Overlooking Important Lessons

When it comes to early professional life and starting a career, many of the most important skills/lessons are incredibly easy to overlook.

Learning how to work with people, learning how to communicate on a professional level, learning how to productively disagree and voice your opinion, and so many other hard to capture lessons come up in the first couple years of your career.

But when people look back at those formative years of their careers, they often overlook those lessons.

Because the lessons at this stage become part of who you are and feel like common sense, you almost forget what it was like to not know them and you forget a lot of the resistance you had to overcome to get where you are.

But this ease of overlooking creates a challenge for the young professional. First, it is easy to turn down valuable opportunities because you miss how valuable they will be. Second, it is easy to give up on a valuable opportunity because on a surface level it doesn’t seem to be leading directly where you want to go.

One of the big secrets of a successful life is the need to trust the process. In many areas, we won’t be able to see the destination, but we need to have enough self-knowledge and grit to stick to our direction anyways.

Only by pushing through initial resistance and learning how to stick with hard things do we give ourselves a chance to learn lessons we need to learn and find the opportunities that will take us to our next career steps.