Excellent at your job and lost about your career?
If you’re excellent at your job and lost about your career, you are in very good company.
If you’re excellent at your job and lost about your career, you are in very good company.
In case you think that you’re the only one, you’re not. Here are some examples I found online. Let’s start with the super famous (which I hate to do because most of us are not famous) but there are some astonishing examples:
Julia Child: Worked in Intelligence during WWII (OSS) handling highly classified documents. Took years to discover that her real calling involved cooking. She was no doubt good at what she was doing (check her accomplishments on Wikipedia) but not close to becoming a national icon. It was when she started to cook (she took classes in Paris because she loved French food) that she started to build a real sense of what she wanted to do.
Ina Garten: Worked in the White House (OMB) analyzing nuclear-energy policy. She found it boring and bought a specialty-food shop, and eventually became the Barefoot Contessa. Working in OMB at the White House was no small feat and many would have considered this as the ultimate place to be, but her career took a astonishing pivot when she bought a small store called Barefoot Contessa and began to cook.
Michael Jordan: Retired after several championships, because of lost desire as well as physical and mental exhaustion, then pursued his father’s dream of professional baseball. It’s accurate to say that his supreme competence and excellence did not protect him from uncertainty about what to do next. It is difficult to understand how someone as supremely talented as Michael Jordan could be confused as to what to do next, but he did go through a genuinely lost period.
Buzz Aldrin: After Apollo 11, Buzz Aldrin genuinely struggled with what came next, as well as falling into clinical depression and alcoholism. His autobiographies discuss his experiences in great detail. The “walked on the moon and still didn’t know what came next” formulation is fair. Aldrin’s achievement was second to none and yet, he couldn’t find his footing after his return.
Sir Brian Harold May: Was in a Ph.D. program in astrophysics, which he abandoned to join Queen (as a lead guitarist and back up vocalist). Then thirty years later, he returned to finish his Ph.D. Apparently being a global phenomena and immensely rich while giving magnificent performances can still leave a unfulfilled drive inside you... which he completed by going back to university.
I’m not saying all of the above were lost, but they definitely went through phases where they were not sure about what came afterwards. Despite the enormous achievements, some were genuinely at a loss about what to do next. Some found their footing by going to a different career. Some did not (Buzz Aldrin, Michael Jordan) find their footing at all. For the rest of us, successful careers that look strategically "impeccable" from the outside look that way only after we remove the confusion, the uncertainty, the low moments, the dead ends, and the seriously questionable middle chapters.
Moving away from the famous celebrities (ChatGPT got most of the images right, although Buzz isn't exact) towards the rest of us - there are really two important questions:
Can you do the work?
Is this the work?
Performance reviews, promotions, and raises only answer the first one.
These do not help answer the question whether this is indeed the work.
Most people build their careers the way you would build a five-year plan: pick a direction or job, work hard, adjust when something goes wrong. The problem is that "adjust when something breaks" usually means adjusting the plan - a new title, a new company, a new industry - without touching the very big thing underneath it.
The role that looked right on paper turns out to drain you. The promotion you fought for does not fit how you actually like to work. Five years in, you've built a résumé full of things you're demonstrably good at, and you still can't answer the question of whether any of it is right for you.
The more you think, the more lost you get and it becomes impossible to think anymore.
Skill tells you what you can do. It doesn't tell you what to do next.
This is where most career advice fails people. It optimizes the wrong things - helps you get better at interviewing, negotiating, networking — all useful, none of it addressing the actual bottleneck, which is that you don't have a clear read on your own strengths, your own drains, or the patterns you keep repeating. So how do you find out what you excel in and what you want to do?
How do you find out when you don't know what you're good at?
Nobody sits down, introspects hard enough, and discovers a hidden talent through sheer effort of will.
If they could, Ina Garten would have figured out the food thing at OMB instead of years later. So would Julia Child. Prediction needs signals and if the signal doesn't exist because you've never done THAT thing, then there's nothing for any model to find. No algorithm was going to look at Buzz Aldrin's flight logs and conclude "this man should write memoirs about depression and recovery." No algorithm would look at Brian May's physics coursework and say "guitar, actually" then, thirty years later, say "now finish the PhD." No algorithm would've looked at Michael Jordan's stat sheet and steered him toward baseball, or away from it.
These weren't failures of data.
There was no data.
That's a serious limitation. Only a person who studies you and your life and your choices very, very carefully can help you here and anyone implying that a person can just "figure it out" your hidden calling from the outside is selling you something that doesn't exist yet. And no, AI can't solve this for you either - you can't feed a chatbot your resume and expect it to say that you're secretly better suited to something you've never tried.
That's a real limitation, not a marketing gimmick.
Anyone selling you certainty is selling you something false.
