Disclaimer: This is not another self-help pitch.
Given Amazon returns over 31,000 books on stress, and WebMD has a “Stress Management Center,” there are plenty of other more qualified places you could go to for “tips and tricks.”
This is about stress and work, more specifically, your life at work.
This manifesto is a statement of the principles by which I intend to live. If you believe the same, I’d invite you to sign it by adding a comment below.
Last month, a few other young professionals, namely Nicole Crimaldi, Matt Cheuvront, and (to some extent) Shane Mac suggested that the best education is self-education.
As one who loves a good debate, and as someone who’s always been sympathetic to the side of traditional education, I decided to interview Cali Harris (@caligater) who recently quit her job to pursue her Masters full-time. She’s the real deal. The video interview and a recap (with my 2 cents thrown in) are below:
image credit: Joe Loong
To be honest, this post has less to do with failure and more to do with personal innovation from within the corporate structure—the struggle to make change happen, to get your ideas implemented if you aren’t in a senior leadership position.
In 2007, Doug Hall suggested that businesses should Fail Fast, Fail Cheap when it comes to innovation. Specifically he showed the business sense of failing quickly and cheaply:
Countless job ads ask for applicants who are detail oriented. Because it’s used so much, in my opinion, “detail oriented” has become just another piece of resume word vomit.
Moreover, I don’t think it’s enough to be detail oriented. Sure it’s important to take the time to learn which details to look for, thus “orienting” yourself toward “detail” in the abstract, but I think the higher skill is the ability to make solid decisions from the details you see.
We often spend a lot of energy on the big picture decisions—which products to develop, which campaigns to create, but I think the sum of our little decisions can be just as important.
Even if profits are up. Even if your boss loves you. Even if your investors are chanting your name in the streets. Your job should never be easy.
That’s because when you view your job as easy, “Status Quo” is your middle name. Complacency sets in, and when the market changes, you’re left only with tales of yesterday’s success.
But when you view your job as a challenge (not necessarily as hard), you figure out how to make things better. You search diligently for the source of your problems, and you find solutions to fix them.
Entrepreneur.com recently blogged about biz/tech journo Michael S. Malone’s new book: The Future Arrived Yesterday: The Rise of the Protean Corporation and What It Means for You.
Malone argues that Gen Y (or the millennials, or whatever you want to call us) isn’t a hard-working or loyal generation, but it’s one that will, as Entrepreneur puts it:
“Accelerate the nation’s evolution form a corporate economy of worker bees to an entrepreneurial one of innovative thinkers and rapid change.”
While that makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside (sorry “worker bees”), I’m a little miffed about the hard-work/loyalty crack. I don’t think that loyalty and hard work are the point.
The Facebook update and subsequent backlash made the BBC News. And the Washington Post. And the San Francisco Chronicle.
It’s weird to me that we can suddenly morph from flair-spreading to profanity-spitting at the whim of Mark Zuckerberg (remember 2006?).
But no matter how you view it, social media has tremendous power.
Even President Obama has started doing foreign policy on YouTube (evidently it’s sort of working?). He’s also launched a humugo grassroots effort (mostly online) to pass his budget.
Our President has succeeded in getting connected and then calling in those contacts when he needs them.
As the economy remains in a slump, many of us are going to face the bitter reality of joblessness—whether it’s because we’ve been laid off, our companies have failed, or we’ve just graduated form college.
I’m continually assured that there are jobs out there somewhere, you just have be willing to relocate (check out this list of unemployment rates).
Which, depending on your life situation, may be either frightening or exhilarating.
For me, it was a little of both.
I moved from Nebraska to New York not too long ago. And I thought I’d share three things about my experience:
