Future-Proofing Your Career

Humans are creatures of habit. We naturally resist change; it’s part of our DNA. Unfortunately, our evolutionary need for things to stay the same can sometimes trip us up. A person may stay in a dead-end job because they fear the unknown. Another person may fade into the background at work because they fear they’re not good enough to be a manager. The examples are endless. Fortunately, there are techniques people can use to not only get over their fear of change, but to actually harness its power to grow.

Entrepreneur Magazine Editor-in-Chief Jason Feifer stopped by #GetHired with Andrew Seaman to talk about those techniques, which are featured in his new book Build for Tomorrow. Feifer told LinkedIn News Editor Andrew Seaman about the different stages of change, how to move through them more quickly and how to harness the power of change in your job search and career.

You can hear their entire conversation on Apple Podcasts or wherever you like to listen.

Transcript: Future-Proofing Your Career

Andrew: From LinkedIn News, this is Get Hired, a podcast for the ups and downs of our professional lives. I'm Andrew Seaman, LinkedIn's Managing Editor for Jobs and Career Development. Each week on Get Hired, we talk about leveling up. Sometimes we talk about finding work. Other times we talk about excelling where you are right now. And through it all, we focus on how to stay true to yourself in the process. The idea that “the only thing constant in life is change” has been around since, oh, the ancient Greeks. And it's certainly still true today. But knowing that change is constant and knowing how to weather change and come out on top are different stories altogether. Jason Feifer, the editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur Magazine, has talked to many business leaders who have been able to surf the winds of change to great career success. And now he's written a book about it. It's called Build for Tomorrow: An Action Plan for Embracing Change, Adapting Fast and Future-Proofing Your Career. So today, he's joining me to get into the nuts and bolts of how to adapt to – and thrive because of – constant change. First, though, I wanted to know what inspired him to write the book. Here's Jason.

Jason: When I first became editor-in-chief, people would invite me onto their podcasts or to speak at their events and they would ask me this question. And that question was, “what are the qualities of the most successful people you meet?” And I came to realize that the most successful people are the most adaptable. The ones who grow their careers the most strongly and who, I think, achieve the things that they are most satisfied with are the ones who are willing and able in some crazy way to abandon whatever came before and build based on what people need now, not what they were comfortable with from before. And so the question was, well, how are they doing that? And the pandemic actually gave me the answer to that question because the pandemic, for all the many things that it was, it also was an interesting experiment in which everybody was going through change in the same way. They were all going through it in four phases: panic, adaptation, new normal, wouldn't go back. Those are the four phases of change. The only question is how do you move through them faster?

Andrew: And your book is called Build for Tomorrow, but really if you boil it down, and I hope this isn't too much of an oversimplification, but it really is about surviving and championing change, right?

Jason: Yeah. That's exactly what it is. It is about understanding that the greatest things that you will ever have are the ones that result from the unexpected. And that you do yourself a disservice when you're building your career, when you're building a company, when you're doing anything, you do yourself a great disservice by trying to hold onto what came before at the expense of what comes next.

Andrew: Yeah. And I would like you to tell a little story about the four stages of change, which you used to actually structure your book. And that's panic, adaptability, new normal, and wouldn't go back. So can you give us an example of how that actually works out, and why those are the four stages of change?

