the same place, not just filling in job applications.

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“The enemy of a good plan is the dream of a perfect plan.”
- Karl von Clausewitz, 1832

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From having this realization, I became aware of unexplored opportunities all around me. Stay curious, be humble, and my dream job may never have the word “design” in its title.

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