Physics Class Gave us one distinction early on that most of us filed away and forgot. A scalar quantity has magnitude only. A vector has magnitude and direction.
Speed is a scalar. If a car is doing 100km per hour, that number tells you how fast it is going and nothing else.
Velocity is a vector. A car going 100km per hour north is not the same as one going 100km per hour south, even though the speedometer reads the same in both.
I have found myself going back to that distinction a lot lately, not because of physics, but because of what I keep seeing in the careers of young professionals around me.
A good number of them are working hard. They are enrolling in courses, chasing certifications, moving into whatever sector happens to be attracting attention that year. A few years ago, it was crypto.
Then it was data. Now everyone wants to be in artificial intelligence or renewable energy because that is where the noise is.
Next year it will be something else, and many of the same people will move again.
None of this is laziness. If anything, it is the opposite.
But effort on its own only tells you the magnitude of what someone is doing.
It says nothing about where all that effort is pointed, and that gap, between how much someone is doing and where it is leading them, is the same gap between speed and velocity.
There is another pair of terms in physics that makes this even clearer.
Distance is the total path a person or object covers. Displacement is how far they end up from where they started, measured in a straight line.
You can run around a football field for an hour, cover a real distance, sweat through your shirt and still finish exactly where you began.
That is a lot of distance and no displacement at all.
I think about careers the same way.
Someone can spend 10 years working, changing industries every 18 months, picking up a new skill each time the market shifts, and at the end of it struggle to point to real depth in any one area.
They have covered the distance. They have not achieved displacement.
Contrast that with the professionals who become known for something, the engineer who gets called when a project is in trouble, the consultant whose name gets passed around before their work does – what sets them apart is usually not that they worked harder than everyone else, or even that they were smarter.
It is that they stayed pointed in one direction long enough for the years to start adding up instead of just piling up.
This does not mean a career should never change course.
Direction is allowed to shift, and sometimes it should. What breaks the vector is not an occasional, deliberate pivot. It is changing direction every few months in response to whatever is trending, so that nothing ever gets the chance to compound.
I see a version of this in project work too. A project team can hold daily meetings, send constant updates and stay visibly busy without moving any closer to the actual milestone that matters. Activity on a project is a scalar. Progress towards the defined objective is a vector. Anyone who has managed a project through to completion knows the difference between a team that looks busy and a team that is converging on the deliverable, and it is rarely the busier one that finishes first.
The same applies to a career. Magnitude without direction is exhausting, and it rarely leaves much behind.
Direction, even at a slower pace, tends to compound into something recognisable over time.
If there is a question worth sitting with, it is not how much you are doing this year.
It is where all of it is pointing, and whether the answer would still make sense if someone asked you again in five years.
– Temidayo Lasekan is the vice president of the PMI Namibia Chapter. He is also a senior project manager at Mondjila project advisory and management.
