Week Seven Discussion Board: The Future of Your Career
So when it comes to thinking about the future of work, I’m going to carry forward several key lessons from the past few weeks. The importance of honest, truly honest self-reflection. The simple rigor of the Pecha Kucha approach in crafting crisp, effective presentations and the kind of brevity necessary for busy audiences. And being more aware of the space between what I do and what I want, and how both frame who I am. The Pecha Kucha project in particular was a powerful reminder that visualizing the journey so far is something worth savoring, and a big contributor to wellness when it comes to one’s relationship with effort over time. I have greatly enjoyed being able to assemble a narrative visualizing what happened, and it motivates me to make more of these in the future. They are powerful, but they are also fun. I’ve also spent a lot of time thinking about what’s important at work. Dimensions of kindness, helpfulness, hard work, curiosity and effort are all showing up as patterns throughout my career, but strong indicators defining what’s important for what happens next.
The self-directed approach of unprompted reflection, the capacity to check-in with one’s relationship to work, and to be honest with what you think you see, has been greatly beneficial, and something I’d like to carry forward. But it’s also afforded me the space to understand that while I am currently in a place of peace and no longer restless about my career, I will always have the itch to be doing more of the wok outside of work which actually gets me up in the morning. And as the work landscape changes to accommodate elements such as artificial intelligence, knowing that change is the only constant, but positioning myself for the trends to come will serve me well. Sometimes I feel as if the world is accelerating in its ambiguity, and long for the simpler nostalgia of the past, especially one which was less digital and connected. Technology will come and go, just as we’re seeing with social media and how our phones age each year. But as generative agents become more pervasive, growth mindsets and knowing how to ask great questions will never go out of style.
A lot of how I think about grit and resilience, like Angela Duckworth explains, comes from effort. Spending time with a problem. Really sitting in it and giving it the effort and rigor it requires. It’s not the same thing as ‘powering through’, but it’s deliberately carving out the time to be able to spend more time with the work which is more meaningful and enjoyable. There will always be setbacks, and I’ve been through a lot of them over the years, but understanding that my work does not define me has been an important place of resilience at which to arrive. It enables me to do the kind of work I really want to do outside of the paid effort, and where completing a journey at Penn would be a great example. Persevering through a problem, and the rewards of coming out the other side are seldom not worth it.
My Vision:
Trends which excite me: Generative artificial intelligence, live streaming, personalized agents, space tourism, virtual reality and more immersive storytellng
Skills, qualities and mindset for thriving in this future: Growth mindset and applying design thinking to how one shows up at work, experimenting with products and platforms, being deeply curious about the future, not thinking of technology as ‘a young person’s game’, understanding how to effectively hire technology into your life to solve an actual problem, reminding oneself of how far things have come
Aspirations towards balance and fulfillment: Balancing the ‘paid work’ of a professional career with the creative and academic aspirations of a potential future in graduate studies. Both are fulfilling, but the creative and academic work is more exciting to me in the longer term.
Plans and preparations for navigating uncertainty: Embrace it all! Knowing what you can control and what you can’t, but also reminding oneself that life is not a rehearsal and that opportunity, especially in timies of uncertainty, is everywhere.
