Photo by J H.
We’re writing this newsletter Tuesday night. We just wrapped up our first ticketed event built around taking control of your career. We’re a bit sleepy, but it was amazing. 80 people in a room doing hard work for the full day. These are the days we love our job most of all.
This message, “No one cares about your career more than you,” was our drumbeat throughout the day. It’s not meant to be a downer. There are people in your life who genuinely want to help. You have hundreds of us standing ready, an email or a tweet away, if you can make a request we know what to do with. But we don’t know what you need. We care about you. We’re cheering for you. But we don’t care about your career more than you do.You gotta tell us what you need. And for a lot of people, that’s where the hard work starts. Because you don’t know what you need. You need something to be different. You need something to be better. You need to feel like there are opportunities out there. But articulating that, and making it concrete, isn’t easy.
We can’t pack the whole day’s work into a newsletter opener. But, if it helps you to have something to chew on, here are 3 questions we used in the morning, all aimed at figuring out what you need:
- What do you value? Think about the times when work was great, and compare against the times when work was awful. What are the core differences? What makes it great for you, what’s missing when it’s terrible? If you can distill it down to a short list, you’ll help us know when something is or isn’t worth your time.
- What fits your life? What’s a thing you’d turn down a 10% raise to keep? If someone offered you a new job tomorrow for 10% more, but it was missing X, you’d pass. Often these things seem superficial (“a better commute”, “the ability to sometimes work remote”, “I want to wear shorts” are all real examples we’ve heard) but they can be an evergreen source of happy, or a constant irritant when they’re gone.
- Where are you going? You might feel like you don’t know. What we find, though, is that you have intuitions about it that are stronger than us trying to guess. What is the shape of the next thing. What does it need to be? What gets you excited to try? If we could put any job in the world in front of you, how should we run that search?
Seeing the questions doesn’t make it easier to answer them. In our session today, this slide was titled, “Figure your shit out” and figuring out your shit is hard. But when you do, it makes it so much easier for the rest of us to know how to help.
— Melissa & Johnathan
What Melissa’s reading
The Constructive Power of Self-Doubt
I clicked on this link before I looked at the byline and then realized I know the author. How happy to find a familiar and friendly name staring back at me.
Rainesford Stauffer is a real and incredibly lovely person. And her piece about the power of self-doubt is a refreshing read. It’s a delightfully contrarian view of something we take for granted as common wisdom in the Instagram age. Self doubt, bad. Believe in yourself, good.
This one found its way to an open tab precisely while we were in the throes of final preparation for something we’d never done before. I believe the kids call it timely af.
This section, in particular, spoke to me:
As much as self-belief can help us feel powerful, doubt has power, too — to serve as a reset button, to interrogate what we really want, to help us move from one chapter or decision to the next with self-awareness.
We’re on the heels of an event where we had a room full of people doing precisely this. Figuring out what they really want, plotting a course, and giving themselves the space to work it through.
So much of the magic of today was giving people space to feel the doubt, acknowledge the parts that are scary, and stay present for it anyway. If you’re staring down something big this week, this one’s for you.
What Johnathan’s listening to
This section will not become a constant podcast recommendation zone, I promise. I honestly don’t podcast nearly as much as the kids these days. But this is a good one.
Farm to Taber with guest, Saadia Muzaffar
We heart Sarah Taber and if you don’t follow her you should. But regular readers will know that we also heart Saadia very much, and you definitely need to follow her, too (though I bet you regular readers already do). To have them in conversation with one another is a real treat.
There’s a lot in the 2-parter podcast to soak up, but three things that put it on my short list for the newsletter this week:
- The way they tease apart this pattern in tech of marching into new areas (agriculture, civic planning, whatever) and announcing that they’re going to be disruptive, that no one can predict the outcomes because it’s so new, and that everyone should be patient with them for honest mistakes when they’re going so fast and inventing the future. Despite the fact that the history of other companies using the same words and making the same mistakes is very visible if you look for it. It’s worth thinking about if you work in a tech disruptor, or if you work in a field that’s being disrupted.
- Saadia really put her finger on something important in the second part around how exhausting it is to fight predictable, known-in-advance fights. I just find her really compelling when she talks about fights that you have to fight, because the stakes are too high not to, but that also use up the energy you have for building and solving in creative ways. Saadia has a way of putting words to a thing, and if you’ve ever fought an important fight, but also felt tired and sad to have to fight it, I think it’s a helpful thing to listen to.
- At the very end they talk about replacing management with automation. I think that part is mostly tongue-in-cheek. I hope.
Also Sarah gives us a brief shout out, which is nice of her.
If you folks have podcasts that we need to listen to, please do let us know. We are nibblers at the podcast trough, not feasters, but we trust your recommendations implicitly.
