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October 16 - October 21, 2018
Having the ability to chart your own course shifts the onus of leadership back onto you.
opportunity and achievement do not flow from a sense of entitlement.
We expect to be fully utilized and constantly optimized, regardless of whether we’re working in a start-up or a large organization. When our contributions and learning plateau, we leave.
We believe that “networking” is sharing. People listen to (and follow) us because of our discernment and curatorial instinct. As we share our creations as well as what fascinates us, we authentically build a community
we must draw opportunity to us by relentlessly developing our raw skills—excelling at our craft in a way that cannot go unnoticed.
First, it turns out that few people have pre-existing passions that they can match to a job. Telling them to “follow their passion,” therefore, is a recipe for anxiety and failure. Second, even when people do feel strongly about a particular topic, decades of research on career satisfaction teaches us that you need much more than a pre-existing interest to transform your work into something you love.
crucial for understanding how people build working lives they love. LESSON 1: WHAT YOU DO FOR A LIVING MATTERS LESS THAN YOU THINK
The two things that seem to really matter to McKibben are autonomy (e.g., control over what he works on, when he works on it, where he lives, etc.) and having an impact on the world. Therefore, any job that could provide him autonomy and impact would generate passion.
This pattern is common in people who love what they do. Their satisfaction doesn’t come from the details of their work but instead from a set of important lifestyle traits they’ve gained in their career.
LESSON 2: SKILL PRECEDES PASSION McKibben was able to gain autonomy and impact in his career only after he became really good at writing.
careers become compelling once they feature the general traits you seek. These traits, however, are rare and valuable—no one will hand you a lot of autonomy or impact just because you really want
choosing a career path solely because you are already passionate about the nature of the work—is a poor strategy for accomplishing this goal. It assumes that you have a pre-existing passion to follow that matches up to a viable career,
Once we’ve caught the attention of the marketplace, we can then use these skills as leverage to direct our career toward the general lifestyle traits
We became ‘labor’ because they stamped us, ‘You are labor.’ We forgot that we are entrepreneurs.” All humans are entrepreneurs not because all people should start companies, but because the will to create and forage and adapt is part of our DNA.
With a Plan A, Plan B, and Plan Z, you’ll be thinking carefully about your future yet also braced for radical change.
Among others, signature GenFlux capabilities include being adept at developing new skills and being naturally at ease with uncertainty—no small feat to be sure.
the most important skill in the age of flux is the ability to get new skills. To constantly be open to new areas of learning and new areas of growth. That is what will make you most valuable
That doesn’t mean that you should be a dilettante. You have to develop a certain level of expertise in whatever area you choose. But you need to have very little tolerance for stagnation, and if something you’re working on doesn’t go the way you wanted, you need to have a high capacity for discarding it and moving on to something else.
If you don’t have one place where you really have a passion to go deep, then dig into all the areas in which you’re interested.
The more passion you can find around what you’re doing, the more voracious you’ll be in adding and building the skills that will be useful for you in the long run. There’s this saying, “The moment you move to protecting the status quo instead of disrupting the status quo, you put yourself at risk.”
titles are a trap. The job you want today may not exist tomorrow. Thus, by tailoring your goals and your skill development to attaining a specific position, you limit your options.
Ask yourself: “What problem am I solving? What do I want to create? What do I want to change?” Your mission will spring from the answers.
Be proactive about taking on additional responsibilities and pitching new projects.
Thomas Friedman wrote, employers “are all looking for the same kind of people—people who not only have the critical thinking skills to do the value-adding jobs that technology can’t but also people who can invent, adapt, and reinvent their jobs every day, in a market that changes faster than ever.”2
You won’t be rewarded with exciting new opportunities by keeping your head down and following the rules. If you want a new challenge at work or more responsibility, it’s on you to pitch your boss or your client on what needs to be done, why it’s a good idea, why you’re the best person to do it, and why everyone will benefit.
you should be asking yourself “What’s next?” all the time. Not in a way that disengages you from your current position, of course, but rather in a way that helps you push yourself and hone in on your passion. What new skills do you want to develop? To whom should you reach out to be your mentor? Should you take on that big new project at work—the one that kind of scares you?
great creative careers are powered by an intersection of three factors: interest, skill, and opportunity.
