Adventure as a Career Plan

Adventure as a career plan: how curiosity and exploration create our best lives, friendships, and careers by Jason Lengstorf

“Where do you see yourself in five years?” Did the you from five years ago know the answer to that question?

What if we didn’t need a Five Year Plan™? What if the secret to the best possible career is not having the best plan, but having the best sense of adventure?

In this talk, Jason Lengstorf will share his own wandering journey and the lessons he learned, including:

What living in a van for two years taught him about running a digital agency

How playing charades in Italy made him a better software engineer

What ten days without internet access in Alaska meant for his productivity, relationships, and happiness

Along the way, we’ll look at success through a new lens and discuss new, potentially counterintuitive ideas, such as:

Why quitting a job to try something completely new does not mean starting over

How seemingly unrelated skills add huge benefits to our current and future capabilities

Why not having a plan may actually be the best plan of all

By the time you leave the room, you’ll have a new perspective on success and career growth, a new set of tools and frameworks to use on your own adventure, and concrete action steps to get your started down your own wandering path.

Jason Lengstorf is a developer, architect, occasional designer, and frequent speaker. He’s passionate about building tools, systems, and training materials to create high-performance teams and apps. He later encourages those teams to use their newfound free time to go outside and be people and stuff. He lives in Portland, Oregon.