What does work is indirect evidence - which is often missed. What do I mean by that? I mean the stuff sitting in your own history that you never filed under "talent" because it didn't look like your job title. You organized every event in your friend group since you were sixteen and never thought of it as a skill. You're the person everyone calls when a project is falling apart, and you've never asked why it's always you.
More importantly, nobody handed you a performance review for any of it, so it never registered as an ability, but that's exactly backwards. The stuff you did before anyone was paying you or measuring you is often the most honest data you have, precisely because you weren't optimizing for how it appeared to others. It was a pattern that you never noticed and patterns, unlike hidden talents waiting to be predicted, are actually findable - if you know to go looking for them, and if something forces you to look back.
Julia loved French food. She couldn't stop thinking about it. Ina was always organizing dinner parties and calling people over.
Some may call them passions. That may well be true. But isn't that obvious only in hindsight?
Plus, Julia and Ina didn't have to worry about a living - if I remember right.
For the rest of us, I claim it to be something else.
Those are actually patterns.
Note: You can tell - I’m not a ‘Follow your passion’ advocate. If you remember, there was a time when everyone talked about following your passion (Steve Jobs, Warren Buffett). Then it changed over the next few years and no one thought it was a good idea. If you love your job and that's what you are truly passionate about and want to get better at it - all power to you. There is merit to both sides of the argument:
The argument for following your passion:
Interest sustains extraordinary effort: If you genuinely care about something, you are more willing to tolerate repetition, setbacks, obscurity and the long period before competence becomes visible. Jobs argued loving the work helped him begin again after being pushed out of Apple. His advice was to keep looking for work you love and not settle. Jobs paired love with great work, not just enjoyment. There is a lot of truth in what he was saying - especially as he knew he didn’t have long to live.
Passion protects against living someone else’s definition of success: People can become extremely competent in a career chosen for the wrong reasons like (say) prestige, security and family approval, and eventually realize that the achievement feels strangely unrelated to them. This is far more common than we know and realize. Worse, the realization happens too late and at that point it is hard to switch roles.
The argument against following your passion
Many people have no pre-existing passion. Telling someone to “follow your passion” assumes they already possess one clear, stable calling. Many people don’t. Most people don’t… this could be because they were never clear, never encouraged, never had the exposure… a variety of reasons, to be honest.
Passion is not evidence of ability or markets or value: You can love singing without possessing an extraordinary voice. The market does not pay for the intensity of your feelings. It pays for value created. Moreover, people have families, restrictions, debt, and/or limited financial means. Passion can confuse people into thinking markets will pay when the reality is that they just won’t. Loving the problem (the product) does not in any way establish customer urgency, or that customers will change behavior or will pay. Passion does not create demand ever.
To my mind, the best advice is neither “follow your passion” nor “ignore it.”
Truth lies somewhere between the two.
Most people do not know their passions, but they almost always display patterns.
So, our simple suggestion is just that: whether or not you can claim a lofty passion - you should know your patterns.
I used to pore over books on the solar system and the universe as a child, fascinated by the distances, but I never realized when it came to choosing a career. I was ten, but I remember those moments clearly. Years later, I wondered - why hadn't I seen those patterns? How can someone spend hours on her stomach on the floor, with books spread out in front - staring at how distant Pluto was, how gigantic Jupiter was, and how beautiful Saturn's rings were? Was it because I was so busy reading those books that I didn't realize how much time I was spending reading those books?
By the time I realized, it was too late to change.
I'm not asking you to quit your job. That is not what this post is about at all.
However, you should know where you can place yourself so you are most likely to shine.
That's the piece most people skip, because it's harder to do. It takes thinking. It takes admitting difficult truths.
Examine your patterns - especially the current ones. From your last job, last title, last role, last task. If those don't give enough clarity, go back in time. It's a clearer starting point - your strengths, your drains, your blind spots, named specifically enough that you can actually act on them. The things you used to like. The work that paid well, but exhausted you. The work that doesn't pay, but you flow in. People who irritate you. People you admire. People you find difficult. Know it all. See yourself clearly. So when you discuss problems with colleagues or projects or management, the solutions will not be as fundamentally difficult as a mismatch or a misfit (which others will know but you might be blind to it), but more along the lines of slight tweaks and a quick conversation. So when you choose a project you know exactly what strengths you will use, when you choose a new job or a role, you know why you will succeed in it. You want to know your blind spots as soon as you can, because others can see your blind spots very easily - the way you can see theirs. You need to know them before the review. You need to know them so you can manage them. You don't want to be the last one to find out.
So, know your patterns. Your blind spots. Your strengths. Your weaknesses. That's the non-negotiable foundational work.
It's the very piece that determines whether the next plan holds up any better than the last one.
You can be excellent at your job and completely lost about your career.
