Two Pieces of Advice from an Industry Veteran

Honestly, in almost four years working in the medical industry, I've rarely met anyone in the field close to my age. Even the youngest were born after 1995. In other words, everyone I meet is my senior, and by rights I should be learning a lot from them. Today, coming back to Chengdu from Dujiangyan, I happened to get a ride with Mr. Ma. The drive wasn't long, just over an hour. I was in the passenger seat, so naturally we had to talk about something. I've noticed a change in myself since I started working: I'm not very willing to talk with people much older than me. Why? Probably because I used to talk too much. I paid dearly twice for things I said, and slowly I learned to keep my mouth shut. It's just that once I shut it, I shut it a little too tight. A couple of years ago, when I was a supervisor at the company and even younger, I always found some excuse to turn down dinners my bosses invited me to. Most of those people were probably more than twice my age. Talking with them made me a bit nervous, and I also worried our views wouldn't line up. Looking back, that was a bit childish. There was really no need to avoid those conversations. The more I ran from situations like that, the more I'd miss out on the very things I wanted.

Over time, I've actually changed as a person. By the time I realized how serious the problem was (that I could hardly chat and joke freely with people anymore), it seemed to have reached the point where it would take a lot of effort to turn around. Mr. Ma is from Lanzhou. He speaks Mandarin with a really nice voice. When he learned I'd been at my current company for almost four years, the first piece of advice he gave me was: if I get the chance, I could actually switch jobs and go see what a bigger platform is like. What did he mean? He meant that I'm still young, I've long since learned everything I can at my current company and seen everything it can show me, and while I'm still young, I should get out and see more. He told me: a person's understanding of the world is key, and that understanding comes from experience. If I stay at one company while I'm this young, I'll miss out on a lot of experiences I should be having, and my understanding won't grow. Many people don't think this way when they're young, and by the time it finally dawns on them, they find it's all too late. I thought Mr. Ma made a lot of sense, especially the logic that experience shapes understanding, which then steers your life. If I follow that logic, my situation right now is risky. I'm only 24, but if I switched jobs this year and made a 3 to 5 year plan, by the end of it I'd be 27 to 29. I wouldn't be thirty yet, but I definitely wouldn't count as young anymore. The second thing Mr. Ma told me is a line you see all the time online: choice always matters more than effort. How did he explain it? He told me that with some platforms, once you choose them, the ceiling you can reach is only so high. With others, once you choose them, you can keep pushing the limits of your potential. You may never touch the ceiling, but your own growth will already be far higher than the ceiling of many other platforms. That explanation was probably where his first point about switching jobs came from. I thought both of Mr. Ma's points made a lot of sense. They rang true. Besides those two points, Mr. Ma also told me that if he could go back to my age, he'd work twice as hard as he did back then. Honestly, my job is stable now, but I've been drifting toward just coasting. Seeing Mr. Ma, ten years older than me, working so hard, I don't know what to say. Looking at my current job through Mr. Ma's logic, if I only consider the duties in my employment contract, then as far as this company goes, I really have already "graduated." There's very little front-line work I can't handle, which is why my workload has always been fairly light. Actually, it's not like I'd never thought about the things Mr. Ma brought up. The fact that I'm writing down what he said means I really listened. Some things are useless to hear. Reading is the same. If you don't write down what you heard or read in your own words, it basically washes away with your memory. Simply put, I'm in a bind. The bind has two sides. On one side, my current job is a cushy job to coast in until retirement, but apart from that, everything else about it is actually not bad. It's good value. On the other side is the pressure from outside. The medical industry is in a slump, and big companies are laying off more than 50% of their staff. How am I supposed to squeeze in under conditions like these? My sense of the industry and my lack of confidence in myself mean that although I've had these thoughts, I've never acted on them. But have I really done nothing at all? Not quite. At the very least, while feeling lost, I've kept exercising and kept working on myself. As for the work side of things, like my social and communication skills, which are a bit lacking now, I'm trying to find a way to get them back. What matters is that I've discovered the things I always tend to run from are no big deal at all, and might even do me some good.