Early in your career, the idea of having security in your finances and your ability to earn an income is very hard to imagine. After twenty or more years living at a safe distance from the need to provide for yourself, you are thrust into a scary and hard marketplace and can’t even conceptualize what it be like to feel confident in that environment.
You have no skills, few connections, and a degree that it turns out won’t actually help you all that much. You feel like a small mouse that could be squished by any passing object.
From this perspective, it is hard to imagine that after only a few years of diligent work you could be in a position to confidently navigate the marketplace.
That you, with no skills and no savings, could develop a skill that is in high demand make yourself a valuable contributor to a business and save enough money to support yourself and have security for the long-term.
As a result, many people bail out on the way. They work briefly and then retreat back to the imagined safety of further credentials. They look for public jobs with retirement plans. Or decide against pursuing a specific career altogether and go through a never-ending process of moving on to the next thing.
The only true pathway through the dark and scary start to your career is to find something specific and stick with it. To get good enough at one thing that others value and to stay with it long enough that others trust your ability to create value in a similar way in the future.
To get to the peaceful meadow of a confident professional there is no other path than moving straight through the anxiety-inducing dark forest of incompetence
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