Telling Your story Archives - Boundless by Paul Millerd

How to write and share in public and not come off as a complete fool

Paul Millerd — Tue, 07 Aug 2018 01:27:17 +0000

The biggest mistake people make writing and sharing in public is taking a checklist or formula approach. If you browse LinkedIn for more than three minutes, you can find a good example rather quickly like this IBM post:

Typically the company had a meeting that probably went like this:

“we need a social media presence”

“great, let’s join LinkedIn”

“now what do we write about?”

“digital transformation seems to be hot”

Next, the team leaves the meeting and spends an ungodly amount of time developing a very below average report. This is typically done by interviewing internal “experts”, some external research and perhaps even a poll (usually an absurdly small sample size that would never help deduce anything).

How do I know this is true? I helped develop “thought leadership” at several companies. It always starts the same “we need to get out there on topic x.”

Takeaway: Fitting into the box may work, but eventually either you will run out of boxes to fit into or you will fail to build any real connections with a community you care about.

Copying Corporate

The shocking thing is that many individuals, knowingly or not, take this same approach. They look at what other individuals who have a lot of clicks post and then assume that the format of those posts is what has made them successful.

This is a huge mistake.

Many of these “influencers” have lost their mojo. What once was a unique perspective, a different writing style or a cause of which they rallied a lot of people has now evolved into them following the formula of everyone else.

“I need to write more blog posts or do more social media posts” on their end turns into a completely passive reader or consumer on the other end.

I have seen a couple people with large followings post wisdom nuggets such as:

“Betting on yourself has the best odds of paying off”

What’s the problem with this? Nothing. In fact, these people typically have done the long hard work of building a following and these simple questions can help start a discussion within those pre-build communities.

However, thinking you should copy this because of the enormous number of likes is a mistake.

Takeaway: What appears to work for other people likely will not work for you. You are missing the enormous risks at the beginning of that person’s journey that inspired people to follow them. If you are looking for any clues, e-mail those people and ask what the first piece is they wrote that broke through.

Constant Reinvention & Experiments

At its best, using social media should be experimental, seeing whats fun for you and the best way to connect with people that care about your ideas.

One person who gets all this is James Altucher. Why? He has been writing for a long time and keeps plugging away. His formula is uniquely his own formula and you know from the vulnerability of his posts that he keeps pushing himself and is always trying to reinvent himself.

Only James Altucher can write a James Altucher post.

This is the key to writing, connecting and putting your ideas out into the world. You need to write things that only you could write. You can copy some of the structure and format of posts (some tips of what works here), but there needs to be some element of originality that ties it to you.

My most read pieces of writing were both personal. One a battle with chronic illness was a two-year journey that was uniquely mine. The second was longform piece on the six elements of organizations that undermine human performance. This was something that churned around in my mind for about 15 years as I build a career focused on talent, organizational development and performance.

Takeaway: What are the stories that only you can tell? THAT is what people want to hear from you. Start there and worry about the formulas later.

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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Planning a Career is Insane — Here is a better approach

Paul Millerd — Wed, 17 May 2017 14:06:36 +0000

I graduated from business school in 2012.

The job I have now didn’t exist then and nor did the previous one. How do you plan landing your dream job if it might not exist yet?

Predicting the future is hard, so I’d like to offer a better approach:

#1 MANAGING YOUR ENERGY

When you are energized, you have energy throughout the day and even when you get home from work. People feed off this at work and come to you with interesting ideas, problems and opportunities. At home, you’ll have energy to read and explore other interests — not to mention having the energy to invest in relationships.

For me, I used this lens to slowly (really, it took years) figure out what excited me. I came to the realization that I didn’t like working for jerks or managers who did not invest in creating high-performing teams. Early in my career I took extra steps to avoid them and said to myself during business school that I would not compromise on this — life is too short.

So in one of my first jobs after business school, they replaced the President and installed a jerk. It was not a healthy atmosphere. Micromanagement, low team morale etc… This led me to quickly jump at an opportunity that was offered to me. Once I had some space from it — I realized I want to contribute to positive work environments.

#2 TELL YOUR STORY

Once I had figured this out, it really helped me channel my positive energy towards the workplace in and out. I started reading more about the workplace, organizational behavior etc… I realized I was really passionate about people, talent & culture.

