There are some words I would like to see stricken from career conversations. Should. Ought to. I must do this before I get to do that. This is the language of obligation, and it’s borrowed from somewhere. It’s almost never examined, just taken as gospel.

The norm underneath it is this: that career has a correct sequence, someone walked a path before you and you are supposed to follow the same path. The assumption is so embedded that people carry it into conversations about their own ambitions as if it originated with them. Someone else's map became your instruction manual, and you never realised it.

Consider two people at the same starting point, heading toward the same goal. Both finish school or university aiming for the same industry, the same kind of role. Within five years, their paths look nothing alike. One took a role that wasn't quite right but introduced them to a mentor who changed everything. One moved cities, or didn't. One had caring responsibilities that narrowed certain options and opened others. One said yes to something uncomfortable and discovered a capability they didn't know they had. One got unlucky with a manager early on and had to rebuild. One got really lucky with a manager and skyrocketed. These are not edge cases.

This is how careers actually form: through choices, skills, preferences, strengths, weaknesses, circumstances outside of work, work ethic, luck, and the particular collection of people you worked with and for along the way. Two people standing at the same starting line arrive somewhere completely different, and neither of them took a wrong path.

Part of the problem is retrospective certainty. We look at successful careers and assume the sequence was obvious all along. The promotion appears inevitable. The move looks strategic. The risk seems intelligent. Looking backwards, people naturally create a coherent story that connects where they started to where they ended up. The reality is usually far messier. Careers are shaped by timing, circumstance, opportunity, mistakes, relationships, and decisions made with incomplete information. We are very good at mistaking someone else's explanation of their career for a set of instructions. It is a useful story. It is rarely a reliable map.

Where you are now is the product of your specific variables: the choices you made, the ones that were made for you, the opportunities you found, and the ones you had to create. Where you go next is shaped by the same kinds of factors. There is no universal sequence for that.

There is one exception, regulated careers. In medicine, law, engineering, and others, you cannot practise without specific qualifications, and those qualifications follow a defined path. The should, in those cases, is real, and it comes from an external authority with a legitimate claim on it. Outside of that category, it does not exist in the way most people assume.

Most people using obligation language in career conversations are not becoming surgeons. They are trying to progress in roles where the supposed sequence is a convention, not a requirement. Conventions can be useful; they often reflect patterns that have worked for many people in similar situations. But they are not rules, and the gap between those two things matters more than most career conversations acknowledge.

Rewriting this norm does not make career planning formless. It makes it honest. The starting question changes: not what should I do next, but what do I want, and what am I willing to do to get there. Those are different questions. The first borrows its authority from somewhere outside you. The second places it where it belongs.

The obligation language belongs to someone else's career. Strip it away and the conversation becomes more honest. What do I want? What trade-offs am I willing to make? What risks am I willing to take? What matters enough to pursue even if there is no prescribed path?

Careers are built by specific people, in specific circumstances, making specific choices. There was never a universal sequence. There was only ever yours.