Jason: Yeah. Let's talk about panic to start. If you go through any kind of change, I mean, maybe you're listening to this and you're going through a career change, or you'd like to go through a career change. Something has changed at your job or whatever the case is. You're going to feel a little sense of panic and I think the reason for that is because people equate change with loss. When something new comes along or when something new presents itself or threatens itself, the very first thing that you do is you think, well, this thing that I'm comfortable with and familiar with, I'm not going to have access to it in the same way anymore. And that feels like a loss. And the great challenge that we have is that we see loss so quickly and easily. There's always gain on the other side of panic, but it's so hard to see. And then after that, I think what comes next is actually just pretty natural human instinct. Once we get past our panic, we gotta do something. So we adapt. We try to figure out, what do we have that's available to us? And as we start to do that, we develop a new sense of normal. We find a new level of comfort. That's what we are driven to do is to find stability and comfort. And after a while we discover these kind of new opportunities and maybe because we were forced to do this, we learned that. And then that put us in a position to do X or Y thing. And eventually we look at this and we say, “oh, my gosh, I am so happy that I am here and not back there.” And I will tell you, Andrew, the greatest challenge of the whole thing, I think, actually, weirdly, isn't panic. It is “wouldn't go back.” Because after you go through this whole cycle of change and you find something so new and valuable that you say, “I wouldn't want to go back to a time before I had it,” well, I got bad news for you. It's not going to last forever. Change is going to happen again. You have to do the whole thing over again. And people, I think, either after enough of these, they either become really, really good at it, or they become really, really exhausted. And what I want to push people to is to become really, really good at it.

Andrew: And I think when I was reading the book, I think what stood out to me is the idea is that you can sort of ride change instead of basically being taken for a ride by it.

Jason: Yeah, that's exactly right. You need to be proactively building yourself for change before the change comes. I'll tell you one way to do this. I think that at all times you need to be what I like to call “working your next job.” What does that mean? Well, Andrew, in front of you, in front of me, in front of everyone listening right now, there are two sets of opportunities. Opportunity set A, opportunity set B. Opportunity set A is everything that's asked of you. So, show up at a job, your boss expects you to do things, you are evaluated on those things. That's opportunity set A. Opportunity set B is everything that's available to you that nobody's asking you to do. And that could be something at your job, that could be switching teams or developing new skills, but it could also be something outside of your job. It could be learning something that you are just interested in. Whatever the case is, I will make the case to you that opportunity set B is always more important, infinitely more important. And the reason for that is because if you only focus on opportunity set A, which is important, I'm not saying ignore your job; you'll get fired. But opportunity set B is where growth happens and where you develop skills that you don't even know how they will be useful, but they will be, and you will find use for them, particularly in moments of change. It is just incumbent upon all of us, I think, to be constantly expanding what we do and how we do it. Because then, when change comes, we will have all these other things to fall back upon. Or frankly, we will have gotten ahead of whatever change comes so that by the time it reaches us, we are doing something else.

Andrew: Yeah. Focusing on option B is also amazing if you're trying to get ahead in your career, because what I always tell people is when you're writing your review and you're looking to step up a level and you're in the middle of your self-review and you sort of say, I did this, I did that, and you're checking off the boxes of what you're expected to do. But if you show that you're doing really what you should be doing at another level, you're basically saying, I'm doing this job already. So give me the title, give me the raise. And so I think going for that idea of “do the job you want” is really important, especially for career advancement.

Jason: Yeah. I completely agree. You want to make sure that your value is as clarified as possible. And the more that you are able to do, the more that people will want you to do. It's funny, when I talk about working your next job and opportunity set A and B, sometimes people ask me, "Are you basically suggesting that I be a bad employee, because I'm going to spend all this time focused on stuff that's outside of work?" And the answer is no, because if you're at a company that is actually designed for you to grow at, then you're going to go out and learn new things and then those things are going to be valuable at your company too. They're going to enable you to adapt to change so that you could get a new job, should you want it. But at the same time, you should be able to bring in new ideas, new skills.

Andrew: Yeah. I want to dive a little bit deeper into the book. I may be the only one who ever tells you this, but you had me at “John Philip Sousa.”

Jason: Bless you.

Andrew: Yeah, well, and actually when I started that chapter, the chapter is You Come from the Future. And then once I saw John Philip Sousa's name, because for those who do know who John Philip Sousa is, that man does not represent the future in most cases. And the reason I know him is that I used to live in the Eastern Market area of Capitol Hill, where he was born. And it's also where the Marine Corps Band is stationed. So on Friday nights you would hear cannons go off, which was startling on its own, but then you would hear John Philip Sousa music all night. And it was because they would put on live performances, as you go into your book. But I loved that idea and that example of that you come from the future. And I think that is especially relevant now where people can feel obsolete or especially old when you hear about Gen Z and companies focusing on younger workers and things like that. And I was hoping you could tell me a little bit of sort of how you came up with this concept, and also just an example of it for the listeners, because I thought it was so brilliant, frankly.

