Tag: Career

Why you will fail to have a great career…

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Larry Smith is a professor of economics at University of Waterloo. He coaches his students to find the careers that they will truly love. The most notable start-up he advised in its infancy is Research in Motion (RIM), maker of the BlackBerry. (No commentary please from the audience on how his advise is working for RIM now…Smile)

While I didn’t find any earthshattering revelations here, I did find Smith to be an engaging and inspirational storyteller in his presentation of the excuses we invent in failing to pursue our passions – – excuses including:

  • “There are no more great jobs, all the good jobs are disappearing”
  • “Great careers are a matter of luck”
  • “People who have great careers are geniuses, special one-of-kind”
  • “In 1950’s, competency would land you a good job. Today, not so much given how competitive it is…”
  • “I would do this (pursue my passion) but I’m not weird or obsessive…there is a fine line between great, weird and madness…and this is why normal people don’t have great careers”
  • “If you work hard, you can have a good career. But you need to work really really hard to have a great career and you are not prepared to sacrifice _____ (family, children, friends, etc.)
  • “I value my relationships more than my accomplishments. I will not sacrifice them in pursuit of my passion or a great career.”

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Do what you love?

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We’ve all either given or received the career advice: “Follow your dreams.”  “Do what you love.”  “Love what you do.”

Recently, there have been an increasing number of counterarguments making the case that if we were all going to “do what we love,” we’d starve doing it.

I came across a 2006 post by Paul Graham: “How To Do What You Love” that offers what may be the best thought-leadership on the subject that I have read.

Graham is an essayist, programmer, and investor. In 1995, he co-developed the first web-based application, Viaweb, which was acquired by Yahoo in 1998. He has an AB from Cornell and a PhD in Computer Science from Harvard, and studied painting at RISD and the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence.  Graham’s blog is one of the most followed in the blogosphere.

It is an essay (longish for those of us with ADD) but I would encourage you to read it in its entirety as my excerpts below don’t give his work its due:

“To do something well you have to like it. That idea is not exactly novel. We’ve got it down to four words: “Do what you love.” But it’s not enough just to tell people that. Doing what you love is complicated.”

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Don’t wait for a salary increase…

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Thank you Nicholas Bate

Wednesday For Women…Get Seduced

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“It began as a frolic…an innocent flirt. Then she was seduced and was never the same again. That’s the story of Shelly Lazarus, chairman of Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide and one of the most powerful women in business.  Early in her career, she was working at Clairol and received a call from a headhunter saying that Ogilvy, an up-and-coming advertising agency, needed a junior staffer who knew something about hair. Lazarus remembers thinking, “well, this should be fun. I’ll do it for a year or so, then I’ll go and get a real job.” But then something unexpected happened. “I was seduced,” says Lazarus. “I was absolutely smitten by the world of advertising, the world of ideas.” The rest, as they say, is history. In a steady rise spanning three-plus decades, Lazarus progressed through the Ogilvy empire and became CEO in 1996, a role she held through 2008. She was named Chairman in 1997 and remains at the helm of what has become one of the world’s largest marketing communications and branding firms….

“…Nor would she be type-cast. “There were no boxes around me, no rules to follow. So I made them up as I went along,” Lazarus remembers. “From the beginning, I was fascinated by the way different people lead. I had exposure to all these different companies and watched all these people leading in different ways. I realized that there’s no one way to lead. So it gave me permission to do it my own way – in a way that was totally me.”

“To Lazarus, passion is the lifeblood of a successful career – and life.  Get seduced by your business, she advises.  Fall in love with what you’re doing.  That’s her first piece of advice.

Here’s 8 additional career tips from Shelly:

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Are Your Positioning Yourself For Career Advancement?

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See George above.  He’s got a plan.  Competition for promotions is fierce.  What’s your plan?  You may have just received or you are about to receive your 2011 performance evaluation.  This is an appropriate time to reflect on whether you are appropriately positioning yourself for a promotion.  I thought this recent article from the HBR Blog Network: Positioning Yourself For Career Advancement was very thoughtful.  I have had several first hand experiences of the consequences of  #1 and #4 of the four common misconceptions regarding career advancement:

  1. The belief that producing results in your current job is sufficient. 
  2. Confidence that you’ll get the feedback you need from your boss in your annual performance review.
  3. The sense that promotions are all about who you know
  4. A naïve belief that all it takes is adding a little polish, a new suit, a new style.

Here are a number of excerpts from the article:

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