Your Sorting Hat: On taking breaks, learning from experience and competitive advantage
Career Tuesday
Career Tuesday
Note: You are receiving this email because you subscribed to my weekly SortingHat newsletter. Every week, I share ideas for your career, quotes from others, and questions for you to think about. Occasionally, I also send out articles on habits and self-improvement.
3 ideas, 2 quotes, 1 question (Jul 27, 2021)
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3 IDEAS FROM ME
I.
"Restore your energy and enthusiasm by taking a break.
A break is not an overcrowded resort in Manali or Goa. It is simply a change in physical environment and mental activity. A weekend spent painting at a friend's house, reading books at a coffee shop or a long drive out and back works like magic.
Just do it often."
II.
"In finance, options have a price. An option means the right but not the compulsion to buy.
In careers too, options have a price. Hence a job at an early startup or a lower paying role of Chief of Staff or an employer who permits lateral changes has lots of future valuable options. A high paying dead end job has none.
The current salary difference is the option price. It is usually worthwhile."
III.
"The best teachers are those who have failed often. They have tried many things to rack up the failures and a few successes.
You can observe or listen to avoid their mistakes and grow faster. "
2 QUOTES FROM OTHERS
I.
Shane Parrish, a former Canadian spy, promotes self betterment and decision making skills through his Farnam Street blog (fs.blog). Here he speaks about getting the benefit of hindsight ahead of time -
“One way to make your future hindsight your current foresight is to ask yourself if this choice makes the future easier or harder.”
Source: Farnamstreet quote
II.
Nissim Nicholas Taleb, author and trader mathematician, believes that experience is the best teacher in his book - Skin in the Game :
"The knowledge we get by tinkering, via trial and error, experience, and the workings of time, in other words, contact with the earth, is vastly superior to that obtained through reasoning, something self-serving institutions have been very busy hiding from us."
Source: Taleb on Twitter
1 QUESTION FOR YOU
What is your competitive advantage? Can you define it in minimum words and use it in action at work and in speech during interviews?
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Until next week,
Devashish Chakravarty
Author of YourSortingHat
Columnist for Careers at The Economic Times