⏱️ Career Strategy #12: Sequencing
How John Legend went from a corporate job to a multiple Grammy-winning musical artist by approaching his career in stages.
Welcome back to Fuzzy’s Career Strategy Series, where we share research-backed strategies & stories to help you realise your best career.
Part 1: 👋 Introducing the Career Strategy Series
Part 2: 🪜 Ladder Climbing as a Strategy
Part 3: 👩🎓 Controlled Supply as a Strategy
Part 5: 🔍 Niche-ing as a Strategy
Part 6: 🧱 Skill-stacking as a Strategy
Part 7: 👷 Be A Generalist as a Strategy
Part 8: 📊 The Portfolio Career as a Strategy
Part 9: 📣 Building a Platform as a Strategy
Part 10: 🌊 Wave-surfing as a Strategy
Part 11: 🏗️ Adding Leverage as a Strategy
Part 12: 🌏 Proximity as a Strategy
Part 13: ⏱️ Sequencing as a Strategy
There are thousands of possible pathways for your career, but our research found there are ~10-15 dominant career strategies, which can be layered together if needed - and we’ll be breaking those down for you in this series.
⏱️ Introducing Strategy #12: Sequencing
Have you ever heard of the musician John Roger Stephens?
Probably not.
But you may know him by his stage name, John Legend - the artist and producer who shot to fame in the early 2000s, with his first record winning three Grammies.
And did you know…
John Legend didn’t just spend his early career focussed on auditioning and performing while struggling financially, like many musicians do.
He actually started his career as a management consultant in New York City, spending three years at the top-tier firm Boston Consulting Group!
And he’s an incredible example of a career strategy known as sequencing.
We’ll unpack later more of John Legend’s story later, but for now let’s dive in and break down how this strategy works.
🤔 The eternal career problem: trade-offs.
Most of us have multiple career goals: money, fulfilment, learning, positive impact, flexibility and so on.
And we can’t have 100% of them, 100% of the time - so we make trade-offs.
Making those tradeoffs can often feel paralysing. For example:
Should I prioritise financial security by working in a job I don’t love?
Should I go all-in & try to make a career out of my passion?
Should I work hard to be promoted faster or prioritise work-life balance?
Should I go for the prestigious role, or the best learning opportunities?
There are several common ways to respond to this dilemma:
Some people give up on having it all and lower their expectations.
Some people try to find the unicorn role that will perfectly meet all our goals on day one - which often means getting stuck at the search phase.
Some pursue, in the words of Bo Burnham, ‘a little bit of everything, all of the time’: a little bit of money, learning, passion and balance, but not making decisive progress towards any at once.
💡 Enter: sequencing.
Think of sequencing as rejecting these responses, with a very different answer to the trade-off question.
Yes, you want it all right away.
But similar to choosing to save and invest now to build future wealth, by delaying career gratification on some dimensions and investing heavily on others, you can achieve better overall results.
In essence - treating your career like a ‘multi stage game’, and making big tradeoffs early on to unlock dramatically different possibilities later.
Sequencing relies on an important insight - you don’t have to play the same career ‘game’ over and over. Each phase of your career changes your set of possible next moves, because both you and your situation have changed.
⏰ Sequencing in practice.
This can take a few forms, but here are 3 examples:
You want to be a musician eventually, but you…
👉 Take a high-earning job (e.g. management consulting) for a few years and invest a lot of your income, to create the financial security to have more free time and pursue your passions later.
You want to produce movies or found a company eventually, but you…
👉 Take a low-paying job (e.g. joining a startup, being an assistant to an influential dirctor) with a focus on learning, make connections & build a reputation which can unlock financial rewards later.
You want to dedicate your career to a social cause, but you…
👉 Take a corporate job in which you can build transferable skills in business & operations, then transition to a nonprofit organisation where your skills can have a bigger impact.
🎷 Case Study: From consulting to multi-hyphenate musical powerhouse with John Legend.
