Your Career Is A Narrative
Don’t lose the story for the plot
Lately I’ve been reading a lot about storytelling. Books like The Art of Memoir and Story; podcasts like Scriptnotes. And I’ve come to believe the problems many of us face in our careers are the same ones that storytellers face in creating riveting novels, movies, and television shows.
Plot vs. Story
Storytelling advice often emphasizes the difference between plot and story. In its simplest form, the difference between the two is the difference between the WHAT and the WHY. As the E.M. Forster quote goes, “‘The king died and then the queen died’ is a plot. ‘The king died and then the queen died of grief’ is a story.” (Okay, whoops, plot/story are actually flipped in E.M.’s quote, but he’s trying to make the same point that I am: that there’s a difference between incidence and causation.)
In my own career, I have often focused myopically on the plot. I have wanted to hit what I believed are the key beats for someone in my field, a steady progression of increasing titles and expanded responsibility. And I’m not alone: think about the doctor gunning for the prized residency, the professor for a tenure-track position. I have seen multiple friends from college follow identical paths from consulting to law school to prestigious judicial clerkships, only to have an existential crisis when they enter their preordained final act, the partner track at a white-shoe law firm.
It’s a cliché for a reason, that not-quite-midlife crisis so many of us have in our thirties, the blooming need to understand: What is this all for, anyway?! And it feels remarkably like the feeling I got when my novel stalled out around 30,000 words, despite rigorously mapping my plot to the beats laid out in Blake Snyder’s “Save the Cat” method.
In both cases, I was focusing on the what instead of the why, the plot instead of the story. If you don’t know what’s motivating you or your characters, eventually you will run out of gas; eventually you will grasp the brass ring and there will be nowhere left to go.
Unless you understand what’s really powering you, underneath the accolades.
Revising Your Story
Reading all these books about story felt like reading the most astute self-help books. (I read some actual self-help books, too.) I realized I had lost my why. I no longer knew what was driving me, just that I wanted to keep going. (“What do we want?” “Something!” “When do we want it?” “Now!”)
I knew that I had talents and affinities outside the lines of the “classic” communications professional, but I thought that embracing them would confuse the narrative. Turns out those weird little quirks ARE the narrative! Sometimes you have to get off the prewritten beats to find the actual story. (And I suspect the same will prove true for my sputtering novel; I’ll need to figure out why my protagonist keeps tugging away from the original plot I had in mind in order to find her story.)
I’ll give you a specific example. Many comms professionals are brilliant media relations experts, so I spent most of my twenties trying to develop that skill. I ignored the internal push that kept guiding me toward other projects, ones that involved aligning executives at really thorny inflection points, or communicating morally and technically complex policy positions, or getting to actually put pen to paper.
But I am starting (imperfectly, in fits and starts) to tune into my internal motor, to really home in on what I love to do. Right now, my list of loves looks something like this:
Mind meld with people who see the world in unique ways
Untangle complicated ideas into simple prose
Build things from the ground up / create order from chaos / find patterns
In practice, that is starting to manifest as a greater focus on executive comms. And yes, advancing in that field will probably require me to sharpen my media relations acumen — but this new lens has given both me and my manager a better sense of what kinds of media relations projects make sense for me. I am not trying to hit my “break into act two” or my “midpoint” just because.
Coming Attractions
I am also increasingly comfortable with the idea that my next career move may not seem linear to an outside observer. Perhaps I will get promoted at my current job, or eventually leave for a pure executive comms role at another company (a function that doesn’t exist as a standalone job at my current employer). But I might also take sabbatical to work on creative projects (my novel! my screenplay!) or foray into ghostwriting or start my own shop focusing on executive comms and speechwriting.
These changes may not have the flash of a Fast and the Furious film or the unflagging plot beats of a Hallmark Christmas movie. But these steps would make sense now that I’ve dug a layer deeper into my own story.
Understanding your own story is psychologically powerful. It is also an extremely valuable career tool. Just as a movie about a stop-motion snail can be more impactful than the flashiest action film, so too can a well-told career tale outrun the most pristine résumé.