And our first one today comes from Sabine. Sabine asks, "When you're in the stage of building career capital, is it worth becoming good at skills that you would like to eventually stop using?" So if we go on to the elaboration here, Sabine says, "I still have four years to study until I can legally be allowed to be hired in my ideal work.

In my current situation, fundraising is a skill that would allow me to get access to the niche expert sooner so I could easily find out their stories, how they got where they are now, and what skills I should focus on to become so good I can't be ignored." So the basic idea here is Sabine does not want to be a fundraiser long-term, but in the current situation, that skill would be useful to be good at, could open up access to people from which learning could be done.

I would say a moderate yes is probably my answer here. By a moderate yes, I mean it's completely reasonable as part of your career journey to build up skills in the moment that are very valuable at this current stage just as part of your efforts to differentiate yourself as reliable, someone who can deliver, someone who is valuable.

That's always a good thing. And if one of the primary ways you can do this in your current position is fundraising, I think it's fine. Let's do this well. Let's get good at it. However, the reason why I say this is a moderate yes is that there is a big trap lurking.

If you're really good at getting good at things, and listeners to this podcast probably are because we talk about it all the time and we talk about deliberate practice, you might start to get really good at this. And when you start to get really good at something like fundraising, that is where you're going to be directed, and you're going to get a lot of praise for it, and more importantly, you're going to get a lot of money for it, and you're going to get a lot of cool positions, and you're going to have that momentum behind you, and it can be difficult to then say, "That was just temporary.

What I really want to do is this completely unrelated skill." When things are going well, it's difficult to move off of that path. Now, in my book, "So Good They Can't Ignore You," I talk about this. I call it one of the two autonomy traps. The first autonomy trap is trying to make a bid for a lot more autonomy in your work before you have the skills to back it up.

So this is the classic 22-year-old saying, "I'm going to go out on my own and start my nonprofit that's going to save the world," the problem being you don't have the skills or the understanding or the connection to actually run an effective nonprofit yet. The second autonomy trap, which is what's relevant here, is that once you actually get to a place where you have the career capital to have a lot of control, you're so good at what you do that there's going to be incredible pressure to keep doing it.

We might as well call this the law partner trap. It happens a lot to lawyers. You come out of a good school. What do I do now? I'm smart. I'm accomplished. How do I keep proving to the world I'm good? Oh, law school is hard to do. Okay, I'll go to law school.

Look, everyone's impressed. I got into Harvard Law. This is very impressive. Okay, great. Oh, I did well in law school. I know how to do this. Look, I'm getting praise. That's great. I got a job in a big law firm. Those are competitive. I have a big paycheck. They're starting me.

My first year associate salary is $170,000. That's a lot. I feel good. People know unambiguously that I'm impressive. Okay, I'm going to try to do my work well. Okay, hey, I'm getting more cases. Hey, I'm about to go for partner. Well, that would be really prestigious. Here we go.

Now it's seven years later. I'm partner. I'm high six figures, low seven-figure salary. And wait a second. I am completely stuck here. I've just been following this path getting better and better because that's what I'm used to doing. And now I realize I'm working 100 hours a week and miserable.

And what can I do? We have a lifestyle that's built around this. There's no easy transference of the skills. And now I'm just sad. That's the second autonomy trap. So there's a long way of saying be wary of that. Sure, do what you're doing now well. It's always better to be doing what you're doing well than be doing it wrong.

Be reliable. Deliver. Deliver at high levels of quality. I always give that advice to people who are new in their career. But I would start right away thinking about what are ultimately the skills that you can build the long career on, the skills that are going to give you those interesting options.

Once you actually get good at it, have that in mind right away and try to get that parallel track going right away. Because I got to tell you, things that are valuable, if you start doing them at a high level, they will get sucked into a path in which you are being pushed with great force to keep doing that at a higher and higher level.

So do what you do well, but be wary about only working on a skill that you really don't want to do.