Most musicians’ stories begin with a period of honing their craft and practising in obscurity, often in financial insecurity, before being ‘discovered’ and finally making it.
Not John Legend.
He attended the University of Pennsylvania, and majored in English with a focus on African-American literature.
While in college, he directed and performed with the co-ed jazz and pop a cappella group Counterparts.
After graduating, Legend took a job as a management consultant at Boston Consulting Group (BCG) in New York City (for those unfamiliar with the industry, it’s a high-paid, high-intensity job which typically involves working with big corporates on business strategy & operations).
He worked in his corporate job to support himself while pursuing music in his free time, honing his skills as a performer and networking in the music industry.
He was eventually spotted by the (then) up-and-coming rapper Kanye West in the early 2000s, who helped him break into the music industry by featuring him on tracks and introducing him to key contacts.
He signed with Kanye West's label and adopted the stage name "John Legend," a moniker friends had given him, releasing his debut album, Get Lifted, which included the hit single "Ordinary People."
The album received critical acclaim and won him three Grammy Awards.
Since then, John Legend has released more albums, dedicated a portion of his time to working on social justice causes (especially criminal justice reform, racial equality, and education), produced Broadway musicals and films, become one of the few people to achieve an EGOT (winning an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony), invested in a number of ventures and more.
Ultimately, John Legend’s early career in consulting helped him build the foundation and stability to pivot into music from a position of strength - as well as teaching him many skills that allowed him to make an impact across a wide range of fields.
As he says:
“It’s not the traditional route to becoming a musician, but I think it served me well… it was such a high quality of colleagues and peers, and it made me just realise that these are the types of people who I want to surround myself with, even in the music business which may not be as known for that.
Want to learn more about John Legend’s career transition? Check out the interview below!
🧠 Keep in mind.
A few considerations to note before you go all-in on sequencing.
😔 Trade-offs involve sacrifice: Be ready to miss out on things you enjoy, and to endure things you don’t, in order to make this strategy work.
🍂 Current self ≠ future self. A sequencing strategy relies on deferring gratification in the present, on the assumption that you understand well what your future self will want. But many people find that their life paths and visions of themselves evolve over time. At its worst, a sequencing strategy could lead to tunnel vision and missing out on important signals about what you actually want along the way!
📈 Unintended consequences: Pursuing a sequencing strategy can have unplanned secondary effects - for example, many people who prioritise earning over passion early on find themselves experiencing ‘lifestyle inflation’ when surrounded by peers earning & spending at high levels - and may find it difficult to save as they intended, or ever return to a lower-earning passion-driven career.
💭 Are your goals actually inter-dependent? There’s good psychological evidence that a sense of learning and mastery brings fulfilment and greater motivation - which might well lead to more success, money and flexibility. Trading off what gives you energy for other goals may end up being a short-term win, but a long-term loss.
Found this helpful?
We created this series to help people realise their best careers - so if a post really resonates with you, we’d love you to share it! ✉️
Keen for more? Check out the other posts in the series 👇
Part 1: 👋 Introducing the Career Strategy Series
Part 2: 🪜 Ladder Climbing as a Strategy
Part 3: 👩🎓 Controlled Supply as a Strategy
Part 5: 🔍 Niche-ing as a Strategy
Part 6: 🧱 Skill-stacking as a Strategy
Part 7: 👷 Be A Generalist as a Strategy
Part 8: 📊 The Portfolio Career as a Strategy
Part 9: 📣 Building a Platform as a Strategy
Part 10: 🌊 Wave-surfing as a Strategy
Part 11: 🏗️ Adding Leverage as a Strategy
Part 12: 🌏 Proximity as a Strategy
Part 13: ⏱️ Sequencing as a Strategy
Hey folks! Lucy here from Fuzzy 👋 A big thanks to one of our eagle-eyed readers, who kindly pointed out an unfinished second case study (on the FIRE early retirement movement, if anyone is curious!) which accidentally went live in this one. Post now updated! Let us know if you're keen to read about it and we can add in a fuller version later on. Thanks for reading!