The vital message here is that you own your career – warts and all – it belongs to you and only you.
You have zero obligation to serve anybody else’s ideas about “what you do” and “who you do it for or to”.
That said, if you want to maintain control of your work circumstances – and you do – then you need to have the ability to anticipate, influence, accept and leverage whatever conditions and situations arise.
Consider the similarities and differences between your views of work and your views of life? You have one or more models that help you to understand and to influence how the world works – you may have different models for work and for life in general.
You need working models that work reliably for you. Use the acronym CIRCUS to help you remember and assess the attributes of an ideal working model: Coherent, Insightful, Relevant, Cohesive, Useful, Simple.
Your models are constructed from basic truths – things that you believe – universal or objective truths, personal or subjective truths and conditional or situational truths, things that are “true enough” in specific circumstances.
This can lead you to have three working models: an authentic model rooted in universal truths, an espoused model rooted in personal truths and an active model rooted in the situation.