I guess it's not such a new story that when my daughter's generation enter the workforce a far higher proportion of them will find themselves with the need (and also the means) to invent their own job. And given the pace of change that surrounds us, then to reinvent it, probably many times.
Perhaps Thomas Friedman is right when he says in this NYT Op-Ed that our education curricula is poorly equipping our kids in a world where an internet connection gives you access to near universal knowledge and what you know matters far less than what you do with what you know. And whilst basic knowledge is still important, one where the capacity to think critically, solve problems creatively, collaborate and bring new possibilities to life arguably becomes more important than academic knowledge.
As does motivation. Sir Ken Robinson has spoken more eloquently than anyone about how our education system seems uniquely designed to sap the creativity out of our young. Similarly, it can sometimes feel as though many of our workplaces are uniquely designed to sap the motivation out of people. I've always thought that when recruiting staff, direct experience is often overrated, and attitude and enthusiasm underrated. Not everyone has agreed with my take on that in the past, but it has never let me down.
In the late 90s I was working in a junior management position on a bunch of magazines. The internet was really starting to infiltrate everywhere but I thought we were missing a trick and I had a few ideas about stuff I thought we should be doing in our own small way. So I did some research, put a deck together, and went to talk to anyone that I could get in to see who had any power to do something about it. What I was talking about was completely out of my remit at the time but I just thought it was important so I did something about it. Two months later I was invited to interview for the job that would change my career, helping to launch the standalone internet-only area of the business (the quaintly named IPC Electric). I only found out later that one of those people who I'd presented to had mentioned me in passing to the director of the internet division.
I tell this story because it's relevant to the chart above (taken from this deck from Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn) which makes the point about breakout opportunities in careers, and the importance of developing habits of behaviour that increase the likelihood that we'll find great career opportunities ("when you do something you stir the pot and introduce the possibility that seemingly random ideas, people, and places will collide and form new combinations and opportunities").
Too often, we look for what already exists instead of believing in ourselves to create the new. Joining IPC Electric was one of those leaps forward for me and it changed the course of my entire career. Leaving IPC over three years ago was another. Counterintuitively, like John Kay's Obiliquity, we often achieve our goals indirectly, through means and endeavours that initially seem unrelated to them. For my own daughters, my hope is that I can teach them enough self-believe that encourages them to stir the pot. This sadly compelling list of top career regrets sits as testament to how important that is.
A few things about slowness.
A while back Matt Steel wrote a powerful post about how easy it is, in the rush of life, to lose perspective and forget that when we slow down, priorities often become clearer:
"The story I told myself was that slowness and emptiness were the same thing. I couldn’t have been more wrong. I’ve found recently that when the time is used well, slowness can actually be one of the most profound sources of abundance."
Seth Godin writes about how easy it is, in an age of real-time information, unlimited digital shelf space, and sharp spikes of attention, to forget that we are also living in the golden age of 'Slow Media'. Media and content where the goal isn't always to get it out there quicker (or make it noisier) than everyone else, but to simply say something worth saying and do it in a way that's worth waiting for:
"It might not be obvious media, or easy to understand media, or easily digested media, but that's okay, because slow media is not mass media. Slow media is not for the distracted masses, it's for the focused few."
Antony Mayfield writes about working fast and slow, and the temptation to constantly work as fast as possible through ever-expanding to-do lists and sometimes missing the benefits that might come from slower activities:
"Reading and reflection – and blogging, for me – are slower modes. They aren’t execution, though. People engaged in reading and reflection look more leisurely than industrious. It feels hard to give time to these slow activities – we want to feel the heartening rush of momentum and be seen to be in the process of moving forward. It feels like progress. Even if it is slightly mindless, lacking in insights and depth that would have been added by spending time working slowly."
I'm not really big on new year resolutions but one of the things I promised myself that I'd try and do for last year was to create a bit more space. Whilst I worked pretty hard at it, I have to say that I found it tougher than expected and that, on balance, I think I was less than successful. So it continues to be an objective of mine. And it's good to be reminded of how important being slow, as well as being fast, really is.
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I'm lucky enough to live with some of England's loveliest countryside on my doorstep and my children get out in it every week. But not every child is so fortunate. The distance children roam away from home has shrunk by 90% in 30 years, and according to Natural England, less than 10% of children get to play in wild places, compared with 40% a generation ago.
So what will happen if we raise a generation of children completely out of touch with nature? That's the question asked by Project Wild Thing - a movement, and now an excellent feature length documentary project currently up on Kickstarter in which filmmaker David Bond seeks to explore the relationship that children today have with nature. It's supported by a range of worthy organisations including the National Trust, the RSPB, and the good folk at Good For Nothing. I think it's a really worthwhile project and so I've pledged my support, but it will only be funded if at least £30,000 is pledged by Thursday Dec 6 and at time of writing they were 70% of the way there. You can check out the trailer for the project below, and pledge your support here.
There's a bit in Dave Trott's Creative Mischief where he talks about the practice he's adopted over the years of giving classes of students briefs to work on and having them come into the agency in the evenings to present their work to the creative department. As well as being wonderfully useful to the students he says this helps to train the copywriters and art directors:
"...each class is a crash course in running a creative department. Writers and art directors have just a couple of hours to look at up to 20 campaigns. In that time they have to work out what's right or wrong about the research, the strategy, the media choice, the creative idea, the copywriting, and the art direction of each campaign. And they have to be able to explain what to do about it in a clear, simple way. Great training in fast, powerful, clear thinking."
