Leda Writes: The Venn diagram of doom

Every Thursday, Leda Glyptis, 11:FS Chief of Staff creates #LedaWrites. This week she turns her attention to careers, indecision and the Venn diagram of doom.

It doesn’t matter what decision you’re making about your career. Each one you make is emotional. Your gut points you in a certain direction, then your brain fits logic around it. It’s a great strategy when it works well, but when it doesn’t you’ll stay up at night trying to justify what your heart wants.

That’s ok. It’s called being human. Taming your heart isn’t easy, but the Venn diagram of doom will help it make decisions that your brain can handle. It breaks down into three simple circles.

What should I choose?

Career choices can be binary, stay or leave. They can also be open-ended, where no options are available and by the same token all options are available and everything is possible. But, there’s no way it can all happen at once, so what should you choose?

No matter the choices available, there is no ‘right thing’ only what is right for you next.

What are you good at?

Ask yourself what you’re really good at. Be honest with yourself, even if you struggle to articulate it without sounding egotistical.

Every job has its drawbacks, things that’ll cause stress, heartache and parts that you’ll just hate so much. So, take a minute and ask yourself what you like doing at work. Find out where what you enjoy doing at work and what you’re good at overlap.

Where do you think your chosen market is going?

Where do you think the market will be, where the profit is, where companies will be focused on is in five years time. There’s never any certainty, but where do you think your chosen market will be in that time? And crucially, how much of what you’re good at and what you like doing will it need.

Doom and gloom

Why doom?

Because none of this takes you where you think it will. Not in terms of the decisions, but the reasoning.

Doom is the emotion you’ll embrace when you start to see that your personality might be a greater asset to your career than 25 years of subject matter expertise. That could be what helps you pivot away from what you’re good at to what you believe will still be marketable in five years’ time. You’ll feel doom. Then you’ll laugh because now you have a plan you believe in.

Read the whole story at Fintech Futures.