What my favorite sci-fi novel can teach you about building the career you want
The enemy’s gate is down.
When I was in middle school, I went through a several-years-long period where I read Ender’s Game and all its sequels and spinoff novels every single year.
They’re still some of my favorite books of all time.
And there’s one particular moment in Ender’s Game that I think can teach you a lot about building the career you want.
The book is set mostly in a space station, where a group of elite children train to be military leaders to fight an incoming alien invasion.
(Listen, it’s sci-fi. Stick with me here.)
The children are arranged into armies that fight each other every week.
And these battles take place in the center of the space station, in a zero-gravity zone. (The rest of the space station has gravity, but the battle zone doesn’t.)
And one of Ender’s key innovations as a captain — the one that causes him to lead his army to victory week after week — is this:
The enemy’s gate is down.
Here’s what this means.
Every week, at the start of every fight, the two armies would enter the battle arena from opposing gates.
And even though they were going from a gravity zone to a no-gravity zone…
Everyone would remain oriented the same way they were outside the arena.
Ender’s innovation was to realize that, in the arena, there’s no enforced orientation.
What’s up? What’s down? What’s left? What’s right?
You get to decide. There’s no more gravity to hold you down.
And so he told his army:
“What difference does it make what the gravity was back in the corridor! Are we going to fight in the corridor?
From now on, you forget about gravity before you go through that door.
The old gravity is gone, erased.
Whatever your gravity is when you get to the door, remember—the enemy’s gate is down.”
And so they all oriented themselves with their feet facing the enemy’s gate and their heads facing their own.
And everyone laughed…until he started winning.
What does this have to do with your career?
You are no longer in the corridor.
You are in the arena.
You are no longer in the enforced-gravity zone of school and your early career.
You are in the zero-gravity zone of the rest of your life.
So the question for you is:
Which way are you going to decide is down?
It’s a surprisingly difficult question.
There’s a reason it took a certified genius like Ender to come up with this strategy.
The hard part isn’t having knowledge.
Everyone knows that, in zero gravity, you can face any way you want.
The hard part is questioning the obvious.
Only Ender spotted the outdated assumption that made sense in the corridor but made no sense in the arena.
And the easiest way to help your brain question the obvious and decide which way is down?
Six simple words: Come talk it out with me :)
Asking your brain to articulate its reasoning out loud will help you surface the unconscious assumptions you didn’t even realize were running the show.
And having that conversation with me will let you take advantage of the thousands of hours I’ve spent helping high achievers like you answer this exact question.
(Trust me, that’s going to shortcut your problem-solving process by a whole lot :)
You can drop by anytime for a no-strings-attached coffee chat ☕️
It’s not a sales pitch.
It’s just an opportunity for us to discuss whatever’s on your mind…
And I’ll give you some one-off coaching about your situation.
Or you can book a consult call, and we can map out a full coaching engagement.
So you can not just decide which way is down…
You can also implement that new orientation in your life…
And get to the point where you’re winning all the battles, and everyone else is asking you what your secret is :)
What my clients have to say…
“Even in our first consultation, Pooja will hear me go on and on about various topics.
And then she’ll be able to, in one sentence, say something that gets me unstuck or feels like it is the crux of the whole cobweb of stuff that’s in my head.
I think that's very rare and very special.”
—Jenny Xia Spradling | Founder & Co-CEO, FreeWill
I help high achievers build their careers around flow.
This requires…
Internally, learning how to access your flow no matter what’s going on around you
Externally, designing a career strategy that angles your flow at a high-priority problem that someone will pay you good money to solve
Tactically, navigating the transition from the role you’re in to the role you want
Today’s article focused on #2.
For more writing on all 3 of these, check out my table of contents.
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