MWB #24 - Career Deep Dive, Pain is A Must and Starting All Over
Oh that we know and apply our heart to understanding.
Hello there,
In the last 7 days, I’ve not so much engaged in writing or sharing things on any of my social media pages. It is some kind of an unconscious break. However, I asked a question on my WhatsApp status a couple of days ago:
What’s the best thing one can optimize for at the beginning of their career?
I got different answers, all of which revolve around one learning as much as they can when they are starting. That’s brilliant and any advice that doesn’t incorporate that point may fail on arrival.
But I believe that answer is a low hanging fruit. You would have guessed so as well especially since all answers revolve around it. Note that low hanging fruit doesn’t mean invalid. In fact, it’s the beginning of validity.
Yet I wasn’t satisfied. Because things are changing and changing fast. So I was looking for some specifics beyond “learning” that everyone gave me. Here, I will provide you with some specifics. A lot of them I learnt from others and they have helped me to be aware of what I am after what I can optimize for.
1. Focus on Career Loops
In the literature of growth & marketing, there is this concept called “loops”. The basic idea is that the best companies not only understand their “funnels”: where their users are coming from and convert down the stack — but also their loops: the process by which one cohort of users not only retains but leads to an additional cohort of users.
Erik Torenberg wrote and posited that there are four different types of career loops (or assets):
Specialized Knowledge / Skills (“Get So Good They Can’t Ignore You”)
Financial Capital ($)
Brand / Legibility (the ability for your skills/assets to be widely recognizable)
Unique Network Access/Strength
Each of these loops is reinforcing and getting your priorities to write from the start will help a great deal. The most important loop is knowledge and skills. And this agrees with all the answers I got, the low-hanging fruit. But there’s an interesting interplay between these loops. Read all about it this Twitter thread.
2. Build Personal Moats
Like company moats, your personal moat should be a competitive advantage that is not only durable—it should also compound over time. You don’t want to build a competitive advantage that is fleeting or that will get commoditized. For a lot of our professional life, what used to be (more) scarce were things like ideas, money, and exclusive relationships. In the internet economy, what has become scarce are things like specific knowledge, rare & valuable skills, and great reputations. Focus on those.
And in the internet age, it is getting increasingly difficult to find that thing that can be a competitive advantage for you. But Erik again has some ideas. Click to read them.
Also read this brilliant article on Career Moat to better understand it.
3. “Have A Thing”
These are the words of Andrew Chen on this (paraphrased):
I usually advise people to “having a thing” - starting a company, writing a book, hosting a speaker series, etc. These are all things that can grow independently of your initial effort and also automatically upgrade your knowledge and network over time.
People talk about “passive income” a lot but not about “passive social capital” or “passive networking” or “passive knowledge gaining” but that’s what you can architect if you have a thing and it grows over time without intensive constant effort to sustain it.
I stumbled on Andrew’s advice 2 years ago (2019) and it’s one of the reason’s I have this newsletter. Andrew is right, this newsletter now goes out to about 800 of you. And I can’t imagine how much this has helped you at least, then think about the goodwill that has brought me as well. Whatever it is you may want to have, just make sure you have a thing. A thing that can compound on its own. Yes, while on this journey of having a thing, in addition to this Newsletter, I have 2 other newsletters and 2 websites and that’s only the beginning.
4. Optimize For An Audience
Nick in this article is even more forward-looking. He wrote, “while rare and valuable skills were once seen as solid career fortification, automation and artificial intelligence seem poised to render many skills obsolete.” There is absolutely no doubt about that.
To make up that inevitable dislocation of the status quo, Nick made an argument that the most sustainable career moat is to have an audience.
One domain where humans seem likely to retain our edge over machines is our ability to influence other people. While machines may find ways to entertain and inform us, we humans are evolutionarily predisposed to take cues about what products to buy, politicians to vote for, and companies to work for, from other members of our species. Given the immense economic value of these choices, our ability to influence one another will likely remain a sustainable advantage for the foreseeable future. Put simply, building a large audience is a good strategy for anyone who wants to build a resilient career.
But what advantage comes with building a large audience? Nick listed a couple:
An engaged audience can also help with:
Fundraising – legitimizing you with potential investors
Job Searching – putting your ideas in front of prospective hiring managers
Recruiting – building relationships with possible hires
Customer Acquisition – creating a marketing channel to reach customers
Relationship Building – lubricating relationships with interesting people
Idea Generation – connecting you with people who can expand thinking
Again, please read this to understand it more and learn why it is important and if it is for you - Audience as a career moat.
5. Work With Ambitious People On Hard Things
Here’s how this works.
When you work with ambitious people, you rub on them and become more ambitious. Because they are a team of ambitious people it is more likely that they are working on hard things (that may even have a high probability of failure). Working on hard things forces everyone to push their boundaries. You are forced to learn and grow at a faster speed than if you were amidst the mediocre of your age.
As if that’s all. It doesn’t matter whether you succeeded in that project or not. You would’ve made lifelong friends. Ambitious friends who will go on to do some other amazing things. You have spent years with them, whatever becomes of them has a very high probability of impacting your career as well.
And lastly, because you worked with this group of people and built with them, you have earned yourself a social capital that most likely has no expiring date.
Of course, this is not to say you can have all the cards dea to you where you can have all the 5 things above working in your favour. No. Rather it is for you be aware of what you should be watching out for and what you should absolutely jump on immediately.
Tweet Of The Week
Balaji’s Musings
This week, we continue to expand on the idea of Pseudo economy. I’m sharing a thread by Balaji from 2020 on how to build a new world after you have been canceled.
That’s all for this week.
See you in the next.