Over the years in my career, I’ve watched people sacrifice things I wouldn’t. I’ve also sacrificed things that, to others, made little sense to give up. I’m at peace with those choices — more than that, they are the source of the deepest satisfaction I take from my career.

I’ve noticed the same pattern in others. The quiet joy that comes from protecting what matters to them, even when it looks irrational from the outside. And just as striking, the willingness to let go of things many of us would give almost anything to have.

Naturally, this left me curious.

While preparing this newsletter, I came across a post on X (formerly Twitter) from an Anthropic employee announcing they were quitting to “explore a poetry degree and devote [themselves] to the practice of courageous speech.” Anthropic is a young company that some already describe as the Apple of our generation — the kind of place people would leave secure, well-paid roles to join without hesitation.

And yet, this person was doing the opposite.

That moment felt familiar. It’s something I’ve seen repeatedly: people walking away from what others would gladly trade years of their lives to obtain, and doing so without regret.

This tension — why different people protect different things, and what that means for how we navigate our careers — is the focus of this week’s newsletter. One of the clearest frameworks for understanding it takes us back to a piece of research published in 1978 by Edgar Schein: Career Anchors: Discovering Your Real Values.

Schein’s Work

Schein’s work begins with a simple but unsettling observation: when people talk about their careers early on, they are often wrong about what will ultimately matter to them.

This has certainly been true for me as well, though that is a reflection for another day.

Schein did not believe people were being dishonest. Neither was I, nor were the people I observed. It was simply that most of us were inexperienced.

In his longitudinal research following professionals over many years, Schein noticed that initial ambitions regularly collapsed when real trade-offs appeared. Promotions were declined. Prestigious moves were reversed. Financial upside was passed over for reasons that sounded — even to the person making them — oddly irrational.

These decisions, he found, were not random. They followed a pattern.

Over time, Schein argued, each of us develops a career anchor — an internal compass that stabilises our choices. Once it forms, usually seven to ten years into working life, it becomes the thing we protect instinctively. We may negotiate around it, rationalise it after the fact, or disguise it in respectable language, but we rarely violate it without paying a psychological price.

A career anchor, then, is what you refuse to give up and not necessarily what you enjoy doing.

This is why the same opportunity can feel like liberation to one person and quiet suffocation to another.

Through his research, Schein identified eight distinct anchors. Most people recognise elements of several, but only one tends to dominate — the one that asserts itself when choices become costly.

  1. Some people are anchored in technical or functional competence. They want depth, mastery, and the satisfaction of being genuinely good at something. For them, promotion away from the work itself can feel less like progress and more like loss.
  2. Others are anchored in general managerial responsibility. They are energised not by depth but by integration, making trade-offs, holding the whole, carrying the weight of final accountability. Titles matter less than scope.
  3. There are those whose anchor is autonomy. Freedom over structure. Independence over hierarchy. They will often accept less pay, slower progression, or unconventional paths to preserve control over how they work.
  4. For some, security and stability sit at the centre. Predictability, continuity, and long-term safety are not secondary concerns but foundational ones. In volatile environments, these individuals don’t merely feel uncomfortable, they feel misaligned.
  5. Then there are people driven by entrepreneurial creativity. They are builders. Once something stabilises, their interest wanes. The joy lies in creation, not maintenance.
  6. Others are anchored in service or dedication to a cause. Their careers must align with their values. When that alignment breaks, the discomfort is moral as much as professional.
  7. Some are anchored in pure challenge, difficulty itself is the reward. They gravitate towards complexity, crises, and unsolved problems, and grow restless once mastery is achieved.
  8. And finally, there are those anchored in lifestyle integration. Work must fit into a broader life, family, health, geography, identity. Careers that demand total devotion feel like overreach, not ambition.

Schein was careful to make one thing clear: these anchors are not chosen deliberately, nor are they reliably visible early on. They emerge through experience — through moments where you surprise yourself by what you will and will not tolerate.

This is why so much career advice fails. It assumes flexibility where there is constraint, and choice where there is, in truth, a boundary.

A Brief Digression

One exercise I often use with people seeking career clarity is what I call True Option Exploration.

We begin by listing every option they believe is available to them. Then, systematically, we remove those that violate what they value most. The result is often surprising. What remains is usually not the option that pays the most, nor the one they enjoy the most, but the one they cannot bring themselves to abandon.

Which brings us back to that Anthropic employee — and to the countless quieter versions of that story many of us have witnessed. People stepping away from roles others would scramble for, it’s all about people protecting something invisible but non-negotiable.

That is what Schein found.

So the question, as we accumulate experience, is not what career should I pursue? It is what would I regret giving up, even if everything else looked perfect?
That answer rarely points to a job title. But it almost always reveals the anchor.

I’ll end with the poem the Anthropic employee shared — because it captures this idea better than any framework ever could.

The Way It Is

There's a thread you follow. It goes among things that change. But it doesn't change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can't get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time's unfolding.
You don't ever let go of the thread.

William Stafford