Maximize Your Potential: Grow Your Expertise, Take Bold Risks & Build an Incredible Career (99U Book 2)

by Jocelyn K. Glei

Here’s a name for us: Free Radicals. Free Radicals want to take their careers into their own hands and put the world to work for them. Free Radicals are resilient, self-reliant, and extremely potent. You’ll find them working solo, in small teams, or within large companies. As the world changes, Free Radicals have re-imagined “work” as we know it. No doubt, we have lofty expectations.

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?”

Finished ought to be an f-word for all of us. We are all works in progress. Each day presents an opportunity to learn more, do more, be more, and grow more.

1. Focus on building a competitive advantage. Ask yourself, “In which ways am I better and different from other people who do similar work?”

Just as business entrepreneurs focus on how their company can deliver a product faster/better/cheaper than other companies, 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.

1. Look beyond the job title, and focus on your mission.

Rather than setting your sights on a specific role, focus instead on what you want to accomplish. Ask yourself: “What problem am I solving? What do I want to create? What do I want to change?”

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.

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. Understanding why this happens is the first step in realizing your potential and avoiding the pitfalls that have derailed you in the past. 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.

The kind of feedback we get from parents, teachers, and mentors when we are young has a major impact on the beliefs we develop about our abilities—including whether we see them as innate and unchangeable or as capable of developing through effort and practice. 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.

TWO MIND-SETS: BE GOOD VS. GET BETTER We all approach the goals we pursue with one of two mind-sets: what I call 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. When we have a Be Good mind-set, we are constantly comparing our performance with that of other people’s, to see how we size up and to receive validation for our talents. This is the mind-set we end up with when we are given too much “ability” praise and come to believe that our talents are innate and unchanging. It’s also the mind-set we often (unconsciously) adopt when our environment is highly evaluative—when our work is constantly exposed to the judgment of others. For creative professionals, this is particularly the case—evaluation and criticism are an unavoidable part of any artist’s life. 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 (“Oh no, maybe I’m not good at this!”), and this creates a lot of anxiety. Ironically, worrying about your ability makes you much more likely to ultimately fail. Countless studies have shown that nothing interferes with your performanc...

SHIFTING YOUR MIND-SET How can you retrain your brain and adopt the Get Better mind-set at work and in life? 1. Give yourself permission to screw up. I can’t emphasize enough how important this is. Start any new project or endeavor by saying to yourself, “I may not get the hang of this right away. I’m going to make mistakes, and that’s okay.” People get very nervous when I tell them to embrace the mistake. But they shouldn’t be, because as studies in my lab and others have shown, when people are allowed to make mistakes, they are significantly less likely to actually make them. Often, when we tackle a new project, we expect to be able to do the work flawlessly no matter how challenging it might be. The focus is all about Being Good, and the prospect becomes daunting. The irony is that all this pressure to Be Good results in many more mistakes, and far inferior performance, than would a focus on Getting Better. 2. Ask for help when you run into trouble. Needing help doesn’t mean you aren’t capable—in fact, the opposite is true. Only the very foolish believe they can do everything on their own. And studies show that asking for help when you need it actually makes people think you are more capable, not less. 3. Compare your performance today with your performance last week or last year, rather than comparing yourself with other people. I know that you can’t really avoid comparing yourself with others entirely, but when you catch yourself doing it, remind yourself that this ki...

the next time you find yourself thinking, “But I’m just not good at this,” remember: you’re just not good at it yet.

Practice undeniably lies at the heart of mastery.

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. We each have one reservoir we draw on, and it gets progressively depleted each time we use it to get something done. If we spend energy when we wake up deciding what to wear that day, or completing a difficult task in the morning, or resisting a chocolate chip cookie following lunch, we’re left with less energy to complete any subsequent task. A ritualized approach to practice helps conserve our precious and finite reserves of energy.

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.

The third key to mastery is perhaps the most counter-intuitive. It’s the importance of restoration. Many of us fear that taking time for rest and renewal will brand us as slackers. More, bigger, faster, for longer, remains the prevailing ethic in most corporate cultures. In fact, rest is a critical component of achieving sustainable excellence over time.

The way to get better at a skill is to force yourself to practice just beyond your limits.

Your health, your productivity, and the growth of your career are all shaped by the things you do each day—most by habit, not by choice.

Even the choices you do make consciously are heavily influenced by automatic patterns.

Once you know that patterns run much of your life, you can start figuring out how to change them.

Consistency means that you try to do a habit the same way each time. Imagine you wanted to set up a deliberate practice routine, where you work on a tough skill you’re trying to master for your career. Let’s say you want to commit to working on it for around three hours per week. One way you could do this is to do one hour, three days per week, when you have time. Some days you might do it before work, other days after; sometimes on weekdays and sometimes on weekends. This may work, but it’s hardly consistent. As a result, the habit will take a lot longer to become automatic. Instead, imagine that you spent thirty-five minutes each day immediately after work on that skill. Now the behavior is very consistent. It takes place on the same days, in the same conditions, in exactly the same fashion. It won’t be long before doing your practice routine after work becomes an automatic part of your day.

