Your manager can point out opportunities for growth. She can show you projects. She can provide feedback on your areas of learning and development. But she cannot read your mind, and she cannot tell you what will make you happy. Whether you are brand new to the workplace or 20 years into your career, the onus of figuring out what you want to do, what you want to learn, and what will make you happy rests on your shoulders.
You’ll probably go through periods of career uncertainty in your life. Many people feel very uncertain in their first two to five years out of school, as they settle into independent adulthood. I felt so unsettled that I went to grad school for a couple of years, in what turned out to be a quest to find security in the familiar academic setting and an escape from a job I didn’t know how to navigate well. I hit uncertainty again after climbing the technical ladder only to feel somewhat powerless at a big company. And then I hit it again after climbing the management ladder only to encounter the challenges of executive leadership. I expect I’ll experience it every 5 to 10 years until I retire, given my track record.
As you go through various stages of your career, you’ll start to realize how much uncertainty there is in the world. It’s a pretty universal truth that once you get the job you thought you wanted, the enjoyment eventually fades and you find yourself looking for something else. You think you want to work for that cool startup, and you get there only to find it’s a mess. You think you want to be a manager, only to discover that the job is hard and not rewarding in the ways you expected.
In all of this uncertainty, the only person you can rely on to pull through it is yourself. Your manager cannot do that for you. Use your manager to discover what’s possible where you are, but look to understand yourself in order to figure out where you want to go next.