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February 11 - February 14, 2020
we cannot expect our managers to take charge of our career development and groom us for greatness. We cannot wait quietly for the perfect mentor to arrive and guide us in the development of our craft. And we cannot count on a future filled with signposts and certainty.
Your ability to realize your potential will depend upon your willingness to hone your skills, to take bold risks, and to put your ego on the line in pursuit of something greater.
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.
To build a career, the right question is not “What job am I passionate about doing?” but instead “What way of working and living will nurture my passion?”
more, do more, be more, and grow more. Keeping yourself in “permanent beta” makes you acknowledge that you have bugs, that there’s more testing to do on yourself, and that you will continue to adapt and evolve. It means a lifelong commitment to continuous personal growth. It is a mind-set brimming with optimism because it celebrates the fact that you have the power to improve yourself and, more important, improve the world around you.
you should be identifying how your combination of assets (skills, strengths, contacts) and aspirations (dreams, values, interests) can create a unique offering in the career marketplace.
What is the mission that you are trying to fulfill in your life that gives your business meaning, that gives your work meaning? And the answer to that may change over time. You may have various missions during the course of your life. But that’s what will dictate how you should be spending your energy.
“The moment you move to protecting the status quo instead of disrupting the status quo, you put yourself at risk.” That’s the challenge for businesses, and that’s the challenge for individuals: understanding the point at which you are protecting what you know and defending what you know, instead of looking at what else you can learn and how you can grow.
Helping our peers, colleagues, and allies should be a regular habit and its own reward. We usually can’t foresee how, but the goodness always comes back around.
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. Lead the way with your own creativity and initiative, and back it up with enthusiasm and a strong business case.
In short, lucky people are open-minded, upbeat, proactive, and always willing to try something new. While it’s good to be directed in your career, you’ll want to stay open and alert to unexpected possibilities.
LUCK IS A STATE OF MIND Expose yourself to new situations, keep an open mind, and be proactive about pursuing chance opportunities. Luck comes to those who seek it.
FOCUSING ON GETTING BETTER, RATHER THAN BEING GOOD
People with above-average aptitudes—the 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 second step is to learn how you can change your own mind-set—the one you didn’t even realize you had—and learn to see your work and your world through a new, more inspiring, and more accurate lens.
Children who had been praised for their effort, on the other hand, performed roughly 25 percent better on the final set of problems compared with the first. They blamed their difficulty on not having tried hard enough; as a result, they persisted longer on the final set of problems and even enjoyed the experience.
Telling a young artist that she is “so creative,” “so talented,” or “has such a gift” implies that creativity and talent are qualities you either have or you don’t. The net result: when a project doesn’t turn out so well, or the artist’s work is rejected, she takes it as evidence that she isn’t very “creative” or “talented” after all, rather than seeing the feedback as a sign that she needs to dig deeper, try harder, or find a new approach.
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 to becoming the creative professional I want to be?
Whether it’s intelligence, creativity, self-control, charm, or athleticism—the science shows our abilities to be profoundly malleable. When it comes to mastering any skill, your experience, effort, and persistence matter a lot. Change really is always possible—there is no ability that can’t be developed with effort.
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.
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.
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.
Mastery is about regularly pushing yourself beyond your comfort zone, while also learning how to deeply restore and take care of yourself. Make rhythmic waves and you’ll not only get better at what you practice, you’ll also feel more in control of your life.
One of the essential things they have found is that, if you want to get better at something, you cannot do it in that autonomous stage. 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.
The way to get better at a skill is to force yourself to practice just beyond your limits.
It’s hard to be your own coach, but not impossible. The key thing is to set up structures that provide you with objective feedback—and to not be so blind that you can’t take that feedback and use it.
Instead of triggering the action itself, our consciousness tries to explain why we took the action after the fact, with varying degrees of success. This means that even the choices we do appear to make intentionally are at least somewhat influenced by unconscious patterns.
what you do every day is best seen as an iceberg, with a small fraction of conscious decision sitting atop a much larger foundation of habits and behaviors.
Once you know that patterns run much of your life, you can start figuring out how to change them.
willpower is a finite resource—something that gets depleted with use. Roy Baumeister did the first experiments on this phenomenon, known as “ego depletion,” showing that the exertion of willpower in one area makes it harder to exert it on another task later.
The key to changing a habit is to realize the ineffectiveness of willpower. It’s not that willpower is unnecessary, but more that it’s a much less powerful tool than most of us assume. Because our willpower is limited, it helps to be clever in how we establish new habits.
The next insight for changing habits is called classical conditioning. This is a basic psychological principle first discovered by Ivan Pavlov through his famous experiment with dogs.
You can also use classical conditioning to speed up the process of habit change. By making the habit you’re working on extremely consistent, you speed up the time it takes to make the behavior automatic.
A diary can help fill the void. It can serve as a sounding board and an alter-ego companion—one who will never forget what you say. What might otherwise have been isolated or passing thoughts become permanent and potentially powerful ideas.
By keeping a daily diary, you will reduce the chance that some later event will transform your memory of the day’s experiences. So when you feel you have accomplished something, write it down soon, before a client or critic has the opportunity to say something that diminishes that sense of progress.
one of the most important reasons to keep a diary: it can make you more aware of your own progress, thus becoming a wellspring of joy in your workday.
On the days when these professionals saw themselves moving forward on something they cared about—even if the progress was a seemingly incremental “small win”—they were more likely to be happy and deeply engaged in their work. And, being happier and more deeply engaged, they were more likely to come up with new ideas and solve problems creatively.
our research suggests that it can be particularly useful to reflect and write on any of the following: Progress, even a small step forward, in work you care about Anyone or anything that helped or hindered your progress Goals and plans, especially a plan for making progress tomorrow Issues or “to-dos” that may be causing you stress as they swirl through your mind Anything that brought you joy or pleasure, even if it lasted only a moment
Be alert to emerging patterns, and jot them down as you see them. Was there a type of project on which you seemed to make particularly steady progress or feel particularly engaged? Specifically, try to identify the greatest sources of meaning in your work—the types of projects in which you felt you were really making a difference. Those are clues about what motivates you most strongly and where you should concentrate your energies going forward.
This is your life; savor it. Hold on to the threads across days that, when woven together, reveal the rich tapestry of what you are achieving and who you are becoming. The best part is that, seeing the story line appearing, you can actively create what it—and you—will become.
Once you stop trying to be good (and look smart), you can focus on tackling the exciting challenges that will help you get better.
Track your progress by journaling for a few minutes every day. The practice will help you identify stumbling blocks, observe patterns, and document successes.
In truth, no individual (or idea) can flourish in a vacuum. Relationships, camaraderie, and collaboration are the lifeblood of our personal well-being and our professional success.
At every stage in our careers, whatever level of opportunity or growth we seek, we depend on relationships to drive us forward.
In a world of collaborative creation, whom we surround ourselves with dictates how much we can achieve.
Views contrary to your own are always helpful, as sometimes you will see truth in them and effect change, and, if not, you will be stress-testing and ultimately strengthening your own convictions.
To ensure that you are optimizing your potential, consider recasting this narrative: Are you taking best advantage of the help that others can offer, and, more important, are you offering to others all the help you are capable of providing?
