Most of us were
taught to plan a career the way you plan a wedding. Pick the date, book the
hall, and hope nothing changes.
Then life
happens. The industry shifts, the children grow, and the job we trained ten
years for starts to feel like a coat that no longer fits. Many women keep
wearing that coat for years, because the alternative, quitting and starting
from zero, feels far too risky.
This month I want
to offer a different way to think about it, borrowed from an unlikely place:
Silicon Valley.
In The Lean
Startup, entrepreneur Eric Ries set out to understand why so many new
companies fail. His answer surprised people. Most startups don’t fail because
the founders are lazy or the idea is bad. They fail because they spend months,
sometimes years, polishing something perfect before checking whether anyone
actually wants it.
Ries proposes
another approach. Build a small, simple version first (he calls it a minimum
viable product). Put it in front of real people. Measure what happens, learn
from it, and then decide: do you keep going in the same direction, or do you
pivot? Build, measure, learn, and repeat.
One line from the
book has stayed with me: “The only way to win is to learn faster than
anyone else.”
I’ve thought
about this a lot in relation to careers, and especially women’s careers. We
tend to treat a career change as one enormous, irreversible decision. Either I
stay at the bank, or I leave and open a bakery. Either I go back to school at
forty-five, or I don’t.
Ries would ask a
simpler question. What is the smallest experiment that would tell you something
true?
Before you open
the bakery, sell cakes to three offices on a Friday. Before you enroll in a
two-year program, take one evening course and see if you still look forward to
it in week six. Before you announce a new business, offer the service to five
people and ask them, honestly, whether they would pay for it.
None of this is
glamorous. That’s the point. Small tests are cheap, and they replace fear with
information. You stop arguing with yourself at 2 a.m. and start collecting
evidence.
And the word
“pivot” deserves rescuing. In Ries’s language, a pivot is simply a change of
direction based on what you learned. Some of the most successful companies in
the world ended up very far from where they started. So did many of the most
interesting women I know.
Life
Application
1.
Write down your hypothesis. “I believe I would be happier, and earn well,
doing ___.” Treat it as a guess, not a vow.
2.
Design one small experiment you can run within 30 days. A side project, a
weekend course, a coffee with someone who already does the work.
3.
Decide in advance what you’ll measure. Your energy?
Income? Whether anyone said yes? Feelings matter, but write down facts as well.
4.
Review honestly at the end of the month. Then choose:
persevere, adjust, or pivot.
5.
Run the next test. A career built this way grows one tested step at
a time.
Lets
look at a real life example. Consider a woman, I’ll call her Marina, who worked
as an accountant for nineteen years and always loved interior design. For a
long time her plan was “someday.” Someday she would quit. Someday she would get
the certificate.
Instead of
quitting, she offered to redesign a friend’s living room for free, in exchange
for honest feedback and photos. Then a second room, for a small fee. Within six
months she had a portfolio, four paying clients, and one important discovery:
she loved the design work and hated sourcing furniture. So she adjusted. Today
she consults on layout and color only, and keeps two accounting clients for
stability.
She didn’t leap.
She tested her way across.
Your career doesn’t need a perfect plan. It needs a first small step, and the honesty to look at what happened. Build. Measure. Learn. And let yourself pivot without shame.
