Don’t Plan Your Career Too Much in Advance. Follow These 3 Steps Instead!

Conventional wisdom tells you to map out your career plan with concrete details. I like the advice of contrarians Sheryl Sandberg and Wharton Professor Adam Grant, who advise you not plan your career too much in advance — there’s so much you don’t know upfront, and technology is constantly changing! (In my case, before law school, I thought I would be a constitutional lawyer … until I took Con Law. I joined WSGR to be an IP litigator, but during the dotcom boom, corporate law became more interesting … until I went in-house and enjoyed tech trans the most when e-commerce and open source were taking off.)

Adam Grant and Sheryl Sandberg suggest these 3 steps in lieu of a complex career plan:

1. Ask yourself what skills you want to learn and from whom you want to learn from.
2. Join the employer that’s most likely to get you those skills from the people you’re interested in.
3. Stay until you are no longer learning.

Obviously, don’t jump around. Instead, keep a long-term goal in mind as you embark on your career.