Explore

If you spend any active time here on LinkedIn (and I assume you do, if you get my letter), you might have experienced this: someone you haven't heard from in years suddenly pops into your inbox, and before you even read the message, you know what's up: they're looking for work.

These folks tend to have a decent amount of years at their last place of work, and then something came out of the blue and they're scrambling to find a new gig. The challenges are many: they haven't updated their skills recently, they haven't networked outside of their current vertical, they don't really even have their finger on the macroeconomic weather at the moment. It's like they were in a trance state for the last x years. Or as I like to think of it, "cottaging."

It's So Easy to Stay in the Cottage

We all can end up doing it. We build a cadence at work, we get in a groove, we focus on what's in front of us, and as we get a bit comfortable and at least a little bit burnt out, we stop looking outside the organization, stop sharpening our capabilities. Why should we? It's going well enough.

The cottage is cozy enough. You might not have everything, but you know where your stuff is, and you know what to expect. Unless you get booted (in my above example), there's no reason to feel otherwise. Everything is serene and placid.

But wow, are you missing a LOT.

We're Built to Explore

I love to meet with people in industries other than my own. It's exciting talking with people working in manufacturing or education or agriculture. The more we can go out and see what the rest of the world is doing, the better we can respond and learn and grow accordingly.

This applies internally, as well. You might know your job, but are you paying attention to the business? If you're not getting a lot in the way of business updates, feel free to ask. Look around. Ask for the information. But the more you know about your company and your industry beyond your role, the more you can assess what you could do to be more valuable as the world changes and rolls forward.

The more you can explore, the more you can bring even more capabilities to bear on future projects.

I'll give you one example: you've heard about the recent wave of artificial intelligence news. But MOSTLY, you've heard about ChatGPT. That's one story, but there's so much more going on. There's more than just the art stuff, too. (Sure, I love using Stable Diffusion. It's built me quite a visual style here on LinkedIn). But there's so much new stuff being developed. Will that change your role? Yes. Should you think about learning even more skills if you're in a space where AI technology can impact the way people do your role? For sure.

But that's one example.

You might find that you can do even more in your current role by learning from some place outside of your cottage. There's a great book about this called FIND YOUR NEXT, by Andrea Kates. I read it maybe a decade ago, and the advice was so great. It talked about how you can find completely different applications for advice in one industry in another one. THIS is a great way to explore, also.

Plant the Seeds or Eat the Seeds

Look, if you need food today, you eat the seeds. If you want to build something outside your cottage, you plant the seeds of preparation, of building, of making new connections long before you need them. That's the advice.

You can explore with a goal, or you can wander and just keep growing new opportunities. I think you get something from both. That's the lesson.

I'm going to go nerdy for one last way to think of all this. You might not have read the Lord of the Rings books (they're pretty meaty), but maybe you saw the trilogy. At the start, Frodo Baggins really doesn't want to leave home. It's thrust upon him. Then, he goes out and does a whole lot of things, meets a lot of people, has to make all kinds of decisions, and by the time he gets back to The Shire, he feels he's outgrown it: like it's a lot smaller than when he left it.

That's something that can and will (should?) happen to your cottage. You should outgrow where you are right now. It's the essence of exploration.

It's not a bad thing. It's what happens to keep you from avoiding that moment when suddenly you have to put on the green LinkedIn #opentowork badge because you're in a weird jam out of the blue.

So, explore.

Chris...