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How to Navigate an Unconventional Career Path (with 7 Examples)
The best career path might not be the ideal one you imagine
Earlier into my career, it was easy for me to buy into the labels. I was either an “entrepreneur,” or I was an “employee.” The reality of the situation was more amorphous. For example, while I ran my own business and had a team staffed with self-employed and part-time colleagues, I actually worked with clients in all sorts of different ways.
For one, I would go into their office two days a week and work as a fractional marketing lead. For others, I would work remotely as a consultant, or an editorial director with my own writing team or as an editor for theirs. I would make various attempts to define myself, and bundle packages in a stricter way (i.e., productized service). That’s just my business — outside of that, I’d worked as a writer at Lifehacker, a comms associate at Xtreme Labs, and I shipped a bunch of self-initiated projects.
Over the years, I’ve come to realize that my situation wasn’t that unusual. Things are generally messy in the real world. A lot of facts and truth are, by necessity, omitted from public narratives.
