Starting Your Career: 8 Successful Strategies to Employ!

We will begin this blog post with a little trivia. I’m going to describe someone and let’s see if you can figure out who they are.

I’ll give you the answer at the end of this post, which discusses tips to follow when starting your career, so you will have 1,500 words to think about it!

At the age of 15, he dropped out of medical school due to the fact that he could not stand the sight of blood. Eventually, he graduated from Cambridge with a Bachelor of Arts in 1831. Shortly thereafter he received an offer from a professor of his to serve an unpaid position as a naturalist on the HMS Beagle which would embark on a several year journey around the world to survey various coastlines. His job would be to collect life and mineral specimens along the way and send them back to England for examination.

Initially, his father was dead set against the idea, so he turned it down. But after careful consideration and recruiting his uncle to help him win his father’s consent, he accepted the offer shortly thereafter.

On the eve of the voyage, he wrote to the captain of the ship and said: “My second life will then commence, and it shall be as a birthday for the rest of my life.” ¹

I’ll give you some time to ponder who this may be and as you will see, it is a great example of starting your career the right way!

The Importance of the Early Part of Your Career

After we complete our formal education, we begin what Robert Green calls in his great book Mastery, ‘the apprenticeship’.

It is in these critical early stages when starting your career where you seize and take control of the opportunity to master the requisite skills, discipline your mind, and mold yourself into an independent thinker who is ready for the upcoming challenges on the road to mastery.

Before we go any further, seeing as how there aren’t many formal apprenticeships anymore, let’s instead refer to it as starting your career for the rest of the post.

The 3 Stages of Starting Your Career

Greene believes it is important to look at starting your career with three different steps. These steps will overlap and will vary in length and importance depending on the nature of your field.

(1)  Step One: Deep Observation – The Passive Mode

The first step is what he calls deep observation or passive mode. This is where instead of trying to impress people, you are like a sponge soaking up everything around you. It is about learning the rules and procedures that enable success in this world and observing the power relationships to understand who’s who. Some of this will be communicated to you implicitly, some you will need to figure out on your own.

Completing this step will help you understand what is critical to succeeding in this environment. It will also give you a lifelong skill of adapting to new environments. Lastly, it will help give you some context to create your own theories and ideas based on what you have seen.

(2)  Step Two: Skills Acquisition – The Practice Mode

The second step is all about acquiring new skills via something similar to what we discussed in a previous post called deep practice. I won’t get into it into much detail, as I just covered it last week, but deep practice consists of three rules:

(i)  Chunk it up: break it up into pieces, go slow to catch and attend to errors better, then speed it up.

(ii)  Repeat it: keep doing the skill over and over – but do it correctly, you don’t want to practice the wrong thing.

(iii)  Learn to feel it: be able to feel if things are going smoothly or not so you can course correct.

(3)  Step Three: Experimentation – The Active Mode

Finally, the last and shortest step involves experimentation as you acquire skills and confidence. As Greene says, “This could mean taking on more responsibility, initiating a project of some sort, doing work that exposes you to the criticism of others or even the public. The point of this is to gauge your progress and whether there are still gaps in your knowledge.” ¹

8 Classic Strategies for Successfully Starting Your Career

Greene then lays out 8 classic strategies that ‘Masters’ have used when starting their careers. While some may be more applicable to certain fields than others, they all contain valuable truths that you would be wise to at least consider early in your career.

(1)  Value learning over money

This is one tip that I did receive early in my career and I’m glad I did.  Choosing a job when starting your career based on the size of the paycheck can have several pitfalls. First, you will have to prove yourself worthy of such pay before you are ready. Second, and more importantly, you will be focused on yourself and not on learning and acquiring skills. Then as you go through life you will find yourself focused on the big paycheck and it may bias where you go, how you think and what you do.

Make it actionable:
Instead, according to Greene, “…you must value learning above everything else. This will lead you to all the right choices. You will opt for the situation that will give you the most opportunities to learn, particularly with hands-on work. You will choose a place that has people and mentors who can inspire and teach you…” ¹

(2)  Keep expanding your horizons

When starting your career, odds are no one is going to help you or provide you with direction. It’s all on you to learn and set yourself up for success. Your low position may limit your access to people and knowledge, so it’s important to struggle against those limitations and expand your horizons.

Make it actionable:
It’s important to be an avid learner and the first place to start is reading more than what is expected of you. Hopefully, this will ignite a hunger for more knowledge that will serve you well and keep you from being satisfied in any narrow corner. It is also important to leverage those in your inner circle for their knowledge and experience while mingling with as many different types of people as possible. Also, get a mentor!!!

(3)  Revert to a feeling of inferiority

Many times, what limits our learning is an attitude of superiority in that we may think we know it already or know more than we do which closes us off to other possibilities.

