In this issue: How a job is very different from a career. How you cannot get the most out of yourself, and those that you lead, if you only have a job. And how, conversely, having a career is the key to professional, emotional and financial growth for you and those around you.

Experience

I remember working for Digitas in Manhattan in the early 2000s. Back then I was helping ecommerce brands understand the potential of their .com investments. Twenty years ago anyone who was a direct-to-consumer brand, such as companies in financial services, travel or retail, was in the midst of establishing an online sales channel.

One day, I was banging my head against a brick wall trying to solve a really tricky problem for a client. In the end, I spoke to my manager about it. He came up with an ingenious solution – one I wished I had thought of myself.

I asked my manager – this is a person who I respect and continue to speak with occasionally – how he went about coming up with that specific solution. I wanted to know what I should be doing differently next time around.

He told me that he’d actually come up with his solution while he was shaving in the morning.

Why wasn’t I thinking about innovative approaches to solving interesting professional problems while shaving?

Reflection

I clearly treated my work at Digitas all those 20 years ago as ‘a job’.

I wasn’t treating my time there as ‘a career’.

And that actually makes sense. Because I found myself at Digitas by accident.

See, back then in 1999, barely two years out of school, I just wanted to make more money to pay the bills, and make more than the $35,000 a year that I was getting paid as a Data Scientist with Charles River Associates.

So I went to a job fair on a whim. Several weeks later, I started at Digitas doing digital marketing. All I cared about is that the $45,000 Digitas gave me was more. More money for a nicer rental, or better drinks in a bar. So I took the job.

I didn’t understand back then that Digitas was starting to ride the wave in digital, where ad budgets grew from 1% in 1999 to 65% today. I didn’t understand that as long as I applied myself, I could ride that tsunami wave of 65x growth for the duration of my career.

I wasn’t seeing the big picture.

That’s why I treated my time at Digitas as ‘a job’. That’s why I wasn’t curious enough, obsessed enough, or willing enough to get into answering hard questions – including when I was shaving in the morning. I did my work at work. When I wasn’t at work I was thinking about other stuff. Or nothing at all.

Had I understood those 20 something years ago, what huge growth opportunities (emotional, professional and financial) digital marketing would offer me, I may even have come up with that great idea, instead of my boss.

When I went to work and just put in the time to get paid I was simply doing a job. But what would have made it a career?

It would have been a career had I been constantly pushing myself. Driving myself to get out of my Comfort Zone, to learn new skills, and to create more Value:

References

This is one of the clearest definitions of the difference between a job and a career:

“At its simplest, a job can be defined as a specific task or set of tasks performed in exchange for compensation.

“A career, on the other hand, implies a long-term professional journey. Careers usually involve a series of jobs in a particular field that collectively contribute to personal growth, skill development and progression towards higher roles or responsibilities.”

So a job is something you do for money. You sell your time for cash. And then when that time is over, you’re ‘off the meter’ and you stop thinking about your job. You get on with what really matters to you.

If you’d like to discuss your career journey with me one-to-one, please feel free to email me at Greg@moveupfaster.me or message me on LinkedIn.

Thank you for reading.

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