Don’t compare your achievements to others.
In school, you are surrounded by peers going through the same course work. But when you start working, you meet new people from different backgrounds and with diverse experiences.
After I graduated, I had friends who were in med school, friends starting their own businesses, and friends who were making double what I was. I wanted to be able to feel the same sense of achievement as I thought these friends felt. But what was making me feel unsatisfied with my own achievements?
I was comparing myself on a scale that was not meant for me.
As a student, grades made it easy to know if I was doing well. But after graduation, there’s no universal quantifiable scale for measuring success, and I was comparing apples to oranges, chalk to cheese. Once I understood that, the next step was to feel sure of myself without making comparisons.
Define your own success.
At what point should you consider yourself successful? How do you even approach this question? How can you know what you will want 10 years from now? I realized that success is different at every stage of life. It’s a constant re-evaluation.
I decided to define my current success as doing something that I am good at and something I am passionate about.
This helped me feel more satisfied. Because now all I had to do was to be good at my job, and maybe do something on the side, like continuing with volunteer work.
Then, a couple of weeks ago, I was rewarded with positive feedback from my manager after a challenging year. I have learned so much this year, and now I am left with feeling relief and satisfaction — relief from having felt so terrible about myself at times along my career path, and satisfaction with being good at something.
Try not to see your career as linear.
During the panel discussion, it was asked: “Do you think you’ve made the right choice with your career?”
I don’t think I have made the right choice, as this would mean that there was only ever a single correct path for my career to follow.
The idea of the right career, the one job that you find right after school and settle down into, has made so many unhappy. If there’s anything I learned over the past decade, it’s that you can’t start out limiting your choices, and expect life to turn out.
I was doing an undegraduate internship that to my great surprise, didn’t turn into a full-time position. I was left without a job right in at the end of my degree. I remember being powerfully miserable. But a few weeks later, I found the job that led to my graduate postion.
Back to that non-linear career path
There is just so much in the world, so much available. The need to find the “right choice” is something that we no longer need in 2022. We have so many options that we have the privilege of experimenting with in our career. That’s the most exciting thing about career.
Today I am in co-op, yesterday (not literally) I was in the lab, and tomorrow I may be running my own company, the point being: I have options and it’s never the end of the world if the first job I choose does not end up working out.
I have been out of school for more than a decade now, and it took years to feel like I was finally able to see clearly. I am still working on my way to my own success and I hope this post inspires you to do the same!
Disclaimer: I have presented a lot of personal opinions here and in doing so, I do not intend to represent anyone else or any organizations that I am affiliated with. This is purely a personal reflection.