On picking your thing and doing it for a decade

When I was in my twenties, I lived in a different place every year. For students, there is always accommodation to vacate and a room in a shared house to find, and since I spent most of that decade as a student, this was my lifestyle. I was not well suited to it. I dreamed of living somewhere with clutter – yes, clutter! – as a byproduct of the luxury of not having to pack my things and be uprooted every twelve months. The saying ‘a rolling stone gathers no moss’ is something I liked to quote back then, since I felt it so keenly. As soon as I got my own house, I got busy gathering moss. (It is now very cluttered here, and I dream of vast, minimalist interiors.)

“The value of your experience to others lies in the things that didn’t work as well as in those that did. This is called expertise.”

There is another kind of moss-gathering, to which I paid less attention. When I imagined a rolling stone, it was always in a precipitous fall down a steep hill: the task was to stop it from falling off into the abyss. It didn’t occur to me that a stone rolling about in a three-inch radius would be just as bare. You could stay in one place and rattle from job to job, from plan to plan, not seeing anything to fruition. Constancy in what we do does for our working lives what living in the same place does for our sense of community. This idea, most notably popularised as Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000-hour rule, is best summed up in an Instagram post I came across recently: ‘Pick your thing. Then do it for a decade.’

People do more and more of this nowadays: each successive generation since the Baby Boomers has changed jobs more frequently. I have not one, but two friends who abandoned the humanities in their late twenties and retrained as medical doctors (both are now successful physicians). I have another friend who did a conversion course in his mid-thirties and is fast catching up with his peers in the field. It’s heartening that we all have such stories to tell. If what you do feels like being shackled by the ankle, you’re fortunate to live in a time that allows you to break free.

But while the stigma of job-hopping may be largely gone, the costs are still there. Celebrations of career flexibility and innovation in the media – the idea that we should be constantly ‘reinventing’ ourselves to suit the needs of the moment – is a confetti cloud that obscures the very real benefits of doing the opposite: remaining steadfast in spite of life’s ups and downs.

The benefits of sticking to one thing:

You grow in expertise

You can’t help it: simply by doing something again and again, you acquire experience, whether you do it well or badly. Naturally, you get much better with repetition, but the value of your experience to others lies in the things that didn’t work as well as in those that did. This is called expertise.

You grow in confidence

You may be a blushing violet when you start out, but that same process of repetition will make you familiar with the people and processes you have to deal with. The familiarity is a huge bonus: it makes you more efficient and a sensitive team player, and it enables you to anticipate future developments – all confidence-boosters that can only be gained through time.

You grow a network

Every time you leave a course/placement/internship/job, you say a fond goodbye to your favourite people in it and promise firmly to keep in touch. But unless you stay in the same field, you grow apart, because you won’t be bumping into each other at conferences or reaching out to each other for professional advice. Sticking to one thing means that the connections you make remain valuable, which helps to keep them active – so if you’re ever in need, there’s a much greater number of people to turn to.

You can carve out a niche

The curious thing about the trend of work flexibility is that it is not accompanied by a rise in the value of generalist approaches: on the contrary, we value specialists more than ever, and employers demand increasingly narrow training and experience. If you spend a long time doing something, you will gravitate naturally towards a part of it that allows your talents to shine. There is no substitute for authority that comes from experience, and people know this when they seek information and guidance.

You develop a vision for your sector

They say that, as a trainee teacher, you are most concerned with the question, ‘Am I a good teacher?’, but as time goes on, your focus shifts to, ‘Are the students learning?’ When we are new to something, we are mostly obsessed with our own place in it, and it takes time to develop a broader view of the sector and its challenges, to distinguish between issues that are endemic to the field and those that are particular to your organisation. The breadth and depth of such practical knowledge is what prepares you for leadership.

Your income grows, too

When you job-hop, it’s easy to take a pay cut for a more rewarding position and tell yourself it’s temporary. But the cumulative financial losses can be significant if you take into account the slower rate of growth you are committing to, not to mention things like pension contributions. More simply, changing positions within your specialism is more likely to be viewed as an ‘upwards’ move and come with a pay rise, while shifting to a different kind of work will be perceived as a ‘sideways’ move, in which you are in danger of being labelled a semi-novice and your pay to be lowered accordingly.

“Hearing disparaging things from others is irrelevant: not because they’re not qualified to judge, but because, by definition, sticking with something will eventually make you good at it.”

When you realise how much is at stake in choosing work or study for the long haul, the quest is all the more daunting. This is rendered more difficult by the fact that your brain plays games with you. My brain liked to tell me that my thing was just out of reach, but it would be my next stop. I would devour books on a subject I wasn’t studying, but each subject would lose its sheen once I became its ‘official’ student. This pattern reproduced itself with jobs. The anxiety of coming face-to-face with something, not just giving it a flirtatious sideways glance, was at times almost unbearable. Yet I can’t help thinking that, had I not mistaken being anxious for being unsuitable, I could have had satisfying careers in any of those subjects.

Other people’s ideas can also create confusion when picking ‘your thing’. Like everyone telling you that you’re very good at something and that you should do it for a living, even though you’re not feeling the vibe. By the same token, hearing disparaging things from others is irrelevant: not because they’re not qualified to judge, but because, by definition, sticking with something will eventually make you good at it. You may never become outstanding, but if you know you enjoy the process, isn’t that a worthy way of spending your life?

We are not stones and won’t be rolling around forever, so the ‘pick’ in ‘pick your thing’ is not accidental. Unlike ‘find’, it implies a degree of settling, a conscious choice undeterred by the closing of alternative possibilities. Beware of approaching your choice of profession with the ideals of romantic love: expectations in both cases usually turn out to have been exaggerated. The most dangerous rumour you can believe about your ideal work is that it won’t feel like work at all. It will feel like work, and plenty. Procrastination will still follow you around. At times, you will be bored and tempted to open some moronic app on your phone. But once the work is done, it will leave you feeling re-energised, not emptied out, and not unhappy about the prospect of doing more.

That’s how you’ll know.