The question “what do you do?” increasingly does not make sense. Five years ago, I would have said “I’m a consultant.” People really just want to know “how do you make money?”

Increasingly, that question is coming to mean “what do you work on?” For me the answer is complicated — I create a podcast, I interview people, I write, I read extensively, I coach people in their careers, I volunteer. Some of those things help me make money and some don’t.

In organizations and in the emerging freelance economy, I have seen a steady, but dramatic shift. The people that are able to thrive are the people that are able to create. The people that are energized and excited are the ones that are doing what matters to them.

Yet, we pretend that the old markers of success — climbing the ladder, getting a promotion, having a “good” job — are what matter.

They don’t.

The Nature Of Work Has Fundamentally Changed, Yet We Operate As If It Is Still 1995

Consider the following:

The decline of full-time work: There was no net increase in full-time employment from 2005 to 2015 — all employment growth was in “alternative work arrangements” such as on-call and temporary as well as contractors and freelancers.

Work continues to increase in complexity: BCG has measured “complicatedness” of work showing that it has steadily increased 6.7% a year for 50 years. This has dramatically outpaced productivity improvements.

Limited connection between traditional education and our work: Less than three out of ten people work in fields tied to their major.

Dream jobs don’t exist: In 1997, Amy Wrzesniewski found that work that is a “calling” is a result of a mindset, not our underlying skills.

People prefer autonomy over control: Researchers found that when power is framed as autonomy versus power over people, people were much more inclined to seek power positions. Autonomy is also highly linked to job satisfaction and performance.

Money is not a motivator: In 1949, Professor Harry Harlow introduced incentives to reward monkeys and ended up destroying their intrinsic motivation. We then found the same result in humans. Yet, almost 70 years later, in organizations, we still use the language of “carrots” and and “sticks”

People are meaner at work: McKinsey found that people experiencing rudeness at work increased from 49% to 62%from 1998 to 2015. YIKES!

Failure to understand these shifts means one thing:

People are stressed, miserable and fed up, playing a game with rules that no longer exist.

In my own career journey, I made multiple career changes and eventually carved my own path as a freelancer. At every step of the road, I encountered endless amounts of bad advice, pseudo-science and buckets of hogwash about the choices I was making. Despite this, I was quite happy and engaged.

That made me wonder, why do ignore science and reality when talking about careers? In the last year as I’ve been carving my own path as a freelancer and in my work as a career coach, I’ve become obsessed with one question:

How should someone think about navigating their life and career in a way that enables them to have freedom to do the things that matter to them?

The deeper I looked, the more good ideas I found. From Pryor and Bright’s “Chaos Theory of Careers” to Adam Grant’s work on original thinking to Ryan and Deci’s self-determination theory to the fascinating research on curiosity, creativity, and solitude.

Our Deep Attachment To Work

How did we get here?

We place so much emphasis on work, yet the labor force participation rate is still less than 65%. We live in a time where we have a belief that much of meaning, dignity and identity can be unlocked through work. This cultural meme runs so deep that we tend to value any work for work’s sake and leave unquestioned the deeper questions of what it means to live a good life. It also results in bizarre phrases like “working poor” being a commonly understood and accepted phenomenon.

We need a radical mindset shift in terms of how we think about work and how we are meant to do things that matter

At the core, we need to stop praising someone for merely being employed or dutifully going into an office every day and we need to embrace the ambiguity and reality of the world.

Let’s ask people instead:

• Does your work bring you alive?
• Are you creating value for other people?
• Are you doing things that matter to you?
• What can I do to support your life?

The Framework

Foundation: Perspective, Motivation & Compass

Perpetual optimism is a force multiplier. — Colin Powell

Perspective:

We are operating under the assumption that the default path is the only path. The reality is that the default path is mostly an illusion. Most people that end up doing something that energizes them end up there through serendipity. We need to shift our thinking to embrace optimism and think about work as a life-long journey that will be reinforced by continuous learning and a flexible and open mind to new experiences, ideas and opportunities. Too often, organizations stifle motivation they tell people what not to do — numbing them into a state of learned helplessness. The reality is, for organizations to thrive and for people to thrive, we will need to push people to think on their own, question the status quo and become “original thinkers.”