At my next job, we were writing a report on organizational change. Part of that included content on leadership and talent. I threw myself at that area of research with my entire energy. I went out of my way to call the Senior Partner and share my passion (he was pumped to connect with a like-minded person despite my tenure). I volunteered to get involved in projects for several partners in the talent and culture space in addition to my own work. This helped me stand out and win some friends along the way.

#3 EMBRACE THE JOURNEY

One thing I’ve learned is that there really isn’t a dream job. There are 840 specific job categories in the BLS. What are the odds I am going to find the perfect “dream job”? Not likely at all.

I’ve learned to embrace the journey. One book that made me appreciate this was Mastery. I learned that Stephen King wrote every single day for NINE YEARS before selling a single book and that Leonardo da Vinci didn’t have his big break until he was 46. For me — the takeaway was that it was a little selfish to expect to land my dream job at 30 years old.

#4 BEGINNER’S MIND

In business school, we had to write down a list of leadership principles. I tried to think about this a little more broadly. I came up with a list of nine principles that would help me guide how I thought about my career. #6 was this:

6. Don’t settle for a comfortable job, always be learning

For me, learning is core to who I am. If I am not learning — and learning fast, I am not optimizing my energy.

Because of this, I’ve always tried to push myself to constantly be moving — whether this means getting a new job, experimenting on the side or even just reading something completely outside my comfort zone.

This symbol above is pronounced shoshin and represents the concept of Beginner’s Mind. This was introduced to me in the The Art of Learning another great book. The magic of this is that putting yourself at the start allows you to put yourself in a humble position where you don’t know what you are doing, you don’t have full confidence and you need to rely on others.

Through making a number of moves in my career, it has actually made me more confident and more adaptable, not to mention emotionally calm when reacting to new situations

#5 EXPERIMENT

In some of the career coaching work I do, I often see people get overwhelmed by the idea of a “dream job.” If it does exist (I hope, one day?) it seems like a massive undertaking. If you define success by landing that dream job, you are setting yourself up for failure by essentially creating 734 failure points and one potential successful outcome (not good!).

For me, I actually realized I wanted to get my feet wet with career coaching. One way was for me to quit my job and do it 100% from the start. Thank god I didn’t because I learned so much about what aspects of it I liked and didn’t like (I mostly learned I would never want to do this 100% of my time).

The approach I did take was to experiment on my free time, take a minimum number of clients and then to adjust my approach and focus as I go. As I’ve done this, I’ve shifted away from career transitions towards helping startup founders and also shifted more towards writing and speaking to college student than spending a ton of time coaching.

#6 DEFINE SUCCESS

Last of all, this picture sums up my thoughts:

I’ll let you cheat and steal my definition of success. No surprise that it has to do with energy.

This is pretty much what it looks like. Here are a couple scenarios:

My health goes downhill and everything else suffers:

My Career is struggling and everything else suffers:

You get the point. The takeaway here is to define success and then manager it.

To summarize:

Manage your energy
When you find what excites you, share it
Embrace the journey
Stay hungry, keep learning
Experiment
Define Success

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The Career Transition Playbook

Paul Millerd — Tue, 05 Jan 2016 02:21:44 +0000

The Career Transition Playbook is a collection of exercises, lessons and personal stories I’ve collected from over 10 years of helping people make transitions in their careers and lives.

I’ve always been fascinated with the impossible and am a fan of the underdogs. Whenever people told me I couldn’t do something, that made me want to prove them wrong. When people tell me, “I can’t do this because of Y,” I want to help them change their mind.

I’ve seen amazing things happen. I’ve helped people land jobs at GE, McKinsey and The White House as well as make transitions from being a nurse to an IT consultant, a teacher to a researcher and a social worker to a technology recruiter. In addition, I’ve helped people later in their career shift to the next chapter in their life, figuring out the next step after being CEO’s, business owners and executives.

This e-book is based on the belief that deep reflection, getting out of your comfort zone and embracing vulnerability are the only options for building a life we find worth living. If you’re reading to be open and take some chances, let’s get started…

The e-book covers ten “chapters” each with lessons, exercises, and takeaways to help you make progress:

#1 What Matters (Values)
#2 Check Your Beliefs At The Door
#3 Research Potential Roles
#4 Track and Share
#5 Assess Your Strengths
#6 Upgrade Your Resume
#7 Share Your Story
#8 Tailor Your Story
#9 Activate Your Fans
#10 Hang In There (Apply, get rejected & stay resilient)

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