Your Sorting Hat: On getting lucky repeatedly, need to improvise and changing levels
Career Tuesday
Careers, Life and Questions (Nov 14, 2023)
Wish you a Happy Career Tuesday!
3 Career Ideas
I.
"How to get lucky, every time, in 3 steps -
- Stay in the game. Players get lucky, not spectators.
- Imagine your goal. To help see chance opportunities.
- Seize the opportunity. Step out of your comfort zone."
II.
"What you know can be a burden on what you need to learn.
To learn a new topic, discard past prejudices and identities.
To learn rapidly, bring a beginner's blank slate to the room."
III.
"A product gets better when a company takes feedback from customers.
A 'feedback loop' means using positive and negative reviews to improve.
Do you have a feedback loop for your current job and career?"
2 Life Quotes from Books
I.
Isaac Asimov, legendary science fiction writer, talks about the impossibility of perfect planning and prediction, in his famous book - Foundation :
"To succeed, planning alone is insufficient. One must improvise as well."
Source: Book: Foundation by Isaac Asimov
II.
Walter Isaacson, best-selling biographer, showcases Elon Musk's building blocks for business, in the biography - Elon Musk -
"1. Question every requirement. Each should come with the name of the person who made it. You should never accept that a requirement came from a department, such as from “the legal department” or “the safety department.” You need to know the name of the real person who made that requirement. Then you should question it, no matter how smart that person is. Requirements from smart people are the most dangerous, because people are less likely to question them. Always do so, even if the requirement came from me. Then make the requirements less dumb.
2. Delete any part or process you can. You may have to add them back later. In fact, if you do not end up adding back at least 10% of them, then you didn’t delete enough.
3. Simplify and optimize. This should come after step two. A common mistake is to simplify and optimize a part or a process that should not exist.
4. Accelerate cycle time. Every process can be speeded up. But only do this after you have followed the first three steps. In the Tesla factory, I mistakenly spent a lot of time accelerating processes that I later realized should have been deleted.
5. Automate. That comes last. The big mistake in Nevada and at Fremont was that I began by trying to automate every step. We should have waited until all the requirements had been questioned, parts and processes deleted, and the bugs were shaken out."
Source: Book: Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson
1 Question
If your career was a video game, what level are you playing at? How will you reach the next level?
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Until next week,
Devashish Chakravarty
Author of YourSortingHat
Columnist for Careers at The Economic Times