What Will You Value At The End Of Your Career?

A powerful question to consider, right?

I once — way back in the day — wrote a post about how much people connect their self-worth to their job, and that might be a small corollary to what I’m about to discuss here. It’s this big concept: you spend a lot of your working life chasing, for lack of a better term, deliverables. These are short-term assignments/projects, and you get down in the weeds / forest + trees, and you get too deeply enmeshed with the politics of everything and … oftentimes people will have a whole career, with 1–2 or 10–12 companies, and never really consider the bigger picture of what they were doing.

That’s kind of interesting, right?

I came across this interview with Dominic Barton — big guy at McKinsey — on Wharton’s website, and it’s amazing on any number of levels. First off, he talks about failure openly. He was denied partnership at McKinsey about three times. That’s a big deal. (Apparently, the second denial was “very public.”) We almost never talk about failure at work, so this was inspiring. (That said, it’s much easier to talk about failure when you make a bunch of money and have some ownership of one of the biggest consulting brands in the entire world.)