Building Bridges

This draft gets to some of the important material, and seems to me a useful way to start writing. But many of its sentences and some of its paragraphs seem to take an external view of you, like an application essay intended to introduce you to a stranger, rather than an introspection designed to help you create a strategy. Improving the essay seems to me most likely to involve replacing the external view with an internal one.

The metaphor of the bridge provides a good structure for the external view: you can be seen as a "connector," using an agreeable disposition and a good work ethic to bring people together. Surely this is an important form of self-definition, but in the present context the metaphor elides the most important question: a bridge from where to where? Counting identities is not a particularly valuable activity: we all have as many as we want to acknowledge at any moment. We aren't building a bridge from one of our social facets to another: we are living our lives.

So the opportunity presented here is to consider, specifically but not immutably, what exactly you want, and how you mean to go about getting it. Probably your objectives will change, perhaps completely. Your sense of the resources you have at hand may also change, and as your objectives alter the resources you will need to collect to achieve them are certain to vary. But the exercise of making strategy—which is quite different from the exercise of putting together an agreeable or marketable profile—is useful even when the fundamentals are uncertain. Learning to define one's objectives; to consider the relevant resources already at hand and to specify the ones needed; to learn how to get the results your license needs to contain, and to build the network you will need to find and serve the clients you want—these are the steps to making good and creative strategy for a fulfilling professional life. All right, you are a bridge-builder. Now we need a map, some materials, an architecture. The bridge you imagine building this spring is just a bridge, probably not the one or ones you are going to build in due course. But seriously confronting the details of the first imagined work is part of the education that lasts through the lifetime of building.