What price are you willing to pay for your career?

I chose my first career as a civil engineer with good intentions but burned out after only a few years. You see, I was just a young, impressionable teenager who happened to enjoy math and knew nothing about how the world worked. When I saw the kind of life that was possible as a civil engineer, I decided at an early age to combine my innocent desire for wealth and natural talent for math in pursuit of a rewarding and fruitful career.

Unfortunately, I was ready to be done with this career after only two years (even though it took me another two years to finally leave).

Nothing met my expectations. My job wasn’t a money-printing machine. The craft wasn’t innovating fast enough for my taste. And I was rarely playing toward my strengths inside the profession. I’d frequently daydream about what would have happened if I had stayed at my high school summer job at Home Depot and worked my way up (a job I didn’t particularly care for, if that tells you anything about how discontent I was as an engineer).

How could this have happened? I loved math, enjoyed problem solving, and despite starting a career with thousands of possible pathways I left after only four years of work.

I failed to recognize an incredible truth about careers:

The goals you place on your career come with an agreement to suffer in a specific way.

These agreements come with the territory and depend on career goals, which is where things get really interesting.

If you had asked me early on what I wanted from my first career, my answer would have been modest - that I wanted to design cool things and play outside. But the truth was that I wanted to be financially rewarded for my growing skills, and I expected to become rich. It wasn’t a specifically conscious choice, either. There was legitimate motivation to contribute to the craft and grow in my skills. Even more revealing were my actions, despite my words.

What we say to others is usually pretty unreliable compared to what’s in our souls, and we don’t always know that. The best way to figure out what you actually want from your career is to evaluate the activity.

I spent an enormous amount of time worrying about my paycheck and far less time investing in the skills to grow mastery. Even though I was technically underpaid, my dissatisfaction came more from the large misalignment about the motivations I held around my career - I wasn’t willing to make the necessary sacrifices to realize the rewards of wealth.

Another example: someone chasing titles is likely in pursuit of authority or even wealth. They may want to be the top dog at a company or achieve a title that allows them to make more money in other places in the market. Sometimes, a title-chaser is chasing the perception of outward achievement.

There are a lot of different career goals to pursue, including:

• Mastery
• Wealth
• Authority
• Fame
• Autonomy
• Work-life balance

Someone may say they value mastery but continue to chase promotions. Others may say they want authority but spend their evenings buried in study and craft.

Actions expose your career desires.

I was constantly stressed out and deeply unsatisfied with my salary. Looking back, it’s easy to see that most of the career moves I made were in the direction of my paycheck. 

Okay, but what about this agreement to suffer? What’s that all about?

Every pursuit comes with a price - a downside you are required to permanently accept in order to chase your definition of success.

For example, mastery requires a significant amount of repetition, frequent boredom, and saying no to opportunities and pivots. You cannot become a master without investing an overwhelming amount of focus into a craft for a long period of time, something that grows increasingly harder in a hurried world.

For wealth, you’re forced to choose economically promising opportunities over anything that might be more interesting or aligned with your values. The choices you make shape how serious you are about chasing your career goal.

There is nothing wrong with a given motivation for a career. There is nothing wrong with chasing the largest paycheck you can earn. But dishonesty about what you want makes it harder to lock in your professional identity and build solid strategies to support where you want to go.

A telling example of this occurs with the advent of people becoming (human) influencers on the topic of artificial intelligence. As the technology evolves, they’re forced to recreate themselves to keep up with the latest and greatest developments - a unique form of professional ecdysis to stay relevant.

By the very nature of their medium, many are motivated by the goal of fame, which forms the shape of the suffering they’re agreeing to in their pursuit. And the cost of fame includes the burden of public scrutiny and an unending race for attention. 

Compare this to internet creators who were first masters in their craft.

Instead of chasing validation of their skills from an audience, they teach. Digital masters are buoyed by a deep portfolio of relevant achievements built quietly over a long career. Having paid the cost of mastery, they’re often publicly known as an educator but their resume includes a long history of accolades in the craft and experience characterized by hard-won lessons.

Now, let’s revisit the original list and point out the suffering required by the goal:

• Mastery: repetition, boredom, obsession, and relative obscurity
• Wealth: choosing the most economically viable options even when other things are more interested or aligned
• Authority: politicking, power games, and distance from the original craft 
• Fame: public scrutiny, chasing attention, and leaving control of attention in the hands of institutions and algorithms
• Autonomy: above average responsibility and expectations for output or capability
• Work-life balance: slower traditional career growth, accepting that others who are willing to sacrifice more will surpass you, risk of irrelevance

Take a deep look at what you are willing to voluntarily pay for your career and the actions you’ve taken recently.

These agreements aren’t merely basic tradeoffs - they also represent the daily price to pay for the  distinct rewards found within. Be honest about what you’re willing to endure to get what you want.

The strength of your desire is directly related to the size and shape of your sacrifice.