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

by Jocelyn K. Glei

“If opportunity doesn’t knock, build a door.”

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.

When it comes to our careers and our experience at work, we’ve become selfish—but in a good way. Getting paid is no longer enough; we expect to actually learn on the job. We want our skills to be fully utilized and are left unsatisfied by “easy jobs.” We want more responsibility when we’re ready, rather than waiting until we’ve “put in our time.” We expect to do more of what we love, automating the more laborious and monotonous parts of our work.

We do work that is, first and foremost, intrinsically rewarding.

We thrive on flexibility and are most productive when we feel fully engaged.

We make stuff often, and therefore, we fail often.

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.

“Follow your passion” is bad advice. I reached this conclusion after spending a year researching a basic question: What makes people love what they do for a living? This research turned up two strikes against the idea of following passion. 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.

LESSON 1: WHAT YOU DO FOR A LIVING MATTERS LESS THAN YOU THINK

LESSON 2: SKILL PRECEDES PASSION

Now let’s step back and pull the pieces together. The goal of feeling passionate about your work is sound. But following your passion—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, and that matching your work to a strong interest is sufficient to build long-term career satisfaction. Both of these assumptions are flawed.

“All human beings are entrepreneurs. When we were in the caves, we were all self-employed… finding our food, feeding ourselves. That’s where human history began. As civilization came, we suppressed it. We became ‘labor’ because they stamped us, ‘You are labor.’ We forgot that we are entrepreneurs.”

One of the best ways to do this is to think of yourself as an entrepreneur at the helm of a living, growing start-up venture: your career.

KEEPING YOURSELF IN PERMANENT BETA

EMPLOYING YOUR ENTREPRENEURIAL SKILLS

1. Focus on building a competitive advantage.

2. Plan to adapt. Entrepreneurs are supremely adaptable.

3. Build a network of both close allies and looser acquaintances.

4. Take intelligent risks.

You change, the competition changes, and the world changes. What cannot change is your determination to continue investing in yourself. Steve Jobs once called Apple the “biggest start-up on the planet.” 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.

I think the most important skill in the age of flux is the ability to get new skills.

There’s this saying, “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.

If the twentieth-century career was a ladder that we climbed from one predictable rung to the next, the twenty-first-century career is more like a broad rock face that we are all free-climbing. There’s no defined route, and we must use our own ingenuity, training, and strength to rise to the top. We must make our own luck.

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

2. Explore new technologies with enthusiasm.

3. Make a habit of helping people whenever you can.

4. Be proactive about taking on additional responsibilities and pitching new projects.

5. Cultivate your “luck quotient” by staying open and alert.

Lucky people take advantage of chance occurrences that come their way. Instead of going through life on cruise control, they pay attention to what’s happening around them and, therefore, are able to extract greater value from each situation… Lucky people are also open to novel opportunities and willing to try things outside of their usual experiences. They’re more inclined to pick up a book on an unfamiliar subject, to travel to less familiar destinations, and to interact with people who are different than themselves.

6. Always be asking “What’s next?”

If you don’t ask, you’ll never find out.

There are two types of work in this world. The first is the obligatory kind, the work we do because of a job or a contract, often with an eye on the clock. The second—very different—type of work we do is “work with intention.”

1. YOUR (GENUINE) INTERESTS

2. YOUR KEY SKILLS

3. YOUR “OPPORTUNITY STREAM”

WORKING AT THE I.S.O (INTEREST, SKILLS, OPPORTUNITY) INTERSECTION

When you engage with a project in your ISO, you’ve entered your zone of maximum impact. In such a state, you are a potent force of nature—your avocation becomes your vocation. You can work with full conviction, without ambiguity, and you can transcend your reliance on short-term rewards and societal approval. This is where the magic happens.

Want to change the world? Push everyone you know to work within their ISO. Mentor people to help them realize their genuine interests and skills and capitalize on even the smallest opportunities around them. When it comes to your own career, make every decision with a constant eye toward your own intersection.

Creating Opportunities

CRAFT COMES BEFORE PASSION Passion isn’t a profession, it’s a way of working. To achieve a lifestyle (and workstyle) that you love, start by cultivating rare and valuable skills that will set you apart.

PLAN TO ADAPT YOUR PLAN Plan flexibly, and be ready to pivot in your career if necessary. Always have a Plan A, B...

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 probab...

GET MISSION CRITICAL Think about your work—and where you are going—in terms of a larger mission. A job title is a closed objecti...

LUCK IS A STATE OF MIND Expose yourself to new situations, keep an open mind, and be proactive about pursuing chance opportuniti...

WORK WITH INTENTION Calibrate your career for maximum impact by working at the intersection of your genuine skill...