Your Sorting Hat: Steady steps and career jumps, dead weight of entitlement and appreciating yourself
Career Tuesday
Careers, Life and Questions (Aug 23, 2022)
Wish you a Happy Career Tuesday!
3 Career Ideas
I.
"Your career grows in two critical ways -
Steady steps from compounding of daily efforts - that you control
Sudden jumps from lucky chances - that you get by being out there."
II.
"Learning ain't free.
A student pays fees. An athlete pays in years.
A business books losses on its mistakes to build.
What are you paying? What are you learning?"
III.
"When your energy, time or money is limited,
Then all the effort you spend on what you can't control
Will only reduce what you control."
2 Life Quotes from Books
I.
Oliver Burkeman, British journalist, talks about making the most out of the limited time in life, in his book - Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals -
"As I make hundreds of small choices throughout the day, I’m building a life—but at one and the same time, I’m closing off the possibility of countless others, forever. (The original Latin word for “decide,” decidere, means “to cut off,” as in slicing away alternatives; it’s a close cousin of words like “homicide” and “suicide.”) Any finite life—even the best one you could possibly imagine—is therefore a matter of ceaselessly waving goodbye to possibility...
...An alternative, Shinzen Young explains, is to pay more attention to every moment, however mundane: to find novelty not by doing radically different things but by plunging more deeply into the life you already have. Experience life with twice the usual intensity, and “your experience of life would be twice as full as it currently is”—and any period of life would be remembered as having lasted twice as long."
Source: Book: Four Thousand Week by Oliver Burkeman
II.
David Goggins - US Navy SEAL, endurance athlete and author - talks about how to go beyond the common human behaviour of tapping into barely 40% of one's capabilities, in his biography - Can't Hurt Me: Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds,-
"You are in danger of living a life so comfortable and soft, that you will die without ever realizing your true potential...
..It won’t always go your way, so you can’t get trapped in this idea that just because you’ve imagined a possibility for yourself that you somehow deserve it. Your entitled mind is dead weight. Cut it loose. Don’t focus on what you think you deserve. Take aim on what you are willing to earn!..
...Our culture has become hooked on the quick-fix, the life hack, efficiency. Everyone is on the hunt for that simple action algorithm that nets maximum profit with the least amount of effort. There’s no denying this attitude may get you some of the trappings of success, if you’re lucky, but it will not lead to a calloused mind or self-mastery. If you want to master the mind and remove your governor, you’ll have to become addicted to hard work. Because passion and obsession, even talent, are only useful tools if you have the work ethic to back them up."
Source: Book: Can't Hurt Me by David Goggins
1 Question
What is any one unique quality about you? Why do you appreciate it? Can you carry that appreciation of yourself through this week?
If you enjoyed that, please share this email with others.
Sign up here to receive this email every week or read longer career articles here.
Until next week,
Devashish Chakravarty
Author of YourSortingHat
Columnist for Careers at The Economic Times
Note: This newsletter is part of Amazon Affiliate program