Jason: Thank you. I really appreciate that. Well, so actually, if you don't know who John Philip Sousa is, you do know his music because it has survived. He is the composer of all the military marches that we know. Da, da, da-da-da, da, da-da, da-da, da, that's John Philip Sousa. There's a ton of them.

Andrew: He was the Taylor Swift of the late 1800s, frankly.

Jason: That's exactly right. Right. Fewer breakup songs, I think, but otherwise. So John Philip Sousa was arguably the most, or certainly one of the most famous musicians of his time. And he lived during a time in which the very nature of how we consume music was radically changing. The phonograph, the very first record player, was being introduced, turn of the century. And you have to consider how insane this was for people at the time. Because consider it. For all of human history up until the late 1800s with the introduction of the phonograph, the only way that you could listen to music was if a human being was standing in front of you playing an instrument. It was the only way. And then suddenly that wasn't true anymore. Now there was a machine that could do it. And it was mind-blowing, people didn't believe it. And so consumers eventually were delighted by this, thrilling. But it was really, really scary to musicians because they saw themselves being replaced. And the leader of the resistance was John Philip Sousa. And he wrote this piece in Appleton's Magazine in 1906, called “The Menace of Mechanical Music,” in which he made all these arguments against mechanical music. And my favorite of which goes like this, that when you bring recorded music technology into the home, it will replace all forms of live music. And nobody will perform at home anymore because why would they do that, when now there's a machine that can do it for them? And you could see what he's doing there. He's doing this thing that I had talked about earlier, where he was kind of seeing change as loss. And then he was extrapolating the loss. When you see how much he was opposing this technology, you see how shortsighted it was, because when we go through moments of change, if we just ask ourselves a couple basic questions to try to get away from the panic, things like, number one, what am I doing differently because of this new thing?

In this case, it would've been, well, people are listening to music whenever they want on a machine. Okay. What new habits? This is question number two. What new habits or skills are we developing as a result? Okay, well, John Philip Sousa, so people are now developing the habit of listening to music whenever they want and listening to whoever they want. Okay. Question number three. Important. How can that be put to good use? Just apply these to literally any change that you're going through. “What new thing am I doing? What habits or skills am I learning as a result? How could that be put to good use?” Because if John Philip Sousa had asked that question, the answer is pretty obvious. Well, how would that be put to good use? I could record and I can sell my music to people that I can't physically get to. That's revolutionary. If you can mass produce your music, you can reach everybody. John Philip Sousa, by opposing the phonograph, was in fact really trying to oppose a system that would have expanded his economic opportunity. And he did it because of panic. We don't know how every story that we are living through right now is going to end, obviously, we're in the middle of it. But when you look back through history, what you can see is the end of the story. You can see how it turned out. And so often what happens is that people panic and they try to stop a change and then that change was in fact, the greatest thing that ever happened to them. It's not to say that every single little thing that's new is going to be great, but you will miss the ones that really are transformative if you're in the habit of pushing back against everything.

Andrew: Yeah. And I really like the idea of coming from the future, because every once in a while, I'll do this thing where I'll sort of think to myself, “what will tomorrow Andrew be thankful for?” It's one of those things where if maybe I have one more thing on my to-do list and I'm like, “eh, should I do it? Should I wait till tomorrow or something?” And I sort of think, “will tomorrow Andrew be better off or be thankful that today Andrew did this?” So a lot of times I often-

Jason: I think that's great.

Andrew: Hopefully, tomorrow Andrew's better than today Andrew, though.

Jason: This is the thing, is if today is the best that you've got, that's a very sad state of affairs. That means that there's no more growth to happen. Everything that you do, everything that you like, all the technology that you use, the clothing that you wear, literally everything about you was once seen as scary and disastrous. And that's everything. Coffee, people tried to ban coffee for 500 years. There was a national moral crisis about teddy bears in 1907, schools were banning teddy bears. Every little thing. Bicycles, people thought were going to make you insane. Do you drive a car? People called it the devil wagon, like everything. And so you have the possibility to shape the future going forward as well. All that it requires is the open mind that whatever comes next can be valuable too.

