Write Your Career Vision
#047: Strip away the shoulds and find what actually energizes you. Part 7 of Design Your Next Move.
The Design Your Next Move Series:
Part 1: Your Design Career Won’t Be Killed by AI; It’ll Be Killed by Inertia
Part 7: Write Your Career Vision
Part 8: Filters, Skills, and Your Influence Network
Part 9: Your Career OS Is a Living System
Every year, during performance cycles, I’d sit down with people on my team to talk about their professional development goals. Some came in knowing exactly what they wanted. Most didn’t. And the ones who struggled most weren’t the ones who lacked ambition; they were the ones who’d gotten so fluent in the language of performance reviews that they’d stopped thinking about what they actually wanted and started thinking about what they were supposed to want.
When someone was really stuck, I’d stop the conversation and ask them to do something that felt almost sideways: don’t write a goal yet, write a story. Describe a perfect day at work. What are you doing? Who are you working with? How does it feel when you close your laptop?
Then we’d build backwards from there.
That exercise unlocked something the goal-setting frameworks never could, and it’s the foundation of what I’m going to walk you through here: the first real piece of your Career OS, which starts with something that sounds almost too simple: writing a vision instead of a plan.
The difference matters
A plan is prescriptive. It says: “Do A, then B, then C, and you’ll end up at D.” It’s concrete, measurable, and usually totally wrong because the world doesn’t cooperate with your timeline.
A vision is directional. It says: “This is what a good day looks like. This is what I’m trying to build toward.” It’s flexible, and survives contact with reality better.
Step one: Your Career Vision Narrative
Before you think about titles, companies, or salaries, I want you to do something that feels almost embarrassingly simple. Strip everything away and describe the experience of the workday you want.
Remove the noise of what you think you should want. Remove the voice that says “that’s not realistic” or “nobody does that.” Just reveal what actually energizes you.
Here’s the prompt: Describe a day at work you’d be excited to wake up for. What are you doing? Who are you working with? Where are you? How does the work feel? How does it end?
Let me give you an example, because this feels too open-ended otherwise:
I wake up without an alarm, make coffee, and walk into my home office. By mid-morning, I’m on a video call with two collaborators (one in London, one in Toronto) discussing early design concepts for a civic technology project. The conversation is sharp, a little bit funny, and we’re actually moving the work forward instead of trying to convince someone that we should move forward. The afternoon is quiet, focused time for prototyping. I’m listening to music, thinking in pixels, making something real. No Slack chaos. No meetings for the sake of meetings. I wrap up at 5 p.m., satisfied that we made progress toward something meaningful, and close my laptop before heading out for a walk.
It’s specific and sensory, and it tells you something real about what matters: asynchronous time across time zones rather than a 9-to-5 office, collaboration that actually moves the work rather than just gathering feedback, autonomy with nobody waiting for permission, and a workday that ends at a sane hour.
A vision. Infinitely more useful than a five-year plan that will be obsolete in 18 months.
Step two: Define your mission
A vision describes the day. A mission describes the why.
Over a long career, you get to choose what problem you’re solving, what kind of impact you’re chasing, what kind of change you’re building. That’s your throughline, the thing that ties your decisions together when everything else is chaotic.
The format:
I am committed to [impact] for [audience] through [skill or approach].
Let me give you an example from the civic tech space, because I think about that a lot:
I am committed to making digital public services accessible to every resident, regardless of age, income, or ability, through human-centered design and inclusive technology.
That’s specific enough to guide decisions. It eliminates a bunch of things right away — you’re not going to jump at a fintech startup if your mission is civic services, and it opens things up in other directions. You might teach, speak, consult, all in service of that mission.
Your mission won’t stay static forever. But right now, in this season of your career, what’s the impact you want to dedicate yourself to? What problem keeps you up at night? What kind of change do you want to be part of?
Write that down.
Step three: Career hypotheses
Plans assume you know what’s true. But you don’t. Nobody does.
So instead of writing a plan, treat your career moves as experiments. State them as hypotheses.
The format:
I believe that [career action] will lead to [desired outcome], and I’ll know it’s true if [success indicator].
Here are a few real examples:
I believe that taking a fractional design lead role at two early-stage startups will teach me how to operate with less organizational structure and more autonomy, and I’ll know it’s true if I can run a full design process with minimal meetings and still ship quality work.
I believe that launching a course on design strategy will expand my reach and build a secondary income stream, and I’ll know it’s true if I get 50 paying students in the first cohort and at least 3 consulting leads from it.
I believe that moving to a non-profit will let me work on problems I actually care about, and I’ll know it’s true if I’m energized by my work three months in and my impact aligns with the org’s real needs.
The beauty of the hypothesis frame is that it’s OK to be wrong. “I thought this would teach me X, but it taught me Y” is valuable information.
When you get enough of these hypotheses running, your career stops being something you’re trying to execute and becomes something you’re genuinely learning from.
Why this matters more than a five-year plan
The world doesn’t slow down for your plans. Markets shift. Technologies change. You change. A detailed five-year plan becomes a monument to what you thought was true, not a guide for what’s actually happening.
But a career vision — a clear sense of what a good day looks like, what impact you’re chasing, what bets you’re willing to make and why — stays useful. It’s a foundation that everything else builds upon.
I often joke that PowerPoint is my main design tool, but it’s not so much a joke as an actuality. And I’ve found that the single most useful “document” I’ve ever created wasn’t a plan but a page that said: Here’s what I care about. Here’s what a good day looks like. Here are the experiments I’m running. Here’s how I’ll know if they’re working.
That page has guided about a thousand decisions. The five-year plans I wrote? I don’t even know where they are.
Your turn:
Find 10 to 15 quiet minutes. No interruptions. No research, no planning, no editing. Write continuously, describing your ideal work day. What are you doing? Who’s in the room? How does it feel?
Don’t overthink it. Don’t make it pretty. Just write.
When you’re done, read it back and highlight the patterns. What keeps showing up? Autonomy? Connection? Meaning? Impact? Travel? Stability?
Those patterns are telling you something true about yourself. Write that down too.
That’s your vision. Everything else builds from there.
This whole series has been good, but this essay really resonated with me. It got me to rethink what matters most to me and how I might steer my career path toward that goal. Thanks!