Career is a long time

After 20+ years in corporate America and working at 5 different Fortune 500, I will say that it’s easy to burnout if you’re not careful. Microsoft analyzed a bunch of MS Office data and showed that we spend about 8 hours a week doing emails. Yes, doing emails. Then add on the thousands of hours of meetings, presentations, this and that.  Oye-vey.

Ambition gets you started

I have the privilege of working with high-powered business students everyday. They do the work. The ask questions. They set up office hours. They do informational interviews with alumni. They grind.

Yet, ambition can run out

There has been a shift in expectations, norms, and hunger for work. This is definitely a US-centric perspective (I live in Atlanta, GA as a FYI). I can tell you that A LOT of people are “checked out” while still at their jobs. Middle-management and mortgages. That’s not the way it should be. That’s not the way they first envisioned their careers.

My assertion is that they did not stay intellectually curious.

Curiosity is a better fuel

Ambition? Greed? Insecurity? For me, I think the right answer is curiosity. I said to several people this week:

If you are not intellectually curious – you won’t get far.  

As an optimist by nature, I am not one to tell people they are headed for doom / gloom. However, on this point, I am sure. If you don’t bring your curious, playful, fun part of your brain/heart to your work, you won’t get far. There are too many obstacles, competitors, excuses, outliers, and messy things in life –  to keep you settled, satisfied, and static.

Future is unknowable

Not to sound too Andy Grove about it, but things are changing. . .a lot . . .faster than before.  Global pandemic, fragmentation of supply chains, war in Europe, 9 interest rate hikes in 15 months, global warming, increasing geopolitical tension among the big 2 economies, generative AI (think: chatGPT), declining birth rates in the OECD. . .

The days when your “strategic plan” was just last year’s data + 3% to keep up with inflation are gone. The key assumptions about consumers, competition, your workforce, supply chain costs are up-in-the-air.

Curiosity is a renewable energy source

Certainly, education pedigree, and hard work, and ambition have their place. Those are minimum requirements – but what keeps you going after things get difficult? What keeps you interested in the industry, in the client work, in the team dynamics after your 10th project, 30th project, after 15 years? When you start treating it like a game, like a puzzle, like a challenge, like a joy – you are on to something. It’s your curiosity.

Curiosity drives you to excel

I am a big believer in Cal Newport’s work – Be so good they cannot ignore you (affiliate link). He argues that excellence precedes passion. BOOM. He argues that you cannot even articulate what “passion” is, until you are actually good enough to have an opinion about it.  BOOM. Well, what keeps you going until you get the necessary skills?  For me, curiosity.

Most of the people reading this blog post like to do good work, be recognized by their respected peers, get better at work that matters, be able to offer help to others, learn, grow, and basically win.

Curiosity = questions

Peter Drucker made it clear that his superpower was asking questions. Smart questions. Logically structured. The right people at the right time. Using answers to spur new and better questions. Digging further. It’s so much fun to ask the question WHY. So great to geek out with friends on ideas and get beyond the obvious answers.

Information is cheap

In a world where all superficial knowledge (height of Mt. Everest, BAC earnings per share, # of words in Hamlet) is immediately available, many people fancy themselves intelligent, witty, or worse – wise. No. no. no. Finding things on the internet is the cooking equivalent to finding a grocery store – yes, you parked the car and can walk into the store. You do not deserve a trophy.

ChatGPT has made this point 10x louder. Being able to type into a keyboard not only gives you the data (WHAT), but composes that instantaneously into English that your high school composition teacher would approve of.

Valuable things are buried

Scarcity drives value. Economics 101.  If it’s on the front page of Google, it’s banal. Everyone has it. If it is an easy problem – it’s already been solved. As Seth Godin says [paraphrasing] . . . if your job is easy, you should be worried.  Things of true value are buried or have not been created. Either way, curiosity can be your shovel or your flashlight. Curiosity keeps you digging and searching even when it’s boring, difficult, or seems redundant.

How I built this podcast

If you have not listened to this podcast yet, you should here. Sara Blakely (SPANX), Mark Cuban  (Dallas Mavericks), Herb Keller (Southwest) all followed their curiosity to amazing places.

Strong beliefs, Loosely held

I first heard this when listening to a Tim Ferriss interview of Marc Andreesen (Netscape founder) here, but then I see that Bob Sutton (Stanford professor) was saying this in 2006 here. Love this idea. Yes, have strong ideas and opinions – but be receptive and flexible to new (perhaps better) ideas.

Strong beliefs. . . 

Love it. Have an point of view. Do enough research and due-diligence that you stand for something. Stop hedging. Channel your experience, network, structured thinking, and sweat equity and put together some hypotheses and test them. Don’t be wishy-washy. Have a theory about the future. Link together ideas that ChatGPT wouldn’t readily think of.

Loosely held. . . 

Love it. Defend your ideas (after all you did the homework), but know when you have been defeated by a better argument, changing environment, or greater opportunity cost. Don’t be dogmatic. Do you want to be “right” or “happy”?

If you belief that you’re the smartest person in the room: a) you’re a narcisist b) you’re in a boring room.

Idea fight club

The great thing about being surrounded by smart, motivated, and diverse consulting-types is that there is no shortage of ideas. Bring your toughest and best idea to the club. Idea fight club. Let the best idea win.  This is how Ray Dalio runs Bridgewater and it works.

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.  – F. Scott Fitzgerald

How to stay curious

This comes easier for some that others. Some immediate thoughts:

• Teach what you know to someone else; trust me – you’ll study a lot harder as a teacher, than a student
• Share lunch with smart people and ask them lots of questions
• Read an article about something you don’t know, then make 1 pg PPT slide about it
• Ask your friends for podcast recommendations; here are 25 great interviews
• Download the Libby app (free library app in the US); borrow audiobooks for free
• Skim or read one of the many books on your shelf you haven’t gotten to yet
• Go to www.Finviz.com and browse through the different industries, companies, and learn something
• Search for any topic you’re interested in, and add the suffix “.pdf” to download reports on the topic
• Got to a large consulting firms’ website and download whitepapers (McKinsey, Bain, BCG, Deloitte, Accenture, EY)
• Go to Coursera, and enroll in a course; yes, you can audit them for free
• Go to Khan Academy and re-learn all the middle-school algebra that you already forgot
• Go to DuoLingo and try out their ChatGPT enhancements
• Go to YouTube and type in “ChatGPT + MidJourney” and see what you find
• Reach out to 2-3 people you’d love to have an informational interview with 
• Listen to the Moth podcast and the beautiful art of storytelling
• Start a blog; it’s been my nerd-town passion for 10+ years
• Create a portfolio of your work (writing, singing, coding, music, video, recipes)

Related posts:

• Consulting: Idea fight club
• Self-feedback: “How do you feel about your work?”
• Links