Andrew: We're going to take a short break. When we get back, how can you tell when it's time to make a change?

Andrew: We're back with Jason Feifer, editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur Magazine, and author of Build for Tomorrow. Something that really resonated with me in Jason's book is the idea of changing before you must. When I was in college, I had a mentor who told me that once you get too comfortable, something needs to change. And I've tried to use that as a mantra. Not that comfort is bad, but once things start to get monotonous, I do start looking for the next evolution. But since Jason has seen this a lot, I wanted to get his take. How can you tell when it's time for a change?

Jason: So until Entrepreneur, I think the longest I ever stayed in a job was two something years, maybe. And the reason was because I would always take a job with an idea of what I wanted to learn from that job. And then as soon as I learned it, I would say, okay, well, now, I didn't come here to do it over and over again. I came here to learn it. And so now that I've learned it, it's time to go. For me, I never once went out and got a job offer and then brought it back to my current job and said, "Hey, can you match it?" Which is a perfectly good way of getting a raise or whatever. But no, I was out. And that's how I grew. And the reason was because I was just so incredibly focused on growth and learning. Harvard Business Review ran this piece years ago called “Why Do Big Companies Stop Innovating?” And the answer that was proposed by the writer was that at the beginning of a company's life cycle, it innovates, obviously, it comes up with some new way to solve a problem, to bring something to market. It creates value that didn't exist before. And as a result, people love it. And once that thing is successful, the company shifts away from innovation and towards efficiency. And it starts to structure itself in a way in which everybody at the company, top to bottom, is incentivized for making things faster, better, cheaper. And look, there's nothing wrong with efficiency. We like efficiency. But if that's the only thing that you have built yourself around is figuring out how to do this one thing that you already know how to do better, well, then what you're really doing is blinding yourself to all the potential opportunities around you. And so instead, what I think we need to be doing is we need to be building in a system for ourselves, by which we are regularly aware of and forcing us to pause on the things that we don't know, and that we see as potential changes to the things that we do. It could be as simple as: every month, go into a spreadsheet and just list out three things that you have seen other people do this month that you don't know how to do, or that maybe signal some kind of interesting change. So here's the thing. You don't have to do it all because that's overwhelming, but just put it on the list, put it on the list. And then every six months, three months, go back through the list, pick one thing that maybe you've heard a bunch or that you've seen grow, and now try it. Try it, do something. It doesn't matter if you know why it's going to be valuable. I'm telling you, just simply the matter of doing it is going to be valuable about that. And so this is a means in which you change before you must. Nobody forces you to do it, nobody's telling that you have to do it, but you're seeing that some change is coming. And you're going to say, “I'm going to try to make some kind of shift on my own terms before I'm forced to,” because if one day you show up at work and you're just laid off, now you're in panic mode. Change happened before you were prepared. It did not happen on your own terms. And what do you do when you're in panic mode? I will tell you what you do. You do the same thing as you do when you're in pain, you just scramble. What is the fastest solution to get me out of this pain? But I will tell you that the fastest solution to get yourself out of pain is often not the best and most sustainable solution. So instead, the question has to be for yourself, what things can I do while I am comfortable so that I am preparing for a moment in which discomfort comes? Because that is where you're ultimately going to be able to grow.

Andrew: And another thing I wanted to touch on with you, too, is something that I think a lot of job seekers and people who are really paying attention to their career can relate to, and that's to treat failure as data, because I think so many people, they don't get the job that they want, or don't get a promotion, and they take it so personally, which can turn into resentment. And I think it's so important to reframe it and think of it as data: How can I use what I learned from this experience so I'm successful next time?

