A Self-Directed Career
Career Satisfaction Manifesto Part 3, read Part 1.
Some people have coined the term “intrapreneur” for a person who approaches a traditional job with an entrepreneurial mind-set. I admit this is a bit of a pretentious word, but it encapsulates an extremely useful paradigm shift in the way we approach our day-to-day lives and careers.
So what does being an intrapreneur look like? The World’s Worst Boss is a useful and insightful post from Seth Godin on the topic. It highlights that we are in fact our own bosses and that we should be spending a lot more time managing our own days and careers. It’s a great read and these are a few particularly pointed sentences from it: “If you had a manager that talked to you the way you talked to you, you’d quit. If you had a boss that wasted as much of your time as you do, they’d fire her. If an organization developed its employees as poorly as you are developing yourself, it would soon go under.”
Key takeaways:
- Positive, encouraging self-talk is something that is highly underrated and easy to neglect, so we have to make a conscious, consistent effort to improve it.
- Time/energy management to help us achieve what we hope for is the only realistic approach to success.
- Developing and improving our skills is something we need to take ownership of.
The piece ends: “There are few good books on being a good manager. Fewer still on managing yourself. It’s hard to think of a more essential thing to learn.” On that note, here’s an insightful resource: Harvard Business Review’s 10 Must Reads On Managing Yourself. The first piece from Peter Drucker, Managing Oneself, is helpful for anyone at any stage in their career and at any level within an organization. The subheadings of the piece provide a quick overview of the useful discussions in the article:
- What Are My Strengths?
- How Do I Perform?
- Where Do I Belong?
- What Is My Contribution?
- Relationship Responsibility
- The Second Half of Your Life
- The Parallel Career
The article runs through some very useful exercises for discovering your strengths e.g. making predictions about your future that you review regularly, and emphasizes the fact that this is not a one and done exercise — it takes years and numerous iterations to get right. While that may sound like a lot of time, the sooner you start, the sooner you’ll start reaping the rewards.
And the investment of time, even for people nearing mid-career like myself, are well-worth the effort.
If you plan on engaging in meaningful work, whether as a volunteer or part-timer throughout your healthy life, most of us in our mid to late 30’s have another 30+ or even 40+ years to go. The paradigm of retirement to a beach and leisure travel starting at 55 that previous generations of blue-collar workers looked forward to, doesn’t seem to apply as well to knowledge workers whose intellectual capital increases with age.
Next week we’ll delve into more practical ideas for learning how to manage ourselves. In the meantime here are a couple of useful primers on exactly how you can start doing the things an intrapreneur does:
- “10 Things You Need to Do if You Were Hired Today.” James Altucher
- “How to Talk About Your Project” Seth Godin
If you really want to go down the rabbit hole and read some paradigm shifting ideas here are a list of posts from Seth Godin’s blog on career or job.
Thanks for reading!
If this series has been helpful, I would be honored if you share it with others:
Career Satisfaction Manifesto: Part 1: Living a Meaningful Life | Part 2: We’re Not All Entrepreneurs | Part 3: A Self-Directed Career | Part 4: Towards a Meaningful Career | Part 5: The Role of Passive Income | Part 6: Community — The Importance of your near 5 | Part 7: Self-Care How to Nurture Yourself and Your Dreams | Part 8: The Importance of Service | Part 9/9: Concrete Steps