PLAN TO ADAPT YOUR PLAN Plan flexibly, and be ready to pivot in your career if necessary. Always have a Plan A, B, and even Z in your back pocket.
DON’T SETTLE FOR THE STATUS QUO Try to regularly “disrupt” your own status quo. If you’re getting too comfortable in your current position, it’s probably time to challenge yourself in new ways.
we must awaken to our own profound capacity for growth. Our intelligence, our talents, and even our habits are all remarkably malleable. This is good news because the market—for skills, for jobs, for big ideas—is changing faster than ever.
ones we recognize as being especially clever, creative, insightful, or otherwise accomplished—often judge their abilities not only more harshly but fundamentally differently than others do. On the flip side, gifted children grow up to be more vulnerable and less sure of themselves, even when they should be the most confident people in the room.
the Be Good mind-set, where the focus is on proving that you already have a lot of ability and that you know exactly what you’re doing, and the Get Better mind-set, where the focus is on developing your ability and learning new skills. You can think of it as the difference between wanting to show that you are smart versus wanting to actually get smarter.
The problem with the Be Good mind-set is that it leaves us vulnerable when things get hard or when the people we compare ourselves with are excelling. We quickly start to doubt our ability
A Get Better mind-set, on the other hand, leads instead to self-comparison and a concern with making progress: How well am I doing today, compared with how I did yesterday, last month, or last year? Are my talents and abilities developing over time? Am I moving closer
When we think about what we are doing in terms of learning and improving, accepting that we may make some mistakes along the way, we stay motivated and persist despite the setbacks that might occur. We also find the work we do more interesting and enjoyable, and experience less depression and anxiety. We procrastinate less and plan better.
Give yourself permission to screw up. I can’t emphasize enough how important this is.
pressure to Be Good results in many more mistakes, and far inferior performance, than would a focus on Getting Better.
asking for help when you need it actually makes people think you are more capable, not less.
Think in terms of progress, not perfection. It can be helpful to write down your goals in whatever way you usually think of them—odds are you think of them in a Be Good way—and then rewrite them using Get Better language: words like improve, learn, progress, develop, grow, and become.
We human beings are designed to move between spending and renewing energy. We’re at our best when we align with our internal rhythms. That means sleeping at night and being awake during the day.
ninety minutes, they rested and renewed. After three such sessions, they were spent for the day. Ericsson subsequently posited that four and a half hours is the natural human limit for the highest level of focus on a single task in any given day.
A ritual is a highly precise behavior you do at a specific time so that it becomes automatic over time and no longer requires much conscious intention or energy. Will and discipline, it turns out, are highly overrated.
The second mastery lesson from Ericsson’s violinists is that the best way to practice is in time-limited sprints, rather than for an unbounded number of hours. It’s far less burdensome to mobilize attention on a task if you’ve got clear starting and stopping points.
Time-limited sessions also make it easier to tolerate abstaining from distractions
the importance of restoration. Many of us fear that taking time for rest and renewal will brand us as slackers.
rest is a critical component of achieving sustainable excellence over time.
Both the top two groups slept an average of 8.5 hours out of every 24—including a twenty- to thirty-minute nap in the midafternoon. The least skilled group still slept 7.8
expanding the amplitude of the waves you make in your life. When you’re working, give it everything you’ve got, for relatively short periods of time. When you’re recovering, let go and truly refuel.
The OK Plateau is that point when we reach the autonomous stage and consciously or unconsciously say to ourselves, “I am OK at how good I have gotten at this task,” and stop paying conscious attention to our improvement.
You can’t get better on autopilot. One thing that experts in field after field tend to do is use strategies to keep themselves out of that autonomous stage and under their conscious direction. That’s how you conquer those OK Plateaus.
