Your career is a pipeline, so focus on it 15–20 minutes per day

I started with this article on Stanford’s MBA site about “the secret to finding long-term career satisfaction” (noble goal, right?) and was instantly turned off because it’s written by a career coach/consultant, which seems like maybe it’s a snake oil profession. But hey, I pressed onward — gotta embrace those new viewpoints — and it made some good points, specifically this one:

“Incremental efforts add up,” says Melcher. “You don’t have to do a big dramatic thing to make progress. What you do every day matters more than what you do once in a while. Like compound interest, if you make steady progress of your goals, you can get somewhere.” He says to take an activity or a goal, divide it into its component parts, then spend 20 minutes a day or less working on it. “I would hold that everybody has 20 minutes. I had 20 minutes today where I didn’t really need to look on social media or check the New York Times. I could have made some small effort toward something.”

Yep. Now let’s start to get real.

The numbers

Employee tenure is about 48 months right now in North America for jobs across multiple industries. If you enter a place tomorrow, you’ll probably be gone before today in 2022. That’s just based on your decision-making and potential moves — remember…