(Even better, Trott's art director Gordon Smith likes to have the campaigns presented one at a time - but he doesn't let the person who did the work present it. He picks someone else from the group. As it's the first time they've seen the work, their ability to explain it is a great test of how clear the idea and thinking are.)
As part of what I do I've been fortunate enough to do a fair bit of workshop-driven work with clients this year. It's taken me round the world and enabled me to meet lots of fascinating people so I count myself very fortunate. If I'm honest though, the thing that has surprised me most about it all has been the amount it has taught me about all kinds of stuff I didn't know before. Teaching, it seems, really is a great way to learn.
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I somehow missed this, but it's a wonderful story. When he was fifteen, John Gurdon's Science teacher wrote on his school report:
"...he will not listen, but will insist on doing his work in his own way. I believe he has ideas about becoming a Scientist; on his present showing this is quite ridiculous..."
Last week, Prof John Gurdon was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine, along with Japanese researcher Shinya Yamanaka, for their work on stem cells. As the Telegraph pointed out, it's like the Munich schoolmaster who in 1895 said of his student “He will never amount to anything”. Who was he talking about? Albert Einstein.
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I'm a big fan of Sir Ken Robinson (particularly the TED talk he did on how schools kill creativity which is the most watched of all time). His book The Element is a powerful evocation of how finding the point where your natural talent meets your personal passion can lead to high achievement and personal fulfillment in work and in life. It all feels perfectly tidy and logical.
Yet do we all really know from the start what that talent and what that passion is? I'm not sure I did. I've always looked upon those who apparently had a clear vocational direction in their careers with envy. And yet I seem to have ended up doing something I get a lot from and fortunately seem to be passably good at.
This piece by Cal Newport (drawing on his new book So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love) makes the case that instead of matching a work environment to a pre-existing passion, the kind of traits that make most of us happy and motivated in our work are agnostic to the specific type of job and more akin to the kind of thing that Dan Pink talked about in Drive - the very human need for autonomy, to create and learn new things, and act in support of a purpose bigger than ourselves.
The other key point he makes is that possessing a pre-existing passion is actually quite rare and that most people who end up happy in their work "follow much more complicated paths on which passion emerges slowly over time". In other words, it's very possible to end up feeling passionate about your work without having followed a particular passion to begin with. In the absence of an overriding calling or mission to give direction to our careers, pursuing the kind of traits that Dan Pink talked about requires the development of valuable skills to offer in return, which takes time and effort. Once attained however, these skills can be used to take more control of your career, taking you on a course that may be far from an expected or standard direction, and so requiring courage but offering great potential rewards:
"Don't set out to discover passion. Instead, set out to develop it. This path might be longer and more complicated than what most upbeat career guides might preach, but it's a path much more likely to lead you somewhere worth going".
There is something here about the power of belief in yourself and what you're interested in, and the need to actively explore and nurture that. In this blunt (and pretty quirky) TEDx talk, Larry Smith (a Professor of Economics at the University of Waterloo in Canada) talks about the kind of excuse-traps it's so easy to fall into, and how important it is to look for your passion.
This excellent and comprehensive round-up from Eric Barker on what principles should guide your career (drawing on another Dan Pink work The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You'll Ever Need) makes some similar points and is worth reading, and reading again. But to pick out his six concepts:
1. There is no plan - it's impossible to predict what will happen in our careers so embrace uncertainty and make decisions for fundamental (that which we care about or believe in) rather than instrumental (things that get us from one point to another regardless of whether we enjoy it or not) reasons.
2. Strengths not weaknesses. Rather than working on fixing your weaknesses, focus on capitalising on your strengths
3. It's not about you - improve your own life by improving the lives of others. Helping others helps us to be happy and we become more successful when we're happier.
4. Persistence trumps talent. In the vast majority of cases, it is not natural talent that controls what we achieve in life (a point well made by Matthew Syed in Bounce). Rather, it is determination and hard work (and what Syed calls 'deliberate practice').
5. Make excellent mistakes. Most successful people it seems, make big mistakes along the way (and as Stephen Johnson says "error often creates a path that leads you out of your comfortable assumptions")
6. Leave an imprint. Barker quotes from psychologist Richard Wiseman's 59 Seconds: Change Your LIfe in Under a Minute:
"Asking people to spend just a minute imagining a close friend standing up at their funeral and reflecting on their personal and professional legacy helps them to identify their long-term goals and assess the degree to which they are progressing toward making those goals a reality."
Remember that top 5 regrets of the dying thing? One of them was "I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me". If you're fortunate enough to have a burning passion to pursue I wish you good luck in doing just that. If (like most of us) you're not, stop giving yourself a hard time and start questioning, exploring, and experimenting with what interests you. The more you push, and the more you learn, the more likely you are to find what you're really good at and what will give you a fulfilling and enjoyable way to pay the mortgage. As Cal Newport says, if you're unfulfilled in your current position, start by asking how you can become more valuable. Something else I'd also add - if your thinking and skills are not valued where you are now, it's never been more achievable to get out there and find somewhere where they are.
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