Your First 10 Years of Work Can Make or Break Your Financial Future

I recently reached the 10-year milestone in my career. It’s been punctuated with highs, lows, and a lot of lessons learned.

Through it all, certain themes have emerged…patterns that I have observed across career and personal finance that, if done well, can set you up for the rest of your life.

Let’s unpack each one.

Lessons from the field:

1. The first job is really important. Trajectory, earnings, savings potential, and career satisfaction all flow from the first job.

Start at the intersection of your strengths and interests. For example, if you’re strong in math and science and love the idea of helping people, maybe medicine is right for you. If you love making numbers make sense, maybe finance or accounting.

Often hiding in plain sight is the fact that the industry and function you choose starts you on a fairly defined career earnings arc. Of course, results vary, but solid data exists for the expected lifetime earnings for a given career. So, develop an understanding for what you can expect to earn, not just immediately, but over the course of 10, 20, and 30 years.

2. If you’re not in the right industry, role, or function…pivot. Move until you find the right work for you. When you feel stuck, know that you may be closer than you think.

This one appears as a bit of a contradiction from No.1. While the first job is critically important for setting the tone about what work you can do and what you’ll be known for, you’re not stuck. If you don’t get it right with No. 1 right away, pivot until you do.

3. Fitment trumps salary when you find something you are actually motivated to do. This may be the most important lesson for the ambitious who struggle a bit with direction. When your work is energizing and motivating, you have a much higher likelihood of being professionally and financially successful over the course of decades.

Ultimately, you want to maximize income potential but through work that is aligned with who you are.

4. Learning how money works is more important in the early part of your career than the amount you save. Saving and investing are critically important concepts but starting small and simply learning how the game works is key. That may mean saving a bit less when you’re earning less, or doing things in your 20s that you can’t do in your 30s with kids.

Study and apply good financial habits with just as much intensity as you build your career.

5. Small amounts lead to big amounts. And big amounts lead to financial freedom. One of the hardest lessons in personal finance is that you need time, patience, and consistency in order to see your actions pay off.

This is true for most things in life, but with money, it’s hard to understand the effects of compounding until you actually see a small snowball become a very big one at the bottom of the hill. And you only see it when you’re actually doing it.

Awareness of the concept precedes the results. People who understand that patience and discipline are the main ingredients will inevitably meet financial success.