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June 9 - June 10, 2019
To help guide you through this brave new world, 99U’s Maximize Your Potential assembles insights around four key areas that we believe are essential to long-term career success: identifying and creating new opportunities, cultivating your expertise over time, building collaborative relationships, and learning how to take risks.
LESSON 1: WHAT YOU DO FOR A LIVING MATTERS LESS THAN YOU THINK
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?”
LESSON 2: SKILL PRECEDES PASSION
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.
Bill McKibben’s story, by contrast, highlights a more sophisticated strategy for cultivating passion—one deployed by many who end up with compelling careers. 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.
For entrepreneurs, finished is an f-word. 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. 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.
1. Focus on building a competitive advantage.
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.
2. Plan to adapt. Entrepreneurs are supremely adaptable.
3. Build a network of both close allies and looser acquaintances.
4. Take intelligent risks.
I think 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 to the employer, partner, start-up of the future. And it is also what gives you the most options moving forward.
There’s this saying, “The moment you move to protecting the status quo instead of disrupting the status quo, you put yourself at risk.”
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?” Your mission will spring from the answers.
Aside from lots of hard work, great creative careers are powered by an intersection of three factors: interest, skill, and opportunity.
There is no such thing as equal access to opportunity. “Old boy” networks and nepotism run rampant in all industries. And most opportunities are entirely circumstantial. As such, you must simply define “opportunity” as anything that brings you a step closer to your genuine interest.
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.
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.
Embedded in these findings are powerful and highly specific lessons for anyone seeking mastery. The first one has to do with the power of ritual. 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 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 ability to focus single-mindedly lies at the heart of mastering any challenge. Time-limited sessions also make it easier to tolerate abstaining from distractions such as e-mail and social media.
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. This insight leads to one that’s even more surprising. When Ericsson asked the subjects in his study to name the second most important factor in improving as violinists, the near-unanimous answer was sufficient sleep.
The way to get better at a skill is to force yourself to practice just beyond your limits.
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.
There’s no magic formula, as evidenced by the staggering variety of what renowned diarists focused on. But 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
The worst-case scenario in many of the risks we now face is not serious injury or death; it is a financial setback, a blow to the reputation, a ding to the ego. Moreover, the increasing pace and uncertainty of our economic lives increases the cost and risk of, paradoxically, avoiding risk in the first place. Rather than trying to protect ourselves by avoiding decisions, then, wouldn’t it be better to embrace the risks we take—and drive the outcome we desire?
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.
