If you get to a certain stage of your career, and you’re lucky, young people will start asking this simple, but devastating question: how did you do it? (And, really, they’re asking how they can do it). If you’re honest with yourself and you try to give a really useful answer, you’ll quickly come to realize that your career, like everyone’s, is full of random changes, non-obvious choices that turned out to be important, and just plain luck. So it doesn’t generalize - no one can follow someone else’s path.
You can’t step in the same river twice, but we navigate rivers, don’t we? So there has to be some answer to this puzzle. That answer is impact. Having a lot of impact in whatever you are doing, however you define impact, is usually what leads to long term success. All the better if that impact compounds somehow - building a business, or a reputation, or a practice that feeds on itself.
Ok, but how do we get to this idea of compounded impact? Impact can mean many things - it’s different for a programmer, a designer, or an artist. But it always comes from the same place - passion. Having passion for what you do, so that you’re obsessed with it, constantly want to get better at it, think about it all the time, is how you develop impact. It’s really important early on when you aren’t very skilled - passion keeps you coming back to it. And it’s important for the compounding effect. Passion keeps you investing and building.
It also leads to something really counter intuitive, sometimes. We have a mistaken tendency to equate “suffering” with “value added”. It can’t be work if it’s fun, right? It must be a struggle to “count” as work. But this is patently false - many of the highest performers have loved their work, and it’s the best place to be, mentally.
But it’s also kind of slippery - if you’re really good at something, and you have passion for it, it’s very easy to feel guilty that you are getting paid to do it. This connects to impostor syndrome too (we’ll talk about that soon) - it’s really easy to feel like “gee, I’m off track because work is fun and doesn’t seem hard, so it must not be valuable”. The right word for that, to quote Charlie Sheen, is “winning”. If you are good at something, it will often feel easy to you. That’s a great sign to look for that you’re actually on the right track - that’s something that’s a fit, that you have skills for, and that you are passionate about.
And that will lead to impact and a satisfying career.