Your Sorting Hat: On standing out, planning your story and being irreplaceable

Career Tuesday

Careers, Life and Questions (Apr 11, 2023)

Wish you a Happy Career Tuesday!  

3 Career Ideas

I.

"You do not win when you need constant approval from your peers.

You can either be average or you can strive to be the best.

You can either fit in or stand out."

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II.

"A business continues to be successful when it learns from customer feedback.

Who is your customer at work? Is it your manager, a department or a client?

What does your customer need? How are you getting better at that?"

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III.

"Complete 3 steps to make progress in any negotiation - 

- Prepare in advance

- Identify the interests, not the position

- Focus on the problem, not the person."

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  2 Life Quotes from Books

I.

Seth Godin, author and dot com leader, offers a compact definition of marketing, in his bestseller - This is Marketing: You Can't Be Seen Until You Learn To See :

"People don’t want what you make. They want what it will do for them....

...If you can bring someone belonging, connection, peace of mind, status, or one of the other most desired emotions, you’ve done something worthwhile. The thing you sell is simply a road to achieve those emotions, and we let everyone down when we focus on the tactics, not the outcomes. Who’s it for and what’s it for are the two questions that guide all of our decisions."

Source: Book: This is Marketing by Seth Godin

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II.

Carmine Gallo, communication coach and author, shares the secret to making a good presentation, in his book - Talk Like TED: The 9 Public-Speaking Secrets of the World's Top Minds : - 

"What’s the first thing you should do when creating a PowerPoint presentation? If you’re like many people you’ll say, “Open PowerPoint.” Wrong answer. You should plan the story first. Just as a movie director storyboards the scenes before he begins shooting, you should create the story before you open the tool. You’ll have plenty of time to design pretty slides once the story is complete, but if the story is boring, you’ve lost your audience before you’ve spoken a word."

Source: Book: Talk Like TED by Carmine Gallo

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1 Question

What do you do at work that others can't or won't do? Everything else about you is replaceable. 

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Until next week,

Devashish Chakravarty
Author of YourSortingHat
Columnist for Careers at The Economic Times