Mindaugas Petrutis
2 Dec 2024
Lila’s career was a mess of tangled threads.
A designer by day, a jazz musician by night, a weekend warrior poet scribbling verses on coffee shop napkins. She felt like a walking contradiction, a human Venn diagram of overlapping passions.
Her LinkedIn profile read like a Jackson Pollock painting. Splatters of experience, no discernible pattern. Graphic design internship here, UX bootcamp there, sprinkled with odd jobs and passion projects.
She used to envy those with linear trajectories. The ones who picked a path at 18 and marched steadily towards the VP of Design title. Zero deviations. Zero doubts.
But then she met Kai.
Kai was a designer, but he was also a former marine biologist, a one-time stand-up comedian, and a perpetual student of obscure philosophies. His mind was a kaleidoscope, always shifting, always revealing new patterns.
“Careers are like quantum particles,” he told her once, over whiskeys and some obscure independent movie. “They exist in multiple states simultaneously, until you choose to measure them. And every measurement changes the trajectory.”
Lila raised an eyebrow. “So you’re saying my scattered path is actually a superposition of potential careers?”
Kai grinned. “Exactly. You’re not a mess, you’re a quantum marvel. Embracing the uncertainty is what keeps you creative. It’s what allows for the unexpected breakthroughs.”
From that moment, Lila saw her journey differently. Each seeming detour was just another facet of her designer’s mind. The music taught her rhythm and flow. The poetry taught her the power of raw emotion. Even Kai’s stories about marine biology taught her to see the interconnectedness of systems.
She stopped trying to prune her passions and started letting them grow wild. She let herself exist in the ambiguity, in the spaces between definitions.
And her work blossomed. Her designs had a depth and dimensionality that others lacked. She could now synthesise her varied experiences and perspectives to create something unique.
She realised that the linear path was an illusion. That every career, if you looked closely enough, was a unique entanglement of influences and experiences.
The goal wasn’t to untangle the threads, but to marvel at the patterns they made. To embrace the quantum strangeness of a life fully lived.
And so, Lila leaned into the uncertainty. She took on projects that scared her, projects that stretched her in new directions. She collaborated with people who saw the world in wildly different ways.
Despite all that, Lila knew she would never have a tidy title. She would never fit neatly into a box. But she also knew that her unique intersection of skills and passions was her superpower.
In a world of specialists, she was a quantum generalist. And she was learning to embrace the strange, spooky action at a distance that connected all her disparate selves.
After all, in the quantum universe of careers, anything was possible. You just had to be brave enough to exist in the ambiguity.
Yet some days, the uncertainty still gnawed at her. Walking home from a particularly gruelling design sprint, exhausted from a late-night gig the evening before, she wondered if Kai’s quantum theory was just a pretty way of justifying chaos.
“What if I’m spreading myself too thin?” she texted him. “Maybe you can’t actually be everything at once.”
His reply came hours later: “Even quantum particles have to collapse into a definite state sometimes. The trick is knowing when to let yourself collapse, and when to remain in superposition.”
She thought about that during her next client meeting. The project needed her full designer focus, no jazz improvisations or poetic tangents. But it was those very tangents that had taught her to recognise the rhythm in user interactions, to find the poetry in negative space.
Sometimes she had to be just a designer. Sometimes just a musician. Sometimes the threads tangled so badly she couldn’t see the pattern at all. But increasingly, she was learning that the art wasn’t in maintaining perfect superposition but in knowing how to dance between states, letting each identity strengthen the others.
Her LinkedIn profile was still a Jackson Pollock. But now she saw it less as quantum entanglement and more like jazz improvisation with moments of chaos and clarity, structure and freedom, all playing together in a constantly evolving composition that was uniquely, unmistakably her own.
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