Most professional women I know - myself included - long since gave up looking for a rulebook or a roadmap; we make it up as we go along. Every day presents a new choice, a new challenge, which makes long-term career planning seem like an especially abstract exercise.
Interpretation
Professional women often navigate their careers without clear guidance or plans.
In this quote, Nancy Gibbs expresses the reality many professional women face: the absence of a predefined guide or structure in their careers. Instead, they must adapt and make decisions on a daily basis, embracing new challenges and choices that continually shift the landscape of their professional lives, rendering traditional long-term planning nearly ineffective.
In practice
During a women's leadership conference to emphasize adaptability in careers.
Americans sometimes ask what the government does and where their tax money goes. Among other things, it pays for all kinds of invisible but essential safety nets and life belts and guardrails that are useless right up until the day they are priceless.
Virtues, like viruses, have their seasons of contagion. When catastrophe strikes, generosity spikes like a fever. Courage spreads in the face of tyranny.
Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth were slaves by birth, freedom fighters by temperament.
The battles after the wars are over can be the toughest; there's no longer the public interest that accompanies, for good and for ill, the start of combat.
Girls grow up scarred by caution and enter adulthood eager to shake free of their parents' worst nightmares. They still know to be wary of strangers. What they don't know is whether they have more to fear from their friends.
All our efforts to guard and guide our children may just get in the way of the one thing they need most from us: to be deeply loved yet left alone so they can try a new skill, new slang, new style, new flip-flops. So they can trip a few times, make mistakes, cross them out, try again, with no one keeping score.
Employers have gone away from the idea that an employee is a long-term asset to the company, someone to be nurtured and developed, to a new notion that they are disposable.
By an irony of fate, my first employment was as a draughtsman. I hated drawing; it was for me the very worst of annoyances. Fortunately, it was not long before I secured the position I sought, that of chief electrician to the telephone company.
There are many more jobs out there than you have ever heard of. Your dream job might not yet exist. If you had told 'College Me' that I would become a professional YouTuber, I would've been like, "That is not a word, and it never should be."
My only advice is to try to get the job that's most like the job you want, rather than the one that's more prestigious. Always try to be the talent.
If you can get better at your job, you should be an active member of LinkedIn, because LinkedIn should be connecting you to the information, insights and people to be more effective.
Salary negotiations are particularly important because people are testing you as both a co-worker and an ambassador. They really don't want you to be a pushover, and they don't want you to be a jerk.
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