More career advice I wish I had at 25

Five years ago, I wrote a LinkedIn article titled The career advice I wish I had at 25. Since then, the article has been read more than six million times on LinkedIn, cut and pasted onto dozens of other websites, shared across social media platforms and translated into various languages.

Feedback from the article has taught me that, in a world where we tend to spotlight our differences, our basic human aspirations are remarkably similar.

It is also clear that many people in many countries are living lives of quiet desperation, waiting for permission to embrace a life of their choosing rather than one that seems to have been chosen for them. So much of our passion for the things we love to do has been drowned in a world of urgent but uninspiring imperatives.

Hundreds of people are battling daily dilemmas trying to maintain their living standards without missing out on seeing their children grow up. Most are hoping if they can’t be a good example for their children, they might at least be a terrible warning.

Many fit the definition of being a contemporary adult – they can’t remember the last time they didn’t feel a little bit tired.

The original list of advice for myself was much longer than the one I published so I thought it was time to share some more. This is really a letter to myself. But I am sharing in the hope that others will find some of it useful.

1. Do what you were put on earth to do

Almost everyone knows deep down that they have a passion or an “element” that truly defines them. Yet how often do people put their dreams or their passions on hold because reality bites? As a result, they live every day with slight feelings of regret and a gnawing sense that they are at the wrong station waiting for the wrong train.

If we are lucky we find our passion and we can turn it into a career. That is not always possible. Sometimes we need to do something different to pay the bills. But that should not stop us putting our passions at the centre of our lives.

During my years in media, I was regularly asked how you “break into” journalism. My answer was always that you should start writing now and become a journalist. You may have to do something else to earn money for a while but that is no reason to put your passion on hold waiting for someone else to legitimise it. As renowned psychologist Abraham Maslow said: “A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What one can be, one must be.”

2. Roll with it

It is easy to spend a lot of time fighting the tide and resisting the demands of life. But you can’t fight life. If you do it is exhausting. You need to roll with it.

Countless words have been written about finding work-life balance. What you really need is life balance. In many contemporary professional jobs it is really hard to draw a solid line between paid work and the rest of your life. Your work and personal phones are usually the same device. There are events, there are things to be read, often your best friends are people you work with.

It is okay to have a blurred line as long as you still have the right amount of rest, sleep, leisure and time for family and friends. It is far more productive to ask if you are living the life you desire than to ask if you have the right work-life balance. Life balance and flexibility seem like more appropriate aspirations in 2019. Find the flow and ride it.

3. Don’t treat busyness as a virtue

Seinfeld’s George Costanza managed to successfully hold down a job by doing nothing but looking busy (achieved by acting annoyed all the time). The word busy is one of the most overused in our language. Everyone is busy. All the time. And you have no extra hours you can add to the day. By definition you are busy doing something all the time. It just comes down to what mindset you bring to that. Generally, if we convince ourselves we are busy we go into a negative mindset. However, organising priorities around the time we have can feel really good. In a similar vein, so-called “face time” or staying at work longer than you need to is rather ludicrous (yes, I’ve done it too). Everyone I know that has done it has regretted it later in life. Your time is worth fighting for.

4. Speak up

Some of the smartest people with the best ideas never say anything at meetings. You need to remember that you are the expert at whatever job you are doing. Meetings can be intimidating but there is seldom a downside to giving a respectful, well-considered opinion on something you know about. The corporate world is full of stories of people who gave a frank and respectful opinion at a meeting and immediately elevated their career status as a result, sometimes spectacularly. Your opinion matters and people will respect you for giving it.

5. Promote yourself (carefully and humbly)

There’s an old phrase that talks about people hiding their light under a bushel (in Australia a bushel is a name for a wooden crate). It is a neat way of describing the many people who have held back their careers by never putting their hands up for a different, better or more senior job or articulating their value. As a result, no-one imagines them into the higher job and they are always overlooked. Boasting and arrogance are a bad look. On the flipside, many of us are humble by nature and believe opportunities will just come along if we sit and wait for them. If you are ambitious, people need to know. This can be as simple as asking to act in a higher role when someone is on leave or going to a leader in the organisation and letting them know that you want to be considered for other things. Better still, go and ask what it would take for you to get ahead. That way someone else has a stake in your success.

6. Gain genuine extra expertise in multiple things

In the past we could get away with having a single deep qualification and a few shallow skills. In the new economy, this is not enough. We need to be seen as a real expert in several things to keep an edge and we need to have a mindset of constant reinvention to avoid being left behind. A lot of people achieve the extra expertise by seeking leadership roles in volunteer organisations outside of work. It is well documented that the most successful scientists in history had very high-level skills (music, art etc) outside of science.

I am totally confident that in a world of robotics and artificial intelligence there is a still a real opportunity to have more and better jobs in the future. I am less confident that we are well prepared as a society and as individuals to avoid a chronic mismatch between skills and expertise we have and the jobs that are emerging. We need to take charge of our own careers to prevent that. Don’t wait for “the system” to secure your future.

 7. Target people and companies you want to work for rather than just apply for jobs

It can be a fairly sobering experience to constantly check job advertisements and then apply for jobs. You are usually up against hundreds of people and some highly-programmed HR bot might bounce you out of contention before a human even looks at your application.

Careers are a long-term game. It is better to research companies with a culture and activities that appeal to you and proactively seek a relationship with that company. A lot of really great jobs are never advertised. I’ve seen many examples of people who seek out companies they like, find mentors there and just morph into the organisation. Some companies even create jobs for them.

8. Always come with solutions

In management you spend a lot of time dealing with problems that are brought to your attention. Very quickly you start to notice people that bring you problems that are already packaged with a potential solution. In fact, that trait is probably the key attribute of people who really get ahead in their careers.

9. Value yourself and your life enough to ask

Too many people too quickly let themselves become victims. They lament that they miss something because they have to work, but they didn’t actually ask if they could have time off to do it. They lament that they don’t have enough holidays but don’t ask about unpaid leave or leave in advance. There is something that bugs them at work every day, but they never ask anybody if it can be fixed. They get overlooked for every opportunity, but they never ask for opportunities.

You really need to value yourself enough to ask stuff. The answer will sometimes be no but quite often it will be yes. It never hurts to ask. What do you have to lose?

10. Give the gift of trust

Trust is one of the most valuable gifts you can give. If you trust an employee or a colleague to do something without looking over their shoulder or trying to micro-manage them, they tend to take that seriously and work very hard to deliver. Great leaders trust their people. They give broad direction but empower their people to find the best way to deliver the outcomes. Sadly, we have started to lose our trust in many of the things we grew up to value. We can only restore it when we all take the trust we are given seriously. And we all give trust in return.

11. Be kind

We live in a world that we have somehow allowed to become infested with trolls and toxin, and a society where too many people seem to be looking for something to get outraged about. I don’t think humans do well in that type of world. They harbour secret stresses and too easily get swept up in the lynch mob mentality and start exhibiting behaviours at odds with their values.

There is always the option to be kind. We can decide to look out for people who just need a friendly word to get them through. We can respect and value someone's opinion (even if we disagree with it) instead of attacking them. We have the option of giving people the benefit of the doubt a bit more and recognising that someone might just be having a bad day when they stuff up. People get tired. They are human. Sometimes they need a second chance.

It costs nothing to be kind but it has the power to light up the darkest oubliettes of our bleakest days.

Comments in my articles are personal reflections and not made on behalf of the organisation I work for.