#37 🧭💡3 ideas to help you narrow down your career options
When there are many ways your professional life could progress
Cristian Lupșa, one of the Romanian journalists that inspire me the most, has recently shared a list of 20 career options he is contemplating at the moment.
Besides the insight that it’s always useful to generate (more than 2) options before key decisions, there’s the question of:
How do you decide when there are many options on the table?
✼
Here are the 3 ideas that I shared with Cristian, that might help increasing his confidence in picking the right things to invest in going forward.
These ideas might be useful to you as well if you find yourself in a similar situation.
1. Reduce the complexity of the decision by clustering the 20 options around the main activity they entail: writing, teaching, enterprising, advising etc.
✼
2. Craft a minimal personal strategy to act as your decision-making guide going forward - see my own example from 2021 exploring the investment mix in 6 main activities: How I crafted my personal strategy for 2021 (Medium)
✼
3. Use the personal opportunity assessment tool - a set of questions designed to help people explore and decide on opportunities to pursue: Picking opportunities in a better way (Substack)
I have to mention that I got to this approach after trying out several ways to narrow down options, inspired from convergence techniques in business strategy work and prioritization frameworks from product development.
Would love to hear about your own approaches to narrow down options - what worked for you? Just reply to this email or reach out on LinkedIn.
Keep on deciding,
Bülent
As a strategic adviser and lifelong learner, Bülent Duagi works with Directors in 🇷🇴 Tech companies to help them make more impact with the limited resources they have at hand, by:
🧭 having a clear strategy that enables better and faster decision making;
🤝 organizing better to both run operations and implement strategy with the available bandwidth and budgets;
🚀 implementing strategic initiatives and programs in an efficient and effective manner, paying attention to the people side of change;
⚡️ intentionally developing proper internal capabilities that are sustainable in the long run.