We are operating under the assumption that career paths still exist and that successful people are the ones with the most money or highest rank. There are jobs and industries with great paths, but these are increasingly reserved for people who know how to acquire the right degrees and credentials. The truth is, we need to destroy the idea that a “job hopper” is somehow a lesser qualified person. We need to encourage people to try more types of work and embrace planned happenstance theory putting emphasis on optimism, open-mindedness and flexibility rather than specialization or the illusion of career paths.

Motivation:

We are operating under the assumption that having a job is enough. Unfortunately, most jobs are not set up to enable you to thrive and at worst, they may also destroy you. You are also more at the whim of the success of your industry, the pace of change in your job, and the “strategic” moves of large companies than you realize. The truth is you will need to continually self-reflect on the work that motivates you intrinsically, prioritizing mastery, autonomy, and relatedness, and continually re-assess your values, definition of success, and a connection to doing work that matters to you.

Compass:

We are operating under the assumption that companies will take care of us. Deep down, many know this is not true — just google the word “layoff” and see who was axed today. Here, I’ll do it for you…and this is only in the last 24 hours:

The truth is, we need to shift instead to approaches like Stanford Professors Bill Burnett and Dave Evans “Designing Your Life” that starts with a focus on living a good life and then helps you find work to do that fits into that. This does not mean living paycheck to paycheck— it means being thoughtful about mitigating risk through lowering expenses and eliminating debt such that you can have the freedom and flexibility to spend time how you want across all aspects of your life.

#2 How You Create: Environment, Connection & Action

It’s the way I study — to understand something by trying to work it out or, in other words, to understand something by creating it. Not creating it one hundred percent, of course; but taking a hint as to which direction to go but not remembering the details. These you work out for yourself.

Professor Richard Feynman

Environment:

We are operating under the assumption that work means going to an office 260 days a year, 5 days a week, working from 9–5 (at least). The reality is, more and more people are not working this fixed schedule and that it is often impossible to do 40+ hours of the types of creative work we will need to do in the future. We need people who are more comfortable in diverse global, virtual and remote teams and understand how to optimize their environments to maximize flow and creativity.

Connection:

We are operating under the assumption that investing more in corporate culture will make us happier. The confusing reality of this is that many of these efforts backfire since they are not built on a foundation of meaningful work. We need to instead align our work and lives around communities that share our passions and values (which can be done in companies sometimes!). We also need to shift beyond the “transaction mindset” which pervades our world and look for ways to be generous and support each other in their work so more people do the work that matters to them.

Action:

We are operating under the assumption that work is easily understood and can be documented in a process. Not to mention that it should be done full-time! The reality is, work is increasingly happening in projects and the companies that thrive are the ones that think in this context instead of keeping employees from quitting. Workers and companies will need to think about experiments — especially ones that will fail. As Adam Grant showed, original thinkers often run enormous numbers of experiments (for example Edison has 1093 patents, but most of them likely had little impact).

#3 How You Adapt: Knowledge, Progress & Vitality

Without continual growth and progress, such words as improvement, achievement, and success have no meaning. — Benjamin Franklin

Knowledge:

We are operating under the assumption that our employers and universities will train us and give us the skills we need. The data shows that most of the $150 billion spent on learning & development every year is wasted. Universities are failing to give people the skills to compete in the economy. The truth is, we need to embrace the mindset of learning through doing, thinking about learning as a lifelong project instead of something that happens from ages 5 to 22, and creating opportunities for apprenticing or projects as a way to continuously develop skills. Finally, we need to more quickly shift to and give more credibility and support to alternatives to on-campus learning.

Progress:

We are operating under the assumption that employers and managers should tell us what to do and that the hierarchy determines our value. The truth is, permission is increasingly an illusion and those who seek it are going to be left behind. Hierarchies are outdated and more concerned with power than helping us develop the skills and experience that will help us build a career and a life. This leads to unnecessary suffering, the lack of growth and people in the wrong jobs. We need to shift from external markers of success to internal ones — are we energized?, are we learning? — and think about our careers as a portfolio of different projects, connections and skills. As Marc Andreessen offers: “The first rule of career planning: Do not plan your career.”

“ Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Vitality:

We are operating under the assumption that two weeks of vacation a year is adequate and that “work-life balance” is a worthy goal. This mindset starts with the assumption that work is the most important thing and you need to be some sort of productivity ninja that carves out meaningful time for health, love, relationships and fun. We instead need to start with our work and time and think about how we can invest in other people and communities to get the best out of each other. Finally, we operate under the assumption that workplaces are the source of all dignity, meaning and energy. However, with this mindset, we avoid the solitude and reflection that will unleash our naturally creative spirits. We need to flip our thinking to ask ourselves what the conditions are for us to thrive!

Are You Ready For The Future Of Work? Take The Assessment Here

41k+ Sold! (Top 1% Book) The Pathless Path is Paul's book about walking away from a "perfect" job with a promising future and starting over again. Through painstaking experiments, living in different countries, and a deep dive into the history of our work beliefs, Paul pieces together a set of ideas and principles that guide him from unfulfilled and burned out to what he calls "the pathless path" - a new story for thinking about work in our lives. Learn More & Buy The Book Here

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However, I am incredibly lucky in that I was able to attend one of the top schools in the world – MIT Sloan. Given this, people ask me about business school all the time. Should I go? Do I need an MBA? My answer is nuanced, complicated and is more focused on getting you to think more deeply about what you are trying to achieve, but I’ll attempt to walk you through my thinking…

Let’s first look at some of the trends from my school, MIT (MIT Tuition). Here is the approximate two-year tuition cost of an MBA over the past 20 years:

• 2000: $47k
• 2005: $77k
• 2010: $98k
• 2015: $128k
• 2018: $142k
• 2020: $154k

What the hell is happening!?

When I look up the tuition every year, I have a harder time recommending that people go get their MBA. Part of this is my guilt for suggesting someone take on hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt and part of this stems from thinking there may be better options.

The money equation (ROI) still works

A typical way to assess the “value” of an MBA is to focus on salaries.

Let’s say you have a job making $65k and you earn modest salary increases that raise your salary to $70k. This would mean by going to a full-time MBA you would be forgoing $135,000 in salary over two years. This type of analysis is fraught with flaws but stick with me.

Given that few people pay full sticker price, let us assume even a 50% tuition cost of $71,000 and living costs of $25,000 a year. Also, let us assume you are able to land an internship over the summer that pays you $25,000. This puts the opportunity costs at $135,000 and the real costs at $96,000. The traditional ROI analysis says that your investment is $231,000.

Next, analyze what you can make after graduation. Top-tier MBAs can usually find jobs paying them impressive salaries that can quickly offset this investment within five years. Let’s say that you make about $150k for 3 years after graduation. The incremental $240k (3 years x $80k more than the $70k you would have been making) covers your total investment. Then you are also looking at the intangible cost of the two-year educational process. There is obvious value in this, and I’ve always thought there was a lot of value in stepping outside of the working world – not to mention being exposed to new people, new ideas, new industries and new cultures.

ROI Analysis: Worth it ✔️

However, this logic can be flawed

Looking solely at salary is short-sighted. It makes a bold assumption that your sole goal for the rest of your career is to maximize every salary increase and promotion. This does not align with reality and increasingly, is harder to do as our business world becomes more fragmented and less dependent on full-time labor.

I am almost six years out from graduating from an MBA and I talk with my classmates often. Many are a bit lost – they have had had one or two promotions but have quickly realized they have no desire to be the CEO or even a senior executive. What was the rush? Priorities have changed – other things like health, family or kids have taken over importance. So the ROI analysis that many people do is deeply flawed.