Make it actionable:
As Greene says: “Understand: when you enter a new environment, your task is to learn and absorb as much as possible. For that purpose, you must try to revert to a childlike feeling of inferiority—the feeling that others know much more than you and that you are dependent upon them to learn and safely navigate your apprenticeship…You are full of curiosity. Assuming this sensation of inferiority, your mind will open up and you will have a hunger to learn” ¹

(4)  Trust the process

Many times, when learning something new we give up when we encounter frustration. As Green says: “Many of those who succeed in life have had the experience in their youth of having mastered some skill…Buried in their minds is the sensation of overcoming their frustration and entering the cycle of accelerated returns. In moments of doubt in the present, the memory of past experiences rises to the surface.” ¹

Make it actionable:
Trust in the process. Frustration is a sign that you are making progress, it’s telling you that your mind is working and simply needs more practice. Once you gain mastery your insecurities will turn into confidence. The key is to trust this will happen so the natural learning process can take over.

(5)  Move toward resistance and pain

By nature, humans take the path of least resistance when something seems painful or overly difficult. This applies to practice as we cannot learn the skills we are trying to acquire if we aren’t giving it our all.

Make it actionable:
Greene gives two pieces of advice which relate to what he calls ‘resistance practice’. First, become your own worst critic to identify a weakness that must take precedence. Second, resist the temptation to ease up on your focus and instead double the intensity and find creative ways to push yourself past previous limits.

(6)  Apprentice yourself in failure

When something goes wrong, many times we take it personally. Instead, it is better to see it as a learning opportunity where we have been shown flaws and areas for us to improve.

Make it actionable:
Embrace the right type of failure. There are two types of failure according to Greene. The first comes from not trying or because you are afraid; this type of timidity can kill you. The other one comes from having an aggressive and bold spirit. As he says, “If you fail in this way, the hit that you take to your reputation is greatly outweighed by what you learn.” ¹

(7)  Combine the “how” and the “what”

Oftentimes, we are too focused on the outside appearances of things, the ‘what’, instead of how they function, the ‘how’. As Greene says, “But this “how” of things is just as poetic once we understand it—it contains the secret of life, of how things move and change.” ¹

Make it actionable:
Keep asking questions such as: How does this work? How do these decisions get made? How does this team interact? By asking these questions you will round out your knowledge which will at some point give you a better feel for reality and a power to impact it.

(8)  Advance through trial and error

This last piece of advice centers around being open to various opportunities that come your way. You don’t know what you don’t know, so trying new things will let you know what you like and don’t like as you move through your career.

Make it actionable:
Be open to all types of opportunities when starting your career. As Greene says, “You avoid the trap of following one set career path. You are not sure where this will all lead, but you are taking full advantage of the openness of information, all of the knowledge about skills now at our disposal. You see what kind of works suits you and what you want to avid at all cost.” ¹ Study the available literature so you can stand on the shoulders of giants who have mastered your subject before you, so you don’t waste time making their mistakes.

No Reversal!

When starting your career, as Greene says: “There are no shortcuts or ways to bypass the Apprenticeship Phase. It is the nature of the human brain to require such lengthy exposure to a field, which allows for complex skills to become deeply embedded and frees the mind up for real creative activity. The very desire to find shortcuts makes you eminently unsuited for any kind of mastery There is no possible reversal to this process.” ¹

Back to the Guy from the Introduction

Before I tell you ‘who’ it is, I will give you one more clue. When he was at Cambridge, he joined the “Gourmet Club” where he ate amongst other things an old brown owl which he described as… “indescribable”.

Ok, ok. So, ‘who’ is it?

The owl-eater who spent almost 5 years on that boat focused on exploring, learning and evolving was none other than Charles Darwin!  Starting his career with this apprenticeship was the catalyst for his theory of evolution. In fact, according to Greene, “On the journey home Darwin began to develop this theory further, so revolutionary in its implications. To prove his theory would now be his life’s work.” ¹

Until next time, use these tips when starting your career – eating owls is optional! And as always…PYMFP!
–Rick

P.S. Wanna know more? Check out the entire book.

Use it or Lose it

The 8 classic strategies for successfully starting your career that we discussed are:

(1)  Value learning over money
(2)  Keep expanding your horizons
(3)  Revert to a feeling inferiority
(4)  Trust the process
(5)  Move toward resistance and pain
(6)  Apprentice yourself in failure
(7)  Combine the “how” and the “what”
(8)  Advance through trial and error

When to Use It

Use these pieces of advice when starting your career or share them with someone you know who is starting their career.

What Do You Think?

Do you have any other thoughts or advice when starting your career? Please share in the comments below!

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References

Mastery by Robert Greene