Career Management Through the Decades

Kathy Oneto

Executive, Life + Work Coach, Podcast Host, Author, Sustainably Ambitious

What is a book that changed your life?

I'm going to give you two. One is What Should I Do With My Life?: The True Story of People Who Answered the Ultimate Question by Po Bronson. In it, he concludes that people finding what they should do with their life need to pay attention to everything, because you often only get a glimmer. The other is One Person/Multiple Careers: The Original Guide to the Slash Career by Marci Alboher. It's pushed me to even be doing what I'm doing now, which is to think that I can wear two hats. 

What is something you refuse to give an f about?

Amassing power in corporate politics.

What’s the best thing that happened to you in the 80s?

The movies. I go back to one of my favorite movies, “When Harry Met Sally.” But there are just so many good ones: “Top Gun,” “Ferris Bueller's Day Off,” “Dirty Dancing,” “Working Girl.” They are a lot of fun to rewatch. 

Ambition: no four-letter word.

For better or worse, I'm very curious and I've always been on this quest for what is the place for me? Where should I be making my contribution? The first time I had a sense of what I wanted to be, I said mathematician. I think I was in fourth grade, and my mom had a book of clever math hacks. Then in high school, for some reason, I got this idea that I wanted to run a bed and breakfast. It’s crazy because I don’t think I would have stayed in one. I even got into Cornell’s school of hotel management, but I didn’t have the money to go so I ended up going to UVA and studying business. 

I always had some interest in marketing, and between my last two years of school, I got the chance to work as an intern for the CFO of Young & Rubicam. It was a great experience to have access to that level of leadership and to be trusted, frankly, with executing some things I still can’t believe they let me do. After working for three years in finance, I danced around different master’s degrees. I went to Berkeley for my MBA, which has one of the best real estate programs in the country, and I took those classes but it just didn't end up sticking. 

Whenever I made a career move, I never had this complete North star I was shooting for. I always had a list of three things, and I’d explore them to see what landed. I ended up as the brand manager at Clorox—a far cry from a mathematician. Living in the Bay Area, I kept trying to get into tech, but the beauty of being a brand manager in consumer package goods is the way you're able to think about a business and a brand. It’s not just the impact you can have, but the scope of the work. It’s just not the same in tech.

After a few other gigs, I ended up joining Minted, a start-up in its sixth year. In my gut, part of me wanted to do something on my own, to create something. By the time I got to Minted, I said, "I'm going to challenge myself to just write once a week and start a blog." It wasn't about amassing a lot of readership; it was much more about me just writing, and a lot of it ended up being around career. Landing on Sustainable Ambition was iterative. Although I’d been thoughtful about my career and tried to keep my eyes wide open, I ended up running into some walls. I started hearing the same from friends: “I'm just bored. I can't do this anymore.” And I'm hearing it even more now.

The idea of Sustainable Ambition is, how do you manage a career from decade to decade? There are two parts: managing a career over time and managing your life plus work in the moment. At Clorox, we talked about two Ps—performance and potential. I think we need to add a third dimension, which is pace. What do you do with somebody who's performing really well and has high potential, but can't be gangbusters right this moment, because they just had a baby? There's not enough awareness about the career management narratives that just don't fit. They haven't evolved based on how our world has changed.

The first core tenet of Sustainable Ambition is defining success on one's own terms. If you're living someone else's dream or what society thinks you should do, at some point that's going to rear its ugly head. The second is to see one's life plus work as a journey, not as a straight line, and to understand that there's going to be ebbs and flows in one's satisfaction and ambition with their work. It comes back to paying attention, being engaged in one's career. The third tenet is to manage one’s effort in the moment to sustain oneself and avoid burnout.

I finally realized why the title of Michelle Obama's book, Becoming, was so beautiful: because we are always all becoming; always learning about ourselves. To have this pressure that we know ourselves and it's all figured out at 18 is just ridiculous, and frankly boring. I had my own coach say to me, "What's so good about knowing?” If you know, it’s set, but if you don’t, the possibilities are endless. Wouldn't you rather live in possibility than stuck in something? People really need to be in this growth and learning curiosity. I almost always think about taking small risks and planting seeds. 

Right now, the state of ambition and what success is are externally defined. It's this external narrative of must get to the top, must be a straight line, must be fast. Some of those things are really rooted in our culture. But there is also a little bit of backlash because of the sense of burnout, where if you’re ambitious or a hard worker, people roll their eyes. In today’s world there's not room for the need to pace ourselves—whether that is slowing down or speeding up. 

So I think it’s important that people self-define their ambition, without judgment. We're all going to be coming into this year with different levels of energy or sense of what we want for ourselves. Some questions I would ask myself are, I'll feel fulfilled this year if I ______________, I'll be thrilled this year if I________________, who I want to be this year is_______________, the ways I'd like to grow are____________, and the curiosities I'd like to explore are _______________.

For more prompts from Kathy to discover your own Sustainable Ambition, pre-order her planner

and stayed tuned for other publications. To listen to the Sustainable Ambition podcast, head here.