Second, looking solely at money avoids a hard look at the underlying learning transformation you are paying for. Most people expect that they will undergo some amount of improvement in their ability, skills, and expertise over the two years. It is easy to look at the success of MBA graduates and assume that the MBA had some role in the process. However, the research on this is pretty damning. Professors Jeffrey Pfeffer and Christina Fong (who both work in business schools!) published an extensive review of the evidence in 2002 and found:

What data there are suggest that business schools are not very effective: Neither possessing an MBA degree nor grades earned in courses correlate with career success, results that question the effectiveness of schools in preparing their students. And, there is little evidence that business school research is influential on management practice, calling into question the professional relevance of management scholarship

In many ways, the types of people that go to top business schools are already incredibly driven and would likely reach the same levels of success with or without the degree and dare I say, perhaps in a shorter time. I often run the thought experiment of wondering where people I know would end up with or without an MBA. My hypothesis would be that If I were to run a simulation of a driven person’s career over the next 35 years, I would guess 55 times out of 100 you might be more successful getting an MBA and 45 times out of 100 it would have had little or no impact on your level of success.

Deeper Reflection: ❓

So how do you get ahead? Is there a better way?

A question that is really bothering me lately given the massive sticker price of an MBA:

Is there a better way to transform yourself with that $150k you intend to spend over two years? Why are we so tied to a 300+-year-old way of learning in classrooms?

Design Your Own: Tim Ferriss had always wanted to go to Stanford Graduate School of Business but challenged himself to think about alternate options. He decided to not pursue an MBA and instead use the money he would be spending on tuition to build a “Real World MBA.” He decided to take the money he put aside for tuition and use it to invest in startups. On his podcast, he talked about how he lost $50,000 in his first investment, but at least he had “skin in the game” as Nassim Taleb would say.

Online Intensive Programs: Another option I have seen emerge is Seth Godin’s altMBA – when you get accepted in the program, you become part of a global online learning community of driven and passionate people and focus on “shipping” 12 projects over 30 days. Tuition for this program? $3,500. That’s less than the deposit for many of these full-time MBA programs. I spoke with Cody Royle on my podcast about his experience with the altMBA and he said the best benefit was “not a credential…but a real-world transformation” that has enabled him to write multiple books, become a freelancer and become an influential sports coach who helps people with talent management. 20 years ago he would have gotten an MBA but now he took 30 days, $3,000 and bet on himself.

One-Year MBAs: Business schools are not oblivious to the shifts happening in the market and many have added one-year MBA options in the last year. This includes schools like Cornell, Babson, Northwestern, Bryant and Miami. However, business schools are not completely ready to disrupt themselves and are charging much higher fees for the one year program – at Northwestern, the one-year program tuition is $103,316 versus $149,742 for each year in the two-year program.

Skill-Specific Programs: Georgia Tech has a one-year business analytics program that can be completed for less than $10,000 online through edX – not to mention the immediate usefulness of the skills, this seems like a steal for your effort.

Screw it, just travel: Finally, a lot of the value I found in the two-year MBA was putting myself in a different environment and pushing myself out of my comfort zone. Could you take one year off and travel through the world, potentially work in some different industries, learn languages, develop skills for less than you would spend on tuition? One of my close friends did that for a mere $24,000. He could have kept going for six years for the full sticker price of a top-tier MBA.

So challenge yourself – how could you design your own “top-tier” MBA experience?

Is the MBA still relevant?

Judging by the high placement rates of top-tier MBA graduates, I would judge that the MBA is still relevant. As long as people want to hire graduates of the school and as long as people keep attending, it will continue to remain relevant.

However, the top-tier MBA seems shakier than ever. It faces two risks, an increasingly homogeneous customer and a disconnect from the skills needed in our economy.

As tuition continues to skyrocket, it seems that demand is largely inelastic when it comes to two parts of the population:

1. people who are working for companies that will sponsor their attendance (consulting firms and investment banks) and
2. rich people and international elites

For these people one could argue that the current prices are way too low and that schools could double or triple the price and they would still attend.

This is the biggest risk of business school because one of the biggest secrets of these elite schools is that most non-sponsored student do not pay sticker price.

This is why I tell people to apply. On the off chance that you end up getting a full-ride? Then definitely go.

However, this fact is not well known and increasingly the MBA is attracting a certain type of student that knows how to jump through hoops and perform in a certain way rather than attractive a diverse set people people and a diverse set of background and experiences.

