We’re used to talking about our careers as if they were timelines. One job followed by another. A lucky moment. A disappointing manager. A promotion that came late or a pivot that came early.
But real careers don’t unfold like that. They unfold like systems.
And systems have structure.
This week’s audio episode looks at a simple but powerful idea: your career is basically a causal model.
Not in a rigid, deterministic sense — but in the sense that your path is shaped by a network of upstream variables, feedback loops, and hidden mechanisms that influence what happens next.
Once you start seeing your career that way, three things shift immediately:
Outcomes become less personal.
Not every disappointment is a referendum on your worth.
Often it’s just variance — a timing mismatch, a budget freeze, a political shift, a structural constraint you never saw.Patterns become easier to understand.
That recurring tension with a certain type of manager?
That recurring burnout?
That repeated sense of “I’m in the wrong environment”?
These aren’t random events. They’re observations. And observations point to mechanisms.Your decisions gain more leverage.
Instead of asking, What should I do?
You begin asking, Which variable can I shift?
You move from prediction to intervention. From hoping to experimenting.
A causal view also reframes mistakes.
Some failures are signal: valuable information about what doesn’t fit.
Others are simply noise: events generated by randomness rather than any meaningful personal flaw.
Being able to tell the difference — to know when to adjust your model versus when to ignore the data point — is one of the most emotionally liberating skills you can build.
And the best part is:
You don’t need software to map your causal model.
A pen and paper is enough.
List your recurring patterns.
Ask what upstream factor might be generating them.
Map where your agency is strong — and where it isn’t.
Choose one lever to shift this month.
Just one.
Small interventions propagate.
A new habit changes your confidence loop.
A new boundary changes your energy loop.
A slightly different environment changes everything downstream.
It’s the compounding nature of these loops that makes careers feel non-linear — but also full of potential.
The real danger, often, is optimizing for an outdated model.
Industries shift. Technologies shift.
And you shift too — in values, energy, ambition, and appetite.
A living model adapts.
The audio episode goes deeper into this idea, and how you can use it to understand your own trajectory without self-blame, without magical thinking, and without the pressure of predicting the future.
You don’t need to foresee everything.
You just need to understand the system well enough to influence it.
The Bottom Line:
Your career is not a straight line you walk.
It’s a system of causes, feedback loops, and leverage points.
Once you see it clearly, you don’t need luck to navigate it — you need awareness.
And awareness is something you can build.