With focus and consistency you can change your habits. By changing your habits, you reprogram the behaviors that control most of your life and ultimately determine your success.

Diaries can be particularly helpful tools for accurately capturing positive events. In his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, the psychologist Daniel Kahneman distinguishes between experience and memory, noting that human memory of an experience can easily be altered. Kahneman describes a man who was enjoying a concert immensely until the very end, when there was an obnoxious sound in the concert hall. The man said that the noise ruined the entire concert for him. But it didn’t really, of course; he had enjoyed the concert up until that moment. What it did ruin was his memory of the concert. 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.

To hatch ideas big and small, and to make them happen, you need a mind clear of worry over “small stuff,” a sense of progress and direction, and a broad perspective on your life as it unfolds.

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.

In a world of collaborative creation, whom we surround ourselves with dictates how much we can achieve.

In any case, the first step is to ask. The worst that can happen is that someone will say no or will offer suggestions that are not especially helpful and can be ignored.

When asking for help or feedback.

She believes that whom you surround yourself with—and how you connect with them—is the single most important factor in unlocking your growth potential.

What would you say to people who think that networking is somehow disingenuous or too transactional? The underlying spirit of networking is generosity. If you engage with people in the spirit of generosity, as opposed to tit for tat—“I gave you three things, now you give me three things”—you’ll go so much farther. What’s more, the process can become joyful rather than an onerous task. Building a network is like cultivating a botanical garden: You don’t want everyone in your network to be one color or one species. You want a variety of ages and stages and professions and passions, and to tend them carefully.

It’s always good to try to steer the exchange away from debt and obligation and more into the spirit of generosity.

On peers who help each other.

Is there anything else to be aware of when you’re thinking about networking in the creative world in particular? In the creative world, there is a lot of love for the shiny penny. People are attracted to what’s new and are quick to leave behind what’s tried-and-true in favor of what’s getting attention. I think that’s interesting fodder for how you think about intentionally building your network for the long term. You want to focus on pulling in people whom you respect, people who you believe will have your interests in mind for the long haul, and also people across a wide enough range—so that you won’t have to go back to the well over and over again with just a few people. If you build your network in a smart way, you can build your entire career on the back of it.

the most successful creative projects are generated by teams that include a healthy mix of pre-existing connections, shared experiences, and totally new perspectives.

BUILD ON OTHERS’ WORK Chartres was not built by a single master but by a succession of nine masters who came and went with the ebb and flow of funding over the years. This meant there was no single comprehensive vision for the cathedral’s design—each master built on the work of his predecessor, adapting and altering the design as he saw fit and the work progressed. One of the unwritten rules of cathedral construction described by James was that whenever a new master started work, he left the previous master’s work intact. Instead of razing the stonework and starting afresh, he incorporated its lines and themes in his new construction. Start to listen to the conversations in your workplace: do people typically build on each other’s ideas (“Yes, and…”) or block them (“Yes, but”) and try to replace them with their own? How about you? When someone proposes a new idea, is your instinct to accept it and look for ways to develop it, or to critique it and pull it to pieces? When you join a project that others have started, do you look for ways to build on their foundation, or are you tempted to start over from scratch? From now on, make a conscious effort to build rather than block. Start by asking “What’s already working? How can we build on it?” Look for opportunities to praise (sincerely). Say “Yes, and” instead of “Yes, but”—and encourage others to do the same. (Don’t worry, your critical faculty won’t disappear. It’s too well-built for that.)

Don’t be too proud to listen to others.

“Co-creation” sounds like a touchy-feely expression, but the reality is that it can be downright scary. Co-creation involves letting go of control, listening—really listening—to people around you, and delegating responsibility to them. Most of all, it means building trust: earning the trust of others, trusting them in return, and trusting that together you can build something bigger and more inspiring than any of you could achieve on your own.

When we think about risks, we think about failure. When we think about failure, we start to get scared. When we start to get scared, our brains send out signals to get the hell out of there.

So you think failure is universal? We can’t avoid it? All of our paths are riddled with small and enormous failures.

There are five primary types of risks: physical, social, emotional, financial, and intellectual. I often ask people to map their own risk profile. With only a little bit of reflection, each person knows which types of risks he or she is willing to take. They realize pretty quickly that risk-taking isn’t uniform.

MISTAKES ARE INFORMATION Mine your “failures” for valuable data about what works and what doesn’t. As long as you learn from the process, it’s not a mistake.

But the Better You knows, just as you know, that the thrill is in the chase, that happiness is motion, and that fulfillment is the constant striving for that which is just beyond our reach. The Better You knows this is the way it has always been, and the way it always will be. And you know it, too.