I grew up fearing debt and no one in my life really cared what schools I went to. The program I attended at MIT had a generous fellowship at the time, but if I were to do the same program today, I would pay at least three to four times more out of my pocket. In only eight years, I would likely have to take another $75,000 of debt. Just writing that sentence terrifies me a bit.

The second risk MBA’s face is an increasing disconnect between the real skills and experiences that enable people to thrive in today’s world. Top-tier MBAs are highly dependent on a symbiotic relationship with powerful, high-paying employers. As Godin stated when he launched the altMBA in 2015:

This is a small-group process that works online, designed to help people move from here to there—to stand up and become the leaders and the game changers they want to be.

I originally wrote this in 2017 and now in 2020 it seems that this gap has continued to widen with more and more cohort-based online courses like the altMBA filling the gap as well as other emerging alternatives like On Deck and even just “creating in public” on twitter as a way to enter a new industry.

The MBA may unintentionally help people make a transformation in their life, but the “job to be done” of the MBA is to groom students to work at a select group of finance, consulting, Fortune 500 companies and now, tech companies.

This is a job it does exceptionally well, but as technology and digital platforms continue to shape our economy and as creativity, experiments, original thinking and building a diversity of skills become more important, we may see many more options like the altMBA emerge to “disrupt” the top-tier MBA.

Do I regret it? (and some exercises to do before you go)

Short answer – no. I’ve written about some of the benefits I’ve gotten from an MBA – but they may not be what you would expect (full article here: Should You Go To Business School? The Only Reason That Matters):

• Lifelong friends
• Global perspective
• Taking a step out from the working world
• Contagious optimism / Overcoming self-limiting beliefs
• Thinking like a leader
• No-risk learning lab

These are not the conventional benefits you think about – because a lot of them are specific to me and were unexpected. With anything, I think you need to expect similarly. These type of experiences also have the confirmation bias effect of making it really hard to regret going to business school.

Some exercises I usually have people do when I chat with them about going to business school:

• Write down 25 ways you could get what you expect from business school now for $25,000 or less. If, after you write this list, you still want to go to business school, you should go.
• Write down what you want to do for work after business school. Now brainstorm at least one alternative to make that career shift without going to business school.
• Brainstorm five ways you could grapple with the insecurity of having an MBA-sized hole in your identity? Where does this insecurity come from? Is there a way to grapple with that insecurity directly?

I always give the rather worthless advice of “go to business school if you want to go to business school.” I’ve found that most people already have their mind made up – they are just looking for reassurance for what they have already decided!

41k+ Sold! (Top 1% Book) The Pathless Path is Paul's book about walking away from a "perfect" job with a promising future and starting over again. Through painstaking experiments, living in different countries, and a deep dive into the history of our work beliefs, Paul pieces together a set of ideas and principles that guide him from unfulfilled and burned out to what he calls "the pathless path" - a new story for thinking about work in our lives. Learn More & Buy The Book Here

The post Should you try get an MBA from a top-tier school? Its complicated. appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

People love STEM — Science, Technology, Engineering and Math. The New York Times wrote an article earlier this year talking about efforts to incentivize people to pursue STEM fields and stay away from liberal arts.

It passes the conventional wisdom test. In a time of rapid accelerating change and more technology, we surely need more people going into these jobs right?

It turns out that STEM alone is not the perfect path to jobs in growing fields with good wages. Research by David Deming has shown that more importantly, social skills, are a leading indicator of fields of jobs that are growing and paying higher wages. His research looked at two factors — how math intensive the job was and the level of social skills required for the job (full paper here). His results found a clear hierarchy of the jobs that have been growing in the economy:

He found a similar pattern for wage growth, except with less of a gap between different types of high social skill jobs. In his research he found that many “STEM’ jobs are actually shrinking, which throws into question any policy aimed at incentivizing people to major in said degrees on that basis alone. While nobody would be surprised to learn that computer science jobs have been growing, many STEM jobs have not fared as well such as biologists and architects:

Deming discussed these findings in a fascinating podcast with Jacob Morgan and I was left with more questions than answers about what we should be doing given these findings. Deming’s own paper leaves the questions of policy to others, but his research challenges a lot of the conventional wisdom over the past fifteen years. Pushing someone to major in engineering may not be the path to a success that it was in the past.

