If I could start my career again, I'd do these three things differently. I was ambitious, but this is what I was missing.
It’s my birthday week! For as long as I can remember, I have hated celebrating my birthdays. Come my birthday eve, I’d start to retreat into a shell of myself. I’d go silent and sulk for no reason I could ever explain.
But something has shifted over the last few years. It started with my husband proposing on my birthday eve - so I would always be happy on the day. And now it’s evolved into my own personal New Year. I’ve swapped the birthday blues for embracing meaningful time to reflect and reset. The approach has given me a completely different outlook on the occasion, so I thought I'd celebrate with some of my recent reflections.
As some of my favourite creators are thriving in their 20s, I’ve found myself reflecting on my own 20s chapter. You know that feeling of “Why didn’t I just know this earlier?” or “Why didn’t I start this earlier?” Looking back, I realise that much of my ambition was focused on what came next: the next qualification, the next role, the next goal. What I hadn't fully grasped was that building a career isn't just about moving forward. It's about building something that gives you more options, more leverage and greater freedom over time.
I’m not one for wallowing in regret, so with Scorpio season upon us, I’m sharing these reflections in case it helps anyone in their own journey earlier. In this blog, I’m starting with my top three career development reflections, and next I’ll share my top three personal development reflections.
1. Create Career Capital
I explored the idea of ‘career capital’ in an earlier blog, Get So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why ‘Career Capital’ Matters More Than Passion.
I was heavily career-oriented in my 20s. By the time I was in my mid-20s, I was the Marketing Manager at an iconic South Australian business, and I had complemented my industry experience with a Bachelor of Commerce (Marketing & Management), a Chartered Institute of Marketing Professional Diploma, and an MBA. Yet, through all my career development, I hadn’t come across the term ‘career capital’, and wished I had packaged the concept of my career in this idea earlier.
As Cal Newport shares in his book, So Good They Can’t Ignore You, if you want to get really good, you have to first grow your career capital, which is centred on building skills that are two key things:
Rare
Valuable
The stronger your rare and valuable skills, particularly those that are hard to replicate, the more leverage you gain. Leveraging your career capital is what earns your personal brand:
Autonomy
Flexibility
Influence
Without career capital, you’re negotiating from nothing. So if you do want to “follow your passion”, you have to build your leverage first. Newport says:
“If your goal is to love what you do, you must first build up ‘career capital’ by mastering rare and valuable skills, and then cash in this capital for the traits that define great work.”
While I was focused on growing my skills, especially in marketing and leadership, I would encourage others in their 20s to not just build generic skills, but strategically build a specialised skill stack, developing capabilities in what’s rare and valuable.
2. Build Your Leverage
Your career capital helps build your leverage. I regularly come back to the idea of leverage in my blog, for example, in my post Create a portfolio of proof for your personal brand online.
In The Almanack of Naval Ravikant, Ravikant, the Silicon Valley icon, champions the importance of creating leverage.
Ravikant proposes that the world is no longer about rich and poor, nor blue-collar versus white-collar. But rather leverage versus un-leveraged. Your personal brand becomes your leverage. Ravikant says:
“You are waiting for your moment when something emerges in the world; they need a skill set, and you’re uniquely qualified. You build your brand in the meantime on Twitter, on YouTube, and by giving away free work. You make a for yourself, and you take some risk in the process. When it is time to move on the opportunity, you can do so with leverage—the maximum leverage possible.”
Despite a career in marketing, I wasn’t one to use social media much for my personal brand at all in my 20s, and not at all for my professional brand. But whether or not you’re applying the idea to your online personal brand, I wish I had thought more about the word ‘leverage’ throughout my career in general. For example:
What leverage am I creating?
What existing opportunities am I leveraging?
What can I leverage from even my losses?
How can I leverage my location?
How can I leverage my current career circumstances?
Instead of always dreaming about the next thing, I wish I’d paid more attention to what was available to me at the time and leveraged my current circumstances more, seeing the peripheral opportunities in my everyday life. Sometimes, the next level of your career isn't about getting somewhere new, but recognising the value of where you already are.
3. Make Future Self Plans
While I do wish I’d seen the opportunities in the present more, at the same time I wish I knew more about future-self thinking. I’ve always been big on goal-setting. I’d set and obsess over my next goal. My next degree, my next job. I now realise that simply setting goals is not the same as a Future Self mindset.
I was setting goals from a vague idea of my interests and current circumstances, when I should have been setting them from a clear vision of my future self and reverse-engineering from there.
I explored this idea more in my blog, Be Your Future Self Now: Hi Me in 10 Years. The Decisions That Shape Your Future.
You can set goals as much as you like, but if you act from your current identity, there will be a significant gap between your results and goals.
Benjamin Hardy, PhD, is a globally renowned Occupational Psychologist who wrote Personality Isn’t Permanent. In the book, Hardy argues that your Future Self should drive your present decisions. While most people are overly attached to their past or present selves, transformation requires identity-level change - not simply behaviour tweaks. This is what the world’s most iconic performers understand. I now set a crystal-clear vision for my Future Self and build my days, weeks, months, and years around this vision. I do what my Future Self would need to have achieved now to get where I want to be.
Learning out loud
Looking back on my 20s, I don’t wish I could change the past, and these things are nothing I can’t change now. I simply wish I’d had these perspectives earlier. From building career capital to creating leverage and becoming more intentional about my future self, these are lessons I’m still applying today. If you’re in your 20s, I hope they give you a few ideas to think about as you shape your own career, and the opportunities ahead of you.
Next, I’ll be sharing three personal development reflections that have changed the way I approach life. Stay tuned!
