First sentence jobs vs second sentence jobs
My sister works at Snap, the tech company behind a mobile app with hundreds of millions of daily users. Snapchat.
Jaclyn is smart and cool and kind, and she’s a good person. You’d like Jaclyn.
She works with other smart people, and she has a former colleague, Adam Ganjani, who says,
“There are first sentence jobs, and there are second sentence jobs.”
When someone asks you what you do for work, you might answer in two sentences.
First sentence: I work in X at Y company.
Second sentence: And I do Z for them.
The first sentence answers “What do you do?” And the second answers “What is your contribution?”
Early in a career, most people try to get the best first sentence job possible. When our peers are junior, it’s impressive to say we’re a junior analyst at Goldman Sachs or an operations coordinator at Google.
But later in a career, the second sentence is more important.
Ideally, we have both.
But our second sentence, our contribution, is what makes a job a vocation. Having a second sentence that aligns with our gifts and strengths is how we’ll thrive.
Our second sentence matters more.
