Power To Advance Your Career
Hello friends,
I completed reading Jeffrey Pfeffer’s book on Power recently and wrote some notes as my takeaway.
“The book started by laying some ground around how we naturally tend to eschew power”, I noted in my summary. “The very thought of reading a book about it is so repugnant that we will not even dare to have the book let alone read it or even be seen to be reading it.”
“But power unfortunately is needed for nearly all things that have to do with the coming together of people. Inevitably, someone must command power. It is part of group or crowd dynamics.”
“One of the most important points to note about the subject of Power though is that anyone’s antipathy to it does not magically mean others won’t embrace it. And those who embrace it will get things that you might think you deserve and maybe you do indeed.”
With all that said, Dr Pfeffer outlined 7 Rules that can help you advance your career notwithstanding any disadvantage you may have. If you follow them.
Rule 1. Get out of your own way
Rule 2. Break the rules
Rule 3. Appear powerful
Rule 4. Build a powerful brand
Rule 5. Network relentlessly
Rule 6. Use your power
Rule 7. Success excuse (almost) everything
And “Lastly, it is worth noting that we all celebrate people of power. We see our potential in them. And that’s the thing about power, when attained, we celebrate it in others. But you see doing the work that’s required to attain it is what we often have issues with.”
Read the complete summary here - 7 Rules of Power To Advance Your Career
Ideas To Challenge Your Mind
Measure what matters. Not all that matters is measured and not all that’s measured matters. There are tones of vanity metrics in our world. And a metric that mattered yesterday, may be obsolete today.
"Often, feedback sessions are seen as a chance for people to give their input. Nothing could be further from the truth. The purpose of creative feedback is to move the project forward. Anything that does not fulfil that purpose — no matter who it comes from — has no place in a feedback session." - Josh Spector
And then what happens by Seth Godin:
We’re not very good at predicting the future.
We’ve very good at being aware of the urgency of the moment, and familiar with our need to deal with emergencies.
Before we react, though, it might be worth asking “and then what happens,” five times.
Five steps from here to there…
If any of the steps involve, “and then a miracle happens,” or “we’ll deal with that later,” it might be worth taking a few more moments to reconsider the first step.
Things I am exploring right now
A Book:
The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself - This book was first introduced to me by someone on Twitter. I am yet to buy it let alone read it. However, it popped up again as I was reading something else. It comes with great acclaim from anyone who has it and has an impressive 4.2 rating on Goodreads by almost 80,000 people. I will give it a read soon. And you can get the notes on books I’ve read here.
A video:
One of the things I enjoyed about Twitter is how easy it is to crowdsource opinions. And while I have reduced my Twitter activities in the last weeks, I was on it during the week and found another treasure video I have now listened to 3 times. It’s the commencement speech of David Foster Wallace, This is Water.
Here’s a quote from the talk that I am still thinking about:
Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centredness because it’s so socially repulsive. But it’s pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute centre of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.
Combining that quote with what Shane Parish wrote here makes it even more alive.
"We unconsciously rearrange the world into arbitrary hierarchies to make sense of the world, maintain our beliefs, and feel better." - Shane Parish
That’s all for this week,
see you next week!
I'm going to read this one. Self-proclamation is quite difficult for me.
Thank you, David.