Passion is the fuel for early careers. When you’re young, just out of school, you don’t have expertise and proven skills — you have education and ambition. Turning that raw energy into concrete skills that create value is crucial — like a wind turbine converting wind into electricity. These skills become chips you can trade […]
Act Like an Owner at Work to Grow Your Career Faster
Too many people hold back at work. They do the equivalent of “clock in, clock out.” Then they wonder why they aren’t making more money, being promoted, or having recruiters knocking down their door. When you hold back at work, waiting on an unknown future event to unlock your potential and your commitment, the primary […]
Stuck in your career? Here’s what to do next
I’ll never forget how it feels to be stuck. Let’s go back in time to my first startup job. I’m sitting at the counter at Harlow, my favorite healthy breakfast spot here in Portland. As I wait on my food, I take off my rain suit to let it dry until I have to get […]
Generalist vs Specialist: There’s No Right Answer for Your Career
When it comes to growing your career, there’s long been a thriving debate over the merits of building generalist vs specialist skill sets. Spoiler: there is no right answer. In reality, whether to build a generalist or specialist skill set (and therefore career path) relates much more to two things: What do you enjoy? What […]
Talent-Company Fit is the Career Equivalent to Product-Market Fit
What do the people with the most fulfilling career trajectories have in common? The most obvious trend: top performers act like owners. Performance leads to leverage. Leverage creates career opportunity. It’s common advice. In order to make the biggest impact on your company, treat it like it’s your own. See a problem? Solve it. Have […]
Five Techniques for Chasing Your Unanswered Callings [Research Summary]
In Every Good Endeavor, Timothy Keller introduces the book by referencing back to Robert Bellah’s Habits of the Heart, starting with a passage on the perils of individualism at the expense of all else: “We are moving to an ever greater validation of the sacredness of the individual person, [but] our capacity to imagine a social fabric that […]
What are you optimizing for? (Or, why I want more moments of joy)
I get in bed and pull the covers up around me. I roll over to tell my wife good night. She’s already fast asleep and cuddling our younger dog like it’s our child. I take a moment to simply watch them sleep peacefully before turning the light out. We invite ourselves over to our close […]
Am I Enough?
When things are going well, it’s easy to wait on the other shoe to drop. “See, I knew I wasn’t doing enough,” I expect to say some day in the future when it all falls apart. I don’t have what it takes. I’m a fraud. When things are going poorly, it’s easy to ride the […]
Define Your Flywheel to Fuel Faster Business Growth
In his classic management book, Good to Great, Jim Collins shares an idea called a flywheel. That concept can help you and your company define what drives growth and then do more of those things over time. It’s a powerful tool for strategic clarity. Collins recently expanded on the concept in a recent manifesto called […]
A Simple System for Creating Community Based on Dunbar’s Number
My wife was busy on that Saturday afternoon in 2014, so I pulled out my list of my friends in Atlanta and sent a flurry of texts inviting 10-15 of them to grab dinner with me in Virginia Highland. Five or six of them said yes and we ended up grabbing wings and beer at […]