One positive from this research is that one could make the argument that humans will not be replaced by technology as many are prone to fear. As technology automates more and more routine tasks, the value of highly cognitive and social tasks seems to be increasing. Deming’s research found that as routine tasks are decreasing, non-routine analytical tasks and social skills are becoming a higher and higher share of knowledge jobs:

So should you drop out of engineering and change to a degree in communications? I’m not sure I would go that far — but a STEM degree alone is not the path for a vibrant career that it may have been in the past.

41k+ Sold! (Top 1% Book) The Pathless Path is Paul's book about walking away from a "perfect" job with a promising future and starting over again. Through painstaking experiments, living in different countries, and a deep dive into the history of our work beliefs, Paul pieces together a set of ideas and principles that guide him from unfulfilled and burned out to what he calls "the pathless path" - a new story for thinking about work in our lives. Learn More & Buy The Book Here

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The Skills Our Workforce Needs

This week Laszlo Bock shared a short update from the Aspen Institute’s National Commission on Social, Emotional, and Academic Development. He highlighted multiple frameworks that aim to identify what is needed in the modern working world. One framework from the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning identified competencies rarely talked about in education such as self-management, social awareness and responsible decision making:

This aligns with research from David Deming at Harvard on the occupations growing the fastest and the skills associate with each:

As you can see the skills growing the fastest require social skills AND math skills. Another chart highlighting this research shows a similar trend:

In today’s working world some of the best organizations are investing heavily in developing these skills in their workers (think GE, McKinsey, PwC). However, most of the workforce is being left behind. It’s not their fault that schools failed to prepare them for today’s economy.

This is a major business opportunity and Startups like General Assembly and MissionU are already taking action, but at the college level. I do have faith that the education system will catch up but there is still a huge gap that needs to be addressed.

41k+ Sold! (Top 1% Book) The Pathless Path is Paul's book about walking away from a "perfect" job with a promising future and starting over again. Through painstaking experiments, living in different countries, and a deep dive into the history of our work beliefs, Paul pieces together a set of ideas and principles that guide him from unfulfilled and burned out to what he calls "the pathless path" - a new story for thinking about work in our lives. Learn More & Buy The Book Here

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I was having lunch with a friend yesterday who is a Chief Talent Officer and also a much smarter thinker than I on organizational dynamics & talent.

He introduced me to the framework of task-competency-responsibility alignment. I love it because of its simplicity. In order to get the best out of an organization, you need to maximize the alignment of these three things on as many tasks as possible.

In addition, its a way to think about your own strengths — do you have alignment with what you are working on, your skills and the responsibility for the outcomes of that task?

Thinking about this, it made me identify two common scenarios I have seen in organizations:

1. The highly skilled employee that doesn’t have any skin in the game

This person may be frustrated that senior people don’t give him the opportunity or they may just be careless because they dont see the result of their work

Antidote: Give people more responsibility than you are comfortable with

2. The manager that doesn’t know what they are doing

This person is doing the task and is responsible for the output, but does not really know what they are doing.

Antidote: Shift to areas where this is a strength or give other members who are more competent more responsibility

41k+ Sold! (Top 1% Book) The Pathless Path is Paul's book about walking away from a "perfect" job with a promising future and starting over again. Through painstaking experiments, living in different countries, and a deep dive into the history of our work beliefs, Paul pieces together a set of ideas and principles that guide him from unfulfilled and burned out to what he calls "the pathless path" - a new story for thinking about work in our lives. Learn More & Buy The Book Here

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In the startup world there is a lot of focus on product-market fit and making sure that alignment is perfect. The better the fit, the more you will sell and the bigger your company gets.

I’ve been thinking about how this applies to individual skill level and organizations. Some organizations excel at maximizing people’s strengths. Others do well at maximizing certain kinds of strengths. A bank may excel at taking advantage of financial acumen, but may struggle to take advantage

Scenario 1: Untapped Potential

In this scenario, an organization can support talent levels up to 90% — this means it will likelt waste some talent of the best of the best people in this area.

In this case, the individual still has an opportunity to improve and grow in this environment

Scenario 2: Wasted Talent

Consider the same person who has the ability to improve up to a 90% proficiency in analytical skills — this organization can only take advantage of any skill level up to 40% proficiency. This same person doesn’t have room to grow any more — they are limited by the talent-organizational fit.

This person should probably look for a new job that better aligns with their skills

Mapping Your Skills

To take stock of your current skill-organization fit, try to take a step back and assess yourself on the skills where you are strong or where you want to improve and develop. Next assess the organizational capacity — basically an estimate of whether these skills are valued or not and if they are able to support the best of the best in these areas.

As you can see in the above chart — the person’s organization is not taking advantage of their above average leadership, written communication and analytical skills. However, there is still room to grow in public speaking and problem solving.

Depending on where you see your career going and which skills you want to develop, you need to think about whether staying at your current organization is doing more harm than good.

41k+ Sold! (Top 1% Book) The Pathless Path is Paul's book about walking away from a "perfect" job with a promising future and starting over again. Through painstaking experiments, living in different countries, and a deep dive into the history of our work beliefs, Paul pieces together a set of ideas and principles that guide him from unfulfilled and burned out to what he calls "the pathless path" - a new story for thinking about work in our lives. Learn More & Buy The Book Here

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Josh was a chess prodigy at a young age and eventually became a world champion. He eventually took a break from chess, but re-focused his efforts on Taiwanese Push Hands — a martial art of which he also became world champion.

What’s his secret? One of them is his ability to aproach things with a “beginner’s mind”:

Beginner’s mind is approaching things with that wonderful, fresh, open spirit of a child

This is easy or almost natural if we are approaching something we are not really sure about — but it gets harder the more we know:

Its an incredibly easy thing to have beginners mind when we’re a beginner when were learning…then we start to be told that we are good, we start to feel proficient, then we start to have our ego attached and we start to think that we have some answers — and thats when things get dangerous

Often when we encounter subjects — we already think we know the answer. We have lost the spirit for discovery. You are quick to identify the reasons why something can’t be done rathter than re-imagining the future. I am certainly guilty of this.

In the workplace, I am amazed at how pervasive some truly bad ideas are. For example: the performance bonus. People who have been getting year-end performance bonuses are so convinced at their effectiveness — mostly because that is what they have been rewarded with throughout their entire career. It must be right.

However, the challenge is not understanding that the current system is broken — but coming up with a better alternative. If we started with the beginner’s mind — where would we end up?

41k+ Sold! (Top 1% Book) The Pathless Path is Paul's book about walking away from a "perfect" job with a promising future and starting over again. Through painstaking experiments, living in different countries, and a deep dive into the history of our work beliefs, Paul pieces together a set of ideas and principles that guide him from unfulfilled and burned out to what he calls "the pathless path" - a new story for thinking about work in our lives. Learn More & Buy The Book Here

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My goal has always been to be versatile and have flexibility in my career. In today’s economy it’s the only way I know how to prepare for the future.

Many jobs that people have today didn’t exist ten years ago. My last three jobs didn’t exist before I had the role. The workplace is changing — fast.

So instead of having a strategy where I aim for a specific role or company I focus on building skills.

At work I volunteer for things that are outside of my current skills. In multiple roles I have volunteered to teach trainings or develop training material. When I first did this I didn’t know what I was doing. Over time it became a strength.

Outside of work I’ll volunteer to speak and present so that I can become a strong public streaker.

Throughout my career I’ve also taken a deliberate strategy to work in different area. I’ve worked in finance, manufacturing, strategy, research and talent roles.

I don’t have a clear goal for where I expect these skills to take me — I just hope to have more options and flexibility later in my career.

41k+ Sold! (Top 1% Book) The Pathless Path is Paul's book about walking away from a "perfect" job with a promising future and starting over again. Through painstaking experiments, living in different countries, and a deep dive into the history of our work beliefs, Paul pieces together a set of ideas and principles that guide him from unfulfilled and burned out to what he calls "the pathless path" - a new story for thinking about work in our lives. Learn More & Buy The Book Here

[contact-form-7]

The post Skill building as a career strategy appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.