|
Personal Success Factors
On average, smart people who work hard and treat people well do better than
people whose thinking is muddled, who are lazy, or who are unpleasant to
colleagues. That has always been and will always be true—even if the
occasional jerk proves the exception. However, talent and hard work only get
you in the top billion on the planet. There are other, more subtle centrifuges
and separators that create the cream of the digital age.
Nothing is more important than
emotional maturity
—especially for people
in their twenties, in whom this quality can vary widely. There are fewer and
fewer fields in which a person reports to work with a single boss, a specific
set of tasks, and the expectation that those parameters won’t change
frequently or significantly. By comparison, the digital-age worker must often
respond to numerous stake-holders and shift between roles throughout the
day—an environment that favors the mature. And as competitive and product
cycles shorten, our work life will see rapid swings between success and
failure.
How well someone manages their own enthusiasm through those cycles is
important. How people interact with one another determines the projects they
work on, who will work with them, and who wants to hire them. Young
people who have a strong sense of their own identity, remain poised under
stress, and learn and apply what they’ve learned, do better than peers who are
more easily flustered, get hung up on petty issues, and let their emotions
drive their responses to stimuli. People who are comfortable taking direction
and giving it, and who understand their role in a group, do better than their
peers when lines of authority get murky and organizational structures are
fluid.
This effect has been well documented in the academic environment. A
massive meta-study of 668 evaluative studies of school programs teaching
social and emotional life skills found that 50 percent of children in those
programs increased their scholastic achievement, and there were similarly
dramatic drops in misbehavior. And bestselling author Daniel Goleman, who
popularized the term
emotional intelligence
, found measurable business
results at global companies led by individuals who demonstrate self-
awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skills.
One interesting result of the increasing importance of emotional maturity is
that among younger people, this skill favors women. I’m not trying to be
politically correct here, though admittedly I’m not sure I would have had the
balls to highlight this point if the finding favored men. Anyway, when asked
in surveys, men and women agree that women in their twenties tend to “act
their age” more than men. There is neurological evidence that women’s
brains develop sooner and more quickly into adult brains.
I often attend meetings where a young man, or several, burn up most of the
time expounding on their own enthusiasms, clash over perceived control of
the dialog, and generally preen before the crowd, until finally a young
woman in the room—who has kept her mouth shut and listened—calmly
introduces relevant facts, summarizes the critical issues, and makes the
recommendation that gets us on to our next task.
Men, even young men, still enjoy a cultural bias over their female peers
when it comes to advancement—probably because they are seen as more
decisive. This will likely remain the case for that minority of young men who
cultivate emotional maturity. But they will be a rare and valuable breed.
Firms have figured out that, with 70 percent of high school valedictorians
female, the future really is women.
The digital age is Heraclitus on steroids: change is a daily constant. In
almost every professional environment, we are expected to use and master
tools that did not exist a decade ago, or even last year. For better or worse
(and frankly, it is often for worse), organizations have access, essentially, to
infinite amounts of data, and what might as well be an infinite variety of
ways to sort through and act on that data. At the same time, ideas can be
turned into reality at unprecedented speed. The thing Amazon, Facebook, and
no less hot firms, including Zara, have in common is they are
agile
(the new-
economy term for fast).
Curiosity
is crucial to success. What worked yesterday is out-of-date today
and forgotten tomorrow—replaced by a new tool or technique we haven’t yet
heard of. Consider that the telephone took 75 years to reach 50 million users,
whereas television was in 50 million households within 13 years, the internet
in 4, … and Angry Birds in 35 days. In the tech era, the pace is accelerating
further: it took Microsoft Office 22 years to reach a billion users, but Gmail
only 12, and Facebook 9. Trying to resist this tide of change will drown you.
Successful people in the digital age are those who go to work every day, not
dreading the next change, but asking, “What if we did it this way?”
Adherence to process, or how we’ve always done it, is the Achilles’ heel of
big firms and sepsis for careers. Be the gal who comes up with practical
and
bat-shit crazy ideas worth discussing and trying. Play offense: for every four
things you’re asked to do, offer one deliverable or idea that was not asked
for.
Another standout skill is
ownership.
Be more obsessed with the details
than anybody on your team and what needs to get done, if, when, and how.
Assume nothing will happen unless you are all over everybody and
everything, as it likely won’t. Be an owner, in every sense of the word—your
task, your project, your business. You own it.
Desjardins, Jeff. “Timeline: The March to a Billion Users [Chart].” Visual Capitalist.
Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