Jason: Yeah. It's a really important thing that we need to reframe for ourselves. Because look, the challenge is that I think we are surrounded by stories of success and we want things to feel straightforward and easy. And they so rarely are. If you can think of failure as data, well, then you're really allowing yourself to reframe an experience and say, “okay, well, this is something now that I need to learn and grow from.” If you get turned down for a promotion at your job, you could be crushed and that's totally appropriate to feel crushed. But it's worth knowing that you have reached the end of some road here. And that road simply could be, this is as far as I could get with the skills that I currently have, or the experience that I currently have. So, okay. What comes next? I'll give you three questions to ask yourself. “What do I have? What do I need? What's available?” Three powerful questions. Here's why. When you take very, very seriously what you are trying to do and what it's going to take to get there, you can start to build from not what you do not have, but rather you start to reframe it towards what do I have? What can I build from? What do I have? What do I need? What's available? I will tell you, when I started my career, my very first job was at this tiny little newspaper in North Central Massachusetts. I hated it because it wasn't the work that I wanted to do. I had greater ambitions. I was frustrated that I wasn't able to achieve those ambitions because I didn't have the experience necessary. So anyway, eventually I sat down, I did this with myself. What do I have? Well, what I have is I have this job that I don't really like. And I have colleagues who aren't really any more experienced than I am, which means that they are unable to really help me grow in the way in which I want to grow. What do I need? What I need is to learn from people who are more experienced than me, who I don't currently have access to at my job, because in doing so, I will be able to develop my own skills faster and put myself into a position that I'm more happy with. What's available? Now, here's the real key one, right? What's available. What literally do you have right now? What can you do today to help you grow? And the answer to me in that moment was freelance. And it's an inefficient system for making money, I will tell you, but what's really good about it is that it allows you to write for places that might not hire you. And so I quit my job and I freelanced out of my bedroom for nine months and I landed some big pieces in the Washington Post and the Boston Globe. And this helped me grow because I didn't become so consumed on the failure of, “I am at this job that I don't love, and that's a failure and I don't know what to do.” And instead, I refocused on “what do I have available? I know things that I know, and I know the things that I don't have access to, and now it's time to build from there.”

Andrew: So if someone's out there today and they're in that panic mode and they're listening to this, what would you say is your one piece of advice to get through it so you can get to the adaptability part of it?

Jason: I would say it is time to reconsider the impossible. Like, okay, you're panicking. The reason you're panicking is because you had a set of things that you thought were your closest skills or contacts or whatever, and now those aren't available to you for some reason, because you were laid off, because you're stuck in a job you don't like, because you didn't get the promotion, whatever the case is. Now you're feeling a kind of panic. And what I want you to know is that when I see people reach a “wouldn't go back” moment, when I see people transform themselves in a way in which they're so deeply satisfied about, almost always, the thing that they did is that they simply tried something that they had previously discarded. Don't be afraid of an idea just because it didn't work once. What can we go back to? How can we reconsider the impossible? And panic often comes from feeling that there is no other option, from feeling that sense of loss and then feeling a loss completely. And you will come up with new things, you will discover new things, but the greatest place to start is with the stuff that you already had. That already gives you more to think about and more to try and more to grow with.

Andrew: Yeah. You're never truly starting from zero, basically.

Jason: Except for the one time when you did. And now it's done. It already happened, it's gone.

Andrew: Well, thank you so much, Jason. I really appreciated this conversation.

Jason: Hey, thanks. This was so fun.

Andrew: That was Jason Feifer, author of Build for Tomorrow. Remember, it's up to you to put our advice into practice. Still, you always have a community backing you up and cheering you on. Connect with me and the Get Hired community on LinkedIn to continue this conversation. You can also join my weekly Get Hired live show every Friday on the LinkedIn News page. And if you liked this episode, leave us a rating on Apple Podcast. It helps people like you find the show. And of course, we'll continue this conversation next week, right here, wherever you like to listen. Get Hired is a production of LinkedIn News. The show is produced by Michele O'Brien. Joe DiGiorgi mixed our show. Florencia Iriondo is Head of Original Audio & Video. Dave Pond is Head of News Production. Dan Roth is the Editor-in-Chief of LinkedIn. And I'm Andrew Seaman. Until next time, stay well and best of luck.