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February 22 - May 28, 2019
identifying and creating new opportunities, cultivating your expertise over time, building collaborative relationships, and learning how to take risks.
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.
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.
We have little tolerance for the friction of bureaucracy, old-boy networks, and antiquated business practices.
We expect to be fully utilized and constantly optimized, regardless of whether we’re working in a start-up or a large organization.
We consider open source technology, APIs, and the vast collective knowledge of the Internet to be our personal arsenal.
We believe that “networking” is sharing.
We believe in meritocracy and the power of online networks and peer communities to advance our ability to do what we love, and do well by doing it.
We make a great living doing what we love.
Pick a job listing, apply, wait for a response. Get the job, perform your duties, wait for a promotion. Rinse, repeat, stagnate.
Greatness doesn’t come from taking a “lean back” approach to career planning. Get out in front of opportunity—and it will come to
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.
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?”
SKILL PRECEDES PASSION
careers become compelling once they feature the general traits you seek.
Basic economics tells us that if you want something rare and valuable, you need to offer something rare and valuable in return—and in the working world, what you have to offer are your skills.
It teaches us that we should begin by systematically developing rare and valuable skills. 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 (autonomy, flexibility, impact, growth, etc.) that resonate with us.
don’t follow your passion, cultivate it.
His book So Good They Can’t Ignore You argues that “follow your passion” is bad advice.
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.
Ask yourself, “In which ways am I better and different from other people who do similar work?”
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.
develop the skills or relationships or interests that will make you stand out from others in your industry.
Set a Plan A that’s your current implementation of building a competitive advantage (your current job, hopefully), but also have a Plan B—something you could pivot to that’s different from but related to your current work. Finally, have a steady Plan Z—a worst-case scenario plan in which you might move back in with your parents or cash out your 401(k). With a Plan A, Plan B, and Plan Z, you’ll be thinking carefully about your future yet also braced for radical change.
Your allies are the people you review life goals with, the people you trust, the people with whom you try to work proactively on projects.
Acquaintances are valuable because they tend to be folks who work in different companies, industries, or cities. They introduce the strength of diversity into your network. Connect in both ways and you’ll be ready to tackle challenging projects with plenty of hands-on support while
In your career, good entrepreneurial risks include taking on side projects on nights and weekends, embarking on international travel, asking your boss for extra work, and applying for jobs that you don’t think you’re fully qualified for.
You change, the competition changes, and the world changes. What cannot change is your determination to continue investing in yourself.
In the same way, you need to stay young, agile, and adaptive. You need to forever be a start-up. The start-up is you.
“Generation Flux” to describe those who will survive and thrive in this complex new world of work.
signature GenFlux capabilities include being adept at developing
new skills and being naturally at ease with uncertainty—no sm...
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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.
dilettante.
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.
It means that when you have an opportunity to learn and interact with something
new, you should be running toward it instead of running away from it. If you have a strong passion and you want to go deep in that one place, go deep. But don’t be surprised if you end up going deep in the wrong place. And know that, at some point, you’ll pull back and start again somewhere else. That’s just the way it’s going to be in the time of flux.
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.
“The moment you move to protecting the status quo instead of disrupting the status quo, you put yourself at risk.”
understanding the point at which you are protecting what you know and defending what you know, instead of looking at what else...
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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?”
By adopting a mission, you reframe
your ambitions in a way that allows other people to get excited and connect with you
“We’re not good at everything; we’re not good by ourselves.”
how the ability to build relationships is the key to our survival
as a race and to thriving as idea-makers. The number one way to build relationships is, of co...
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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
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.
