Most careers begin reactively. You take the opportunity in front of you. You optimise for the next step, not the destination. This is not irrational — it is how information arrives. You cannot know at 22 what you will care about at 42.
Somewhere along the way, the reactive mode stops serving you well. You accumulate experience but not necessarily direction. You get good at things that may not be the things you most want to be good at — and the longer you wait to examine this, the more expensive the course correction becomes.
A spatial metaphor has been useful to me for thinking about this: latitude, longitude, and altitude. Three dimensions. Each worth examining carefully.
Latitude: what you do
The first dimension is the field — the problem space you inhabit. It is not your job title, not your employer, but the underlying question your work is trying to answer.
Someone working in education might be a teacher, a curriculum designer, a school operator, or a policy researcher. Very different roles, but the same latitude: how do children learn, and how do we make that happen more reliably at scale? The problem is the constant. The role is just one way of engaging with it.
This matters more than it might seem. When an organisation disappoints, or a role narrows, or funding dries up, people who are anchored to a problem can find another entry point. People anchored to a role or an employer often find themselves stranded.
Shifting latitude — genuinely moving from one problem domain to another — is possible but takes real time. The literature is different, the key people are different, the unwritten knowledge that tells you what has been tried and why it failed is different. Someone moving from climate to public health, or from markets to governance, is in some ways starting over. That is not a reason to avoid it, but it is a cost worth seeing clearly before you decide.
Longitude: where you work
The second dimension is geography — physical location, but also institutional and contextual setting. India or East Africa. Urban Maharashtra or rural Jharkhand. A high-capacity system or a fragile one.
Longitude shapes everything: the problems you encounter, the tools available, the pace of change, the nature of relationships. The same field — say, improving school quality — looks entirely different depending on where you plant yourself.
This dimension is often underweighted. People think carefully about role and domain, but less carefully about context. And context has large effects on whether particular skills and temperaments are assets or liabilities.
Altitude: the level at which you operate
Take education in India. A classroom teacher works at the most granular altitude — one child, one lesson, one day. A school leader holds a small system: forty teachers, five hundred students, a community. Move up, and you have someone running a network of schools. Then a district administrator. Then state policy. Then national reform. Then global learning and advocacy.
Each altitude is a genuinely different job. The feedback loops differ. The time horizons differ. The nature of influence differs. At the classroom level, you see your impact within hours. At the state level, you may wait years to know if something worked. At the global level, causality is often unknowable.
Altitude is not a hierarchy of importance. A great classroom teacher may be doing work that is harder and more consequential than a policy consultant advising a state government. But altitude does shape what kind of person thrives, what skills matter, and what a typical day actually looks and feels like.
Productivity, energy, and fit
Where does time collapse for you — where you lose track of hours because the work itself is absorbing? Where do you feel the feedback that tells you something is working?
These questions matter enormously for sustainability. You can operate at an altitude that looks impressive but drains you in ways that compound badly over time. You can also find a level where your particular way of thinking and relating to people is genuinely useful, and where the work sustains itself over years.
Ego enters here quietly. There is sometimes a gap between the altitude someone wants to operate at for reasons of identity, and the altitude where they are actually most effective. Sitting with that gap honestly is uncomfortable but clarifying.
The time horizon question
What level can you meaningfully commit to for a decade?
A decade is long enough to build real capability, deep enough to understand a system, long enough to see the results of choices. Some altitudes require years just to develop basic competence. Others offer faster feedback but plateau sooner.
The honest question is: given what you know about how you work and what you care about, what commitment can you make that will still feel right in year seven?
Coordinates change
None of this is static. Life phases alter what is possible and what is desirable.
High-output, high-travel roles that feel generative at one stage of life may feel corrosive a decade later. Work that was absorbing at one altitude may stop feeding you once you have learned what you came to learn. The things that made a role exciting at the start — novelty, steep learning, proximity to action — gradually give way to other needs.
Changing coordinates is how a career stays alive across decades.
The cost of misalignment
Operating at the wrong altitude tends to show up quietly. The most visible form is carrying responsibility for systems you cannot yet read, at a scale where feedback is too slow or diffuse to guide you. The less discussed form is possessing capabilities the role does not use — growing restless, misreading your own performance because the context is too thin.
Both tend to manifest as a low-level flatness. Work that is fine, but not quite alive. Recognising this as a coordinates problem, rather than a personal failing, opens up more useful responses.
Some questions to reflect on
- What is the underlying problem you are working on — and is that the problem you actually care most about?
- In what context do you feel most capable? Is that the context you are currently in?
- At what altitude do your skills and temperament genuinely fit — where does the evidence of your own experience point?
- Where do you feel the feedback that something is working, and how long can you sustain work without it?
- What might you be holding on to for reasons of identity rather than genuine fit?
- What would you want your work to look like in ten years, and does the current trajectory take you there?
These are questions worth returning to more than once, across a career.