Dan Herr

9/ The career advice I wish I had listened to   I was WAY too focused on having a logical career when I was younger.   My plan was basically: Consulting → MBA → consulting   Very sensible. Very respectable. Also completely wrong for me.   I accidentally ended up with a much weirder career. I studied international relations. I became a management consultant. I went to business school. I did corporate strategy. I worked in corporate venture capital. I did M&A. I bounced in and out of the defense industry several times despite repeatedly trying to leave it. Eventually I somehow ended up running Corp Dev at a defense technology company.   I could not possibly have planned this career when I was 22.   There is a line in The Men Who Stare at Goats that I’ve always liked about life being a river. The basic idea is that if you’re pursuing something that isn’t your destiny, you’re constantly swimming against the current. If you’re going in the right direction, the river starts carrying you. We can debate destiny, whether we are in a simulation, or whether our AI overlords from the future are helping out people in the timeline who are generally supportive of the birth of the superintelligence. Either way, there were points in my career where I was working very hard to force myself toward the thing I had decided I was supposed to want. And then there were other things that I kept getting pulled toward — technology, defense, investing, deals — despite not having some grand plan to build a career around them.   Eventually I stopped fighting it. Pay attention to the things you’re weirdly good at. Pay attention to the work that other people seem to value disproportionately when you do it. Pay attention to the subjects you keep coming back to even when they’re not part of The Plan.   Having a weird career does create problems. Recruiters like careers that can be explained in six words, and sometimes you will have to explain why your collection of experiences makes sense.   Who gives a shit.   Your objective isn’t to construct the world’s easiest LinkedIn profile.   Learn useful things. Work with really smart people. Get yourself into situations where you’re slightly uncomfortable and have to figure things out. And don’t be so committed to the career you planned at 22 that you miss the one you are accidentally really good at. I wish I had figured that out earlier.