5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Started My Career

From Ryan Raiker — As Seen in Disrupt Magazine

Ryan M. Raiker, MBA
5 min readOct 10, 2021

These five things I wish someone told me before I got started working were originally published in an interview with Disrupt Magazine.

I have received many responses from young folks, college students, and friends mid-career about these five things, tips if you would, and it is my hope that in republishing here that they will reach more people and specifically a person who needs to hear them, just like I had wished I heard sooner. I hope this helps you!

Photo by Daniel Chekalov on Unsplash

1. Don’t plan your future; work for it, and let it come to you.

Disappointment, anxiety, and stress are a few of the things I felt when I planned things out of my control. When I was younger, I swore I would be married and engaged and then have children by a specific birthday that has since passed. I also decided as a child that I would own a house and become a corporate director by another birthday. While the latter came true, I cannot explain to you the immense amount of self-imposed anxiety I experienced simply because 10-year-old Ryan decided some predetermined age when I should have gotten engaged, married, and later have had kids. In the end, those ‘deadlines’ never mattered, and I was foolish for ever thinking they did.

Photo by Md Mahdi on Unsplash

2. It only gets better.

In his Stanford commencement address, Steve Jobs said, “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life

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Ryan M. Raiker, MBA

TEDxSpeaker | Former Consultant | Process Expert | Marketer | Digital Guy | Adjunct Professor & Learner. I write about tech, marketing, business, and more.