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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Jenny Blake
Read between
March 11 - April 7, 2023
investing your searching time wisely and getting your story straight:
If you are compelled by a force that calls you toward a specific type of work or group of people, that can provide great clarity when pivoting.
If your one-year vision is the what, or the desired destination of your next career pursuit, your project-based purpose is the why.
As you scan for projects that might suit you, look for the underlying project-based purpose.
Developing a public-facing platform, a corner of the world from which you can share your ideas and expertise with a community you cultivate, greatly amplifies your leverage during and after a pivot.
Dorie Clark, author of Stand Out: How to Find Your Breakthrough Idea and Build a Following Around It,
publishing high-quality content just often enough to keep her engaged in conversations within her industry.
Expert as teacher: Teaching large groups of people, either in person or through online channels. For example: creating software tutorials or teaching guitar by posting videos on YouTube or online course platforms.
Coach or consultant: You or a team you teach use your expertise to guide others. For example: running time management workshops like David Allen, creator of the classic productivity system Getting Things Done, or working as a professional organizer like Marie Kondo, author of the runaway hit The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up.
Subject matter expert (SME): Sharing ideas, solutions, and best practices on what you know about a specific area; forecasting or interpreting trends in your industry; disseminating knowledge and projections beyond the classroom. For example: in addition to teaching computer science at Georgetown Univer...
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Software as a service (SaaS): Create software or systems that improve efficiency or automate a specific market need. For example: online scheduling tools like Calendly and ScheduleOnce make booking meetings a snap; an accountability tracking service like AskMeEvery.com sends a question you have written, such as “Did you work out today?” to your inbox at a specified time, while tracking your yes or no responses in a dashboard to show progress.
Combinatorial innovation and curating: Make sense of the massive amounts of information across several interest areas by curating and consolidating content.
Specialized community building and connecting people: Bring like-minded people together to enhance your network and theirs, connect in an interesting setting, and align around a mission or big idea.
Brokering between buyers and sellers by creating a marketplace, facilitating comparison shopping: Systematizing the buying and selling process, or finding ways to reduce fees in traditional industries by connecting buyers and sellers.
Aggregating and analyzing data, conducting original research:
by seeking out, taking on, and excelling at the work that no one else wanted to do.
“If you don’t know what you want to do next and you are feeling stuck, do the work no one else wants to do,”
he was shooting too far ahead of his experience, at least in terms of what was visible to others from his résumé and public-facing platform.
“Care deeply, but have no expectations.”
The leapfrog approach has three key benefits: it helps build transitional skills and experience, allows you to explore what you enjoy more deeply, and enables you to form key relationships in the area you want to pivot to, even before you have your following steps lined up.
identified what she wanted, the known variables of her one-year vision,
Once people get clear on what type of opportunity they are looking for and make it known to their network, prospects materialize in surprising ways.
When you are heading in a direction that resonates, every step you take prompts another fortuitous rolling out in front of your feet.
potential directions for his next career move, skills he wanted to improve, content he was interested in, and ways his network could help.
no matter what you do or where you go, you will always have this itchy, unsettled feeling.
return to the Plant stage. Reconnect with your vision, values, strengths, and what is working.
How you react to what you are discovering is as important as what you are learning;
the primary goal of the Pilot phase is ignition and validation: generating ideas, testing those ideas, then taking small, smart risks to eventually inform bigger decisions about what’s next.
maintain an open, curious mindset, testing one hypothesis at a time, ideally several.
Prepare to be wrong
MVP, OR MINIMUM VIABLE PRODUCT.
When it comes to product development, the message is not to delay a launch by months or years so you can craft every last immaculate detail behind the scenes. Instead, form an educated guess and test it sooner rather than later with your target audience.
Just get something out, then test it, get feedback, revise, and do it over again.
That ideal state may never happen, and by that point users’ needs would likely have shifted.
“Community feeds personal, professional and economic growth.”
Taking on advisory board positions with other companies.
Volunteering for a team or interest group related to your one-year vision.
Creating an informal pop-up group or program, such as a book club.
How many touch points does it have to your strengths, career portfolio, and one-year vision?
How can you pilot in a low-cost way in terms of money, energy, and time?
What small experiments would have the most potential upside with limited downside?
Virtual workshop w/ handouts, 2 hour set rate
Neither gives you a hook unless you actually have innate talent or interest in the same skills required to be successful on that path.
lean pilot is one that does not cost a tremendous amount of time, money, or energy.
small tests to help you determine if you enjoy this area, have the skills to succeed and differentiate yourself within it, and have the potential to earn income (or any other top priority value).
pulled herself back from information-seeking mode when she realized that, although her scanning seemed helpful, it was making her feel more stuck and it did not equate to real-world insight.
scanning to piloting by volunteering to speak at smaller events to get real-time feedback, and started trusting her own wisdom for answers about next steps.
If you are not generating the traction you seek from piloting, travel can be a tremendous way to spice things up.
A fresh location can provide exactly the creative catalyst we need.
The Pilot process works just as well for travel as it does for career change.
Which of your pilots, if you invested in it further, is most likely to bring opportunities to you?
