We are nearly halfway through the year and I want to remind you that you are, in fact, allowed to reinvent yourself and your career as often as you want.

 

There really is no 1 way to be “successful” anymore. With the rise of social channels, disruptive industries, and the diversity of marketing strategies, there are countless ways you can achieve the life and success you dream of having.

 

Old school advice no longer applies and today we are breaking down 3 false stereotypes and their current day truth:

 

This is no longer the era of staying at one job forever

 

The average time spent at a job is 3-4 years now. There used to be a little more incentive to stay at your job forever: when you could retire & get a pension. But, that is no longer the case when it is rare to find a job that offers a pension. Across all my corporate clients, I might have seen 2 that grandfathered a few people into a pension plan that they had been promised decades earlier. That benefit was not available to anyone else.

 

Nowadays, you should really only stay at a job if it is growing and enhancing your career and you are still able to positively contribute to their growth as well. It should be a mutually beneficial relationship.

 

Your career doesn’t have to be related to your college major

 

For today’s argument, let’s put aside the exorbitant cost of college tuition and focus on the life value. The value of college is in giving you a well rounded education, teaching you about responsibility, holding yourself accountable to commitments, the results of hard work, etc… But, you can absolutely study accounting and work in marketing, or study marketing and choose to go into management consulting.

 

The choice truly is yours and is usually based on a combination of timing, luck, and how good you are at positioning yourself for different opportunities.

 

You can take time off and come right back to your career

 

Burnout is very real and, for many people, it starts very early on in your career. If you are working in a high pressure, high productivity environment… there is a high likelihood you are unable to put any distance between yourself and your job. Everyone has a smartphone and you are usually expected to answer emails and calls at all times of day and night. The very people who think young professionals can’t be burned out, are the ones causing the burnout. Your boss might be able to take vacations because they know they have full control over 10-15 hours of your day… sometimes more & often including weekends.

 

It has become a necessity to take time off and decompress. Give yourself the mental and physical space to rethink your career, what is important to you and where you want to go next.

 

Ultimately everything will require hard work, consistency and the luck of timing. When you consider that you will most likely have a decades old career, you also realize that you have plenty of time to reinvent, redefine, start something new, live in a different country… and even change your mind again.