I recently heard about a Twitter meme called #firstsevenjobs. A meme, if you don’t know, is an activity or image spread rapidly by internet users.
The objective with this particular meme is to list your first seven jobs, starting from the first time you received pay from someone other than your parents.
Some of the lists show how far we’ve come as a society. Here is Buzz Aldrin’s list:
“Dishwasher. Camp counselor. Fighter pilot. Astronaut. Commandant. Speaker. Author . . . now Global Space Statesman!”
How the world has changed since Aldrin’s first job in the late 1940s, when man only dreamed of walking on the moon, to today, when we actually have a call for a global space statesman.
Aldrin’s career trajectory was fairly linear — not a lot of weaving but rather rocket-ship-like propulsion to astronaut status and beyond. The career progression of most of us is not that direct.