Along the way I learned a number of lessons. Life is neither linear nor predictable. A career is not something that you put on like a coat. It is something that grows organically around you, step-by-step, choice-by-choice, and experience-by-experience. Everything adds up. No work is beneath you. Nothing is a waste of time unless you make it so. An elderly cab driver in Bogota may well have as much to teach you as a wandering sadhu in India or a mystic saint in the Sahara. There were tens of thousands of teachers out there that I did not even know I had.

Wade Davis – Explorers’ Sketchbooks The Art of Discovery & Adventure

Anthropologist Wade Davis (a real life Indian Jones?) reminds us of the unpredictability of life and career.

Work hard, pursue an education, but be open to the surprising teachers along the way.