Difficulty As A Learning Experience In A Career
Edition #065
Introduction
Welcome to The ContraMind Code.
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Take a journey to www.contraminds.com. Listen and watch some great minds talking to us about their journey of discovery of what went into making them craftsmen of their profession to drive peak performance.
Don’t Let Quiet Quitting Harm Your Career
In this MIT Sloan Management Review article, Josh Bersin, a global industry analyst covering HR, talent, and leadership and founder of the Josh Bersin Company, writes about the effects of quiet quitting on people’s careers. Josh provides a counter-view on why it is essential to build a mindset not to quiet quit.
Here are some thoughts from the article to think about:
A job or career should be more than just a means to collect a paycheck.
It can be helpful to our career to use difficulty as a learning experience.
Disengaging from your work isn't a rational option, but you should take this path only as a last resort, as your reputation can follow you throughout your career. Instead, it’s best, to be honest and deal with challenges head-on whenever possible.
Disengaging from work can also negatively affect your development as an employee and your ability to build resilience.
When employees fully engage in their work and expect employers to ask more of them, they realise that work can be a fulfilling and meaningful part of their lives.
Work is an opportunity to pursue one’s aspirations and give our best effort. Adopting this mindset can lead to greater happiness and self-respect. And in today’s economic climate, having this attitude may make us more recession-proof.
Read more
Ravishankar Iyer on Storytelling: The Catalyst To Influence People And Business Growth
A lot is spoken about the power of storytelling, but it takes guts to take storytelling as a career. Ravishankar Iyer is a Story Coach and Founder of Story Rules (storyrules. in), a startup that offers training and coaching services on how to apply storytelling techniques at work. Here Ravishankar shares his thoughts on the nuances of storytelling.
Here are some key takeaways:
Don’t throw data back to your clients, which they most often know or can interpret but learn to tell the story behind the data.
Reading can help you become a better storyteller.
You can use storytelling techniques to enhance the quality of meetings.
Even corporate crises can leverage the power of storytelling to build buy-in and engagement in the workplace.
Honesty and Authenticity are two essential pillars of storytelling.
These and more insights can be distilled as you hear the entire podcast.
Listen to the entire episode on:
Apple Podcast | Amazon Music | YouTube | Google Podcast
‘Godfather of AI’, Geoffrey Hinton -Possible End of Humanity from AI?
Geoffrey Hinton is a British-Canadian cognitive psychologist and computer scientist, Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto and, till recently, Engineering Fellow at Google. He is most noted for his work on artificial neural networks and is considered a ‘Godfather of AI’. In this video, he spoke at the MIT Technology Review's EmTech Digital meet.
Here are some takeaways from Geoffrey Hinton on AI and its impact:
Geoffrey starts by saying that he has changed his mind about the relationship between the brain and the digital intelligence that is being developed. Then, he talks about how computer models use backpropagation which is different from how the brain works.
He explains that he used a tiny language model to build a poor approximation of the biological brain, but the growth of large language models and what they can do today has stunned him.
Large language models like GPT-4 have a trillion connections, and they know much more about everything, in fact, better than us humans, though humans have 100 trillion connections in their brains. But, despite that, with a trillion connections, computer models know a thousand times more than us. The reason is that backpropagation is a much better learning algorithm than the human brain.
GPT-4 is slowly improving its reasoning power though humans have better reasoning capabilities to date, which is increasingly getting better and better with GPT-4. They are doing sensible reasoning with an IQ of 80 or 90!
He raises an alarm about the existential threat of humans as AI and machines take control.
Generative AI will improve efficiency and productivity, and there will be significant job losses. Still, the enormous challenge of the societal impact of the rise in violence or the use of it by the Governments in War etc. is a more significant challenge and threat that we will face.
Difficulty As A Learning Experience In A Career
The term ‘difficulty as a learning experience’ stuck a chord when reading through the article by Josh Bersin in MIT Sloan Management Review.
This situation in a career is often not viewed positively, and its value needs to be understood better in how it can change or transform careers. When thrown into very difficult situations in a career, it puts you out of your comfort zone and tests your skills, grit, resilience and perseverance. It forces the best out of you and helps you discover your potential, which sometimes you may not be aware of, or helps you develop new skills, to survive and succeed. Even though it may feel a bit overwhelming initially and as you go through the grind.
But, during these difficult periods of one’s career, people either give up or move to more known and comfortable jobs as they find it hard to fight the odds they are up against. The best education systems or pedigree degrees don’t teach you how to survive these situations. During these periods of ‘career crisis’, your behaviour, your maturity to handle the situation with your colleagues and your tenacity to stay put and learn come up for serious scrutiny.
