Crushing Your Career

How Being Mission-Focused Makes You Recession-Proof

Everyone has an opinion on surviving a recession. You remember all those terrible news spots and articles in 2008:

“Everyone should own a liquor store, downturns never affect them!”
“You should work in healthcare. Even broke people get sick!”
“Just start a dropshipping company and sell fake purses. It always works!”

And underlying all that advice is one thing:

Happiness in your career and life is irrelevant, just so long as you feel a little safer financially.

If that’s how you feel about your life, then there’s no reason for you to read ahead. Happily stagnate forever. If you want to live a life where you are constantly moving forward, where you are always bettering yourself and moving towards what you truly want, then read on.

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How To Admit Your Great Job Isn't Your Dream Job

What’s the difference between a good life and a good job?

It might seem like a silly question. To a lot of people, having a good job is a big part of having a good life. But to the millions of people with good jobs who are still unhappy, the distinction is critically important.

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How To Quit Your Job (And Still Win)

You’re going to quit at least one job in your life, probably several. In fact, 2.8 million Americans quit their jobs every month. You know what’s heartbreaking about that statistic?

Virtually none of those 2.8 million people know how to quit their job and still win.

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feeling stuck? try these 5 questions

A mate asked me to speak with his brother who feels stuck at a crossroad in his career.

Ahead of speaking I sent him these five questions that might be helpful to some of you:

1. What do you want? Not right now, but what is your grandest vision for your career and life?

2. What is holding you back from moving towards it? What would change that?

3. How do you dream your career and life will look after you’ve navigated this crossroad? Imagining looking back from that point now, how did you do it?

4. What skills or other capabilities would enable you to keep moving forward?

5. If we were talking two years from now, what would have needed to happen for you to be on track creating the career and life you truly want?

As you see, all of these questions are forward looking and specifically focused on what he might need to change to keep navigating his career.

While sometimes we can feel stuck where we are, when you “directionalize your mind” to the future and focus on the things that you can change, somehow new solutions magically appear…

In the NEXT DOWNTURN, what will YOU do?

People keep asking me if I think we are headed for another credit crisis and recession.

Of course it is impossible to know, but the fact people are asking the question tells you something.

Famously, Joseph Kennedy is said to have gotten out of the stock market right ahead of the 1929 market crash, after receiving stock tips from a shoe-shine boy…

Today, with the obvious setup of easy credit that led to the last credit crisis, we might be in an equally precarious position…

Or we might not be…

Again, while most everyone on Wall Street likes to take an educated guess, it is unknowable.

But irrespective of where the market is headed there is one thing you can know with absolute certainty.

You cannot control the economy and the markets, but you can always control how prepared you are to respond to change.

When the Internet bubble burst when I was based in Silicon Valley in 2000, of the many people who lost their jobs, it was those who were thinking ahead that got back to work quickly.

Many others remained unemployed for months, if not years.

The same was true after the last credit bubble burst.

By the time almost all of my former Goldman leveraged finance colleagues were being laid-off I was well-positioned in a distressed investing seat at Carlyle, taking advantage of the market collapse…

That was only possible because I had been thinking ahead and left Goldman some two years earlier.

I