by Serguey Shinder
Ten years ago I would have told you, with real confidence, exactly what my job would look like today. I had a clear picture of the trajectory, the skills that would matter, the shape of a career in this field. I was wrong about almost all of it, not at the edges but at the centre. The things I was certain were permanent turned out to be the things that moved most.
What strikes me looking back is not that I failed to predict the future. Nobody does that well. It is how much of my planning had been built on the assumption that the ground would hold still. I had treated the current shape of the work as a fixed landscape to navigate, when it was really a wave I happened to be standing on, already moving under me even as I drew my careful maps.
The specific predictions do not embarrass me much. Everyone gets those wrong. What I have had to sit with is the deeper mistake, which was wanting certainty at all. I had craved a stable picture of the future because a stable picture is comfortable, because it lets you feel that effort compounds toward a known destination. And that craving had made me brittle, over-invested in a version of the work that was never promised to last.
I have watched people navigate this same change in two very different ways. Some held tight to what they knew, treating each shift as a threat to be resisted, and the resistance aged them faster than the years did. Others held their knowledge more loosely, curious rather than defensive, and the same changes that diminished the first group seemed to feed the second. The difference was never talent. It was the grip.
So I have tried to change what I plan for. Not the specifics, which I have given up predicting, but the posture. I no longer build my sense of security on knowing what comes next, because I have been wrong too many times to trust that knowing. I build it instead on the belief that I can meet what comes, whatever it is, by staying curious and willing to be a beginner again.
That is a less comfortable foundation than certainty. It does not offer the pleasure of a clear five-year picture. But it has the advantage of being true, and truth, I have decided, is a better thing to stand on than comfort, especially when the ground is moving.
If there is one thing I would tell my younger self, drawing his confident maps, it is this. The maps are not the point. The point is to become the kind of person who is not undone when the territory changes, because it will, sooner and more completely than you can imagine. Everything you are certain about is the thing to hold most lightly.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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