Job Tenure and Job Changes by Age
A US Bureau of Labor Statistics survey throws up some interesting insights. Among jobs held by workers ages 25 to 34, the median tenure is 2.8 years. From ages 35 to 44, the median job duration was 4.9 years, and from 45 to 54, the median tenure at a job was 7.6 years. Median tenure rose to 10.1 years for workers aged 55 to 64. A worker's age impacted the number of jobs that they held in any period. Workers held an average of 5.7 jobs during the six-year period when they were 18 to 24 years old. However, the number of jobs held declined with age. Workers had an average of 4.5 jobs when they were 25 to 34 years old and 2.9 jobs when they were 35 to 44 years old. During the most established phase of many workers' careers, ages 45 to 52, they held only an average of 1.9 jobs.
While these may be US statistics, they may be true in any country or geography. As people get older, they tend to stay in a job longer and change fewer jobs. The question is, what has changed for them to stay longer and change fewer jobs? Not much, really. The same reasons remain, like seeking higher pay, career advancement, better work-life balance, escaping an incompetent or hostile boss, reorganising at their company, choosing a less stressful job etc., remain. The hard truth, however, is that they put up with these as they have few options and don’t want to take any more risks or lose their ambition as they age. So the question is, why not prepare for this difficult situation early in your career?
Looking outside than preparing yourself inside
During these periods, you tend to blame the management, your boss, the company, your colleagues, the job role, clients etc., and the phenomenon now called ‘quiet quitting’ happens. Also, your mindset starts to look at other options and greener pastures, which significantly biases your career decisions.
To paint a picture of the opportunity that difficult careers can throw up, here are a few of them for you to think about:
Ray Kroc, who built McDonald’s as a global brand, was a struggling Illinois salesman selling milkshake mixers. His life changed when he got an order for six milkshake mixers, and he was curious to know who wanted them when he found it difficult to sell even one! He got this opportunity at the age of 52! Ray Kroc himself said, “I was an overnight success alright, but 30 years is a long, long night.”
Howard Schultz of Starbucks was hired at Starbucks as the director of retail operations and marketing. After a successful pilot of the cafe concept, the company decided not to deploy Schultz's idea further, and he stepped down from Starbucks to start his own business. Schultz left Starbucks in 1985 to open a store of his own. Starbucks invested in his venture! Of the 242 investors Schultz approached, 217 rejected his idea.
Walt Disney was fired from his first job at the Kansas City Star after his newspaper editor told him he lacked imagination or creativity! Walt Disney was 53 years old when he started Disneyland Park.
Indian IT Major Infosys’ Narayana Murthy’s first venture, Softronics, failed about a year and a half after its start. After the failure of his first venture, Narayana Murthy joined Patni Computer Systems and worked there for about five years. He then founded Infosys. He was 35 years old then!
AM Naik, Chairman of L&T, a leading Indian Engineering giant, joined the firm as a junior engineer for a meagre salary of INR 670 in 1965 to become its chairman. He fought some fiery takeover bids of the company from the clutches of Reliance Industries & Aditya Birla Group! However, he never gave up during these difficult career situations. He still works for 16-17 hours a day!
How many jobs did Nitin Paranjpe, Chief People & Transformation of Unilever, change to reach where he is today? Zero!
Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, had been with Microsoft since 1992 for 22 long years before he took up the CEO role. These were periods when Microsoft went through the most difficult business challenges moving from the desktop to the internet era! How many companies did he work for before that? Just one - Sun Microsystems!
The problem of getting carried away
You often overestimate your contribution and underestimate the environment or opportunity provided for you to excel in your work. The world around you also creates a bubble of how big a difference you have made with incredible job offers, pay hikes and promotions. It’s best not to get carried away and put a ruthless realistic filter to assess your areas of growth and improvement to be the best in what you have set out to do. Benchmarking and doing your own realistic self-appraisal in such an unreal environment is hard when everything looks rosy and too good to believe.
A Harvard Business Review article suggests some great pieces of advice for this:
De-emphasise prestige and compensation.
Start experimenting.
Spend time defining your passions.
Difficult career situations must be seen as a ‘window of opportunity’ rather than painting your mind with bleak situations and outcomes. Jumping the ship to a new job may not be the solution to the problem. Instead, it must be seen as an opportunity to learn new skills, build resilience and develop the patience to overcome the crisis, which is critical to a successful career.
Impatience and instant gratification through higher paychecks, promotions, or new jobs are not sustainable over a long career. They may look attractive in the short term but has enormous ramifications over the long term.
Some of the lessons we learnt from this week’s mission:
Disengagement from work, quiet quitting and running away from difficult challenges at work or in your career can seriously hamper your career reputation.
Storytelling can create vivid images in people's minds. It can improve their commitment and engagement if done right.
A trillion connections of computer models can do learning much better than 100 trillion connections in the human brain. Moreover, it can seriously threaten ‘human reasoning’ as they could reason better with trillions of past data points. Whether it can, needs to be observed assiduously.