global + local seasons

In Hell Yeah or No, Derek Sivers suggests deciding whether you want your next project to have global or local focus. He shares an example of a time he shifted from playing local shows in a local band to starting a business distributing CDs for musician friends around the country. He moved from local to global work and made choices about where he put time and attention accordingly.

In Sivers’ framework, “local” and “global” are rough categories. “Local” captures something like “your city” or “your nearby area” and “global” could be defined as “anything beyond that” or “multiple places”. So “global” work is not necessarily international or worldwide in scope.

I like this prompt. I also like adding a heavy caveat to it - don’t stress yourself out by seeing global and local as mutually exclusive domains, inescapable once you have chosen one. It can be tempting to think, especially early in your career, that you’re making a grand headwaters decision with the global vs local choice. So many careers, and maybe especially the most interesting and useful ones, oscillate between these two. 

You can often find that the experience and mental models you developed in one domain lend you credibility and leverage in the other. It’s great when an education policymaker served as a classroom teacher once upon a time; similarly, it’s super useful when a civics teacher was a Congressional aide. Ditto for CEOs who have done the front-line work. 

-eric