I’ve been doing a lot of self-reflection on my career lately, and I wanted to compile some of those thoughts here for you, to hopefully inspire you to reach for new heights in your own careers. I’ll also share with you my career philosophies and some of my own personal goals that I developed while coming up with this framework as examples. Let’s get right to it.

Define Your Career

Before we embark on this story, let’s get clear on what your career is. Dictionary.com’s definition focuses on a career being a single path one takes through life, but I feel this definition is incomplete in the 21st century, the century of the side-hustle. I believe your career is the sum of all the productive output of your life: your job(s), side hustles, businesses, investments, etc.

Define Your Goals: The Five Pillars

This framework revolves around establishing your needs and finding a balance between Income, Passion, Expertise, Time, and Relationships. The first step is simply defining what’s important to you and what isn’t — there should really be two, at most three, of these things that are the truly important ones for you specifically, and you’re going to need to be very honest with yourself here. I implore you to take out a piece of paper or a notes app to record your own answers for each of these pillars.

1. Income: How much money do you want to make and how important is it to make that much or more? Keep in mind what money does for you, specifically (some people want a fast car, some want a nice house, some want to travel a lot, some want financial freedom, etc). Also certain income thresholds are easier for some careers than for others, so calibrate according to your career path(s).
2. Passion: How much of your passions do you want to channel into your work? Most people say they want to be able to work on things that they’re passionate about, but is it really that important to you? Think carefully about this one.
3. Expertise: Developing expertise is something that can bring you a lot of self-worth and confidence. How important is it to you that you be an expert in whatever you do?
4. Time: How much (or rather how little) do you want to work? Kinda straight-forward.
5. Relationships: What kind of people do you want to be surrounded by? How can your career contribute to helping you make connections with the kinds of people you’d like to know?

When you look through these pillars and answer them for yourselves, think in the nearish term. While it’s good to also think about the long-term, right now, we’re making a plan for the near future of your career. To give you a more specific example, I’ve ranked my career needs from highest to lowest.

1. Passion: I’m a creator, and what I mean by that is that I have a deep need to create things. There is a creative energy inside of me that I constantly need to give an outlet to, or I will go crazy. It’s also probably tied a little too closely to my self-worth, but you’re not my therapist. So needless to say that, for me, I have a lot of passion that I need to put into my career somewhere.
2. Relationships: I very much want to meet a lot of interesting people: comedians, writers, directors, game designers, actors, crypto developers, investors, etc. I’m aiming high here, so I will want to obviously plan my career in such a way that I might run into these kinds of people.
3. Income: At this time, my target income is around $150,000/year. It’s enough to fulfill all my needs and leave me with a lot left over for investing in myself and my business.
4. Time: I like to maximize my efficiency while working such that I can get more done in less time and have more time left over for everything else while still getting a lot done. I may work anywhere from 4 to 9ish hours in a day, 6 days a week. That’s the kind of time I would like to maintain.
5. Expertise: Becoming well-known as an expert in my craft(s) is something that’s not at the top of my list. Being an expert is really cool, and I do enjoy it whenever people come to me for my expertise, but what really drives me is being known for my perspective and high-level view of things. I would ultimately like to delegate the specifics and be able to focus on the macro.

Make Your Plan

Once you’ve defined your goals and prioritized them, it’s time to do something about it. The first step is to assess where you are today and see where it matches and where it doesn’t with your goals.

Assessing My Career Today

I’m going to list out how my career currently stacks up against those five pillars and my goals. When you do this for yourself, there will likely be some mismatches (just like me), but that is totally normal and simply gives you something to work on.

1. Expertise. My career today relies a lot on my expertise, from my day job as a Software Engineer to starting up my business which takes a lot of my hard skills (like programming, writing, designing, etc.). This is more than I would like ultimately, but this is also, to a large extent, necessary during this stage of my career.
2. Time. Right now, my career allows me a fairly nice work schedule. My day job doesn’t bleed into my personal time, and at the stage I’m in, I can more or less work at my own pace on my business.
3. Passion. I’m able to put my passions into my entrepreneurial activities, but I can’t really say the same about my day job. That’s okay for now, but eventually this’ll have to change.
4. Income. I’m definitely not making $150,000 yet. I do fine, have money left over each month that I can deploy for my business and/or into crypto investments, but I would like to make more to accelerate my progress.
5. Relationships. Right now, my career doesn’t really expose me to the kinds of people I want to meet. I do get to work with some really cool people that I really like and feel lucky to know, but I’m not on a path to meet many other creators, at least not yet.

Mapping the Differences and Areas of Opportunity

So now, based on your answers to the above two questions, you should have some mismatches in your goals and current state of your career. These represent areas where you can make changes in your career to help you get closer to where you want to be.

So for my goals, there are clearly three major areas for improvement: Expertise, Relationships, and Passion. As I mentioned, my career today relies quite heavily on my expertise and hard skills, and to some extent, that’s just going to be how it is for the time being. But this is an area that I want to address as I go on. I want to make an effort to work with partners, to be able to delegate some things to others. This can be challenging for me, personally, to feel worthy of other people’s work on my objectives, but it’s something I’m working on.

As far as relationships go, this is also something I have to work on. As I create more things and build out this career I’m pursuing as a creator, I will be putting myself on a path to meet the kinds of people I dream of meeting (and maybe even working with). While I cherish the people I get to work with today for many reasons, I want to expand my horizons further and meet more people who are like me.

And finally, I do get ample opportunities to inject my passions into my entrepreneurial work, and as I continue to develop this new career path for myself, these opportunities will only grow. But, once I get the opportunity to leave my day job for good, those opportunities will multiply even further, finally propelling it to the top of my list where it belongs.

Overall, I’m feeling good about my career. I can envision how it will evolve over time and how I can get closer to my goals, and that’s in part due to going through this exercise with myself (albeit before I organized it into the specific pillars you see in this story). I want you to feel this kind of confidence in your own career too, so if you haven’t already, take out a pen and paper or a notes app and run through this exercise with me. You can thank me in the comments.

Bonus Points: Write a Mission Statement

If you want to take this exercise even further, take your goals and turn them into a one or two paragraph Mission Statement. I won’t share mine here, as I believe this particular thing should be personal (partly so that you can adjust it as you keep going and your goals and plans inevitably change). But I found this exercise to be really powerful and useful.

I read a story here on Medium several years ago that helped me organize those kinds of goals, and I’m going to link it here. If you want to take the exercise in this story even further, this story helps you develop your own personal Theme and Mission Statement.

As I am not a registered fiduciary agent, none of my advice is legally binding in any way, and choosing to follow or not follow it is a responsibility that lies squarely on your shoulders. Crypto is a volatile market, and a significant crash in values is a normal event in this space, just as a significant increase in values is. Treat the market as an irrational actor (which is what it is), buy the proverbial dip when possible, take some profits along the way, and enjoy the ride.