I spent most of my 20s as a resident advisor, hanging out with college students who were trying to talk themselves into things they didn’t really want to do. “Oh, I’d love to [build an orphanage/design a better sneaker/reform the immigration system], but I know that’s unrealistic, so I should probably just go work for AirBnB.” I wish I would have told them: what’s unrealistic is thinking that you can reshape your desires to be more convenient, as if your soul is made of Silly Putty. — Adam Mastroianni
In a way, being a career coach isn’t so different from being a lawyer. Clients don’t come to me if they can help it. They’d prefer to be happy where they are, and to keep doing what they’ve been doing: take the promotion, switch firms, say yes to the opportunity that fell into their lap. They reach out to me because they have a feeling they can’t ignore. The feeling says that staying where they are or climbing the next rung up the ladder is going to hurt some part of them that matters. It’s usually some part of them they find inconvenient or unprofessional or poorly developed or otherwise undesirable. The work we do together involves imagining a way forward where that part has space to breathe and grow, too.
I like Adam Mastroianni’s thinking and writing enough to pay for a Substack subscription, which I don’t do for very many people. And he’s right that desires, ignored, don’t go away. But maybe Silly Putty and souls at work aren’t so different. You can get stretched very thin, and still recover. Your surroundings can leave a mark on you, but that imprint isn’t permanent. There’s no one way you have to be. You get to change.
