This kind of follower-driven opining may have value in the world of social media, but it’s far less likely to serve you in the world of work. Here you will build the greatest value if you can show yourself to be someone who has stayed focused enough in their field to know all the details, and which details truly matter. Regardless of your field, this sort of expertise is always valued on a team. It has heft. It is rare. It is recognized even if other folks on the team don’t understand the details themselves. It is intimidating, which is no bad thing. And it leads to you being deeply trusted.

Contrary to what you may have heard or read, being focused in this way doesn’t make you narrow, or less open to novelty and innovation. The opposite is true. It is only when you know so well the existing ways of doing things—which ones work, which don’t, and when and why—that you are able to imagine what a more effective way might look like. Focus such as this not only helps you anticipate the future—you are deeper into the forest, further ahead than anyone else, and so can see round more corners— but also helps you create the future. This focus prepares your mind with actions, experiences, and results played out over many years, and as all innovators know, creativity comes only to the prepared mind.

My suggestion is to explore thinking differently about the true nature of your career. I believe we all have only one career. It’s a career that spans and integrates work, relationships, and all parts of our lives. This career is living a mindful life.

Here’s another key element when you’re wayfinding in life: follow the joy; follow what engages and excites you, what brings you alive. Most people are taught that work is always hard and that we have to suffer through it. Well, there are parts of any job or any career that are hard and annoying—but if most of what you do at work is not bringing you alive, then it’s killing you. It’s your career, after all, and you are going to be spending a lot of time doing it— we calculate it at 90,000 to 125,000 hours during the course of your lifetime. If it’s not fun, a lot of your life is going to suck.

Act your way into a new way of thinking and being. You cannot discover yourself by introspection.

Start by changing what you do. Try different paths. Take action, and then use the feedback from your actions to figure out what you want. Don’t try to analyze or plan your way into a new career. Conventional strategies advocated by self-assessment manuals and traditional career counselors would have you start by looking inside. Start instead by stepping out. Be attentive to what each step teaches you, and make sure that each step helps you take the next.

Most of us know what we are trying to escape: the lockstep of a narrowly defined career, inauthentic or unstimulating work, numbing corporate politics, a lack of time for life outside work. But finding an alternative that truly fits, like finding our mission in life, is not a problem that can be solved overnight. It takes time. Whatever the first step, the process gradually changes the nature of what we know and what we seek to learn. Learning happens in cycles. Early cycles focus on the most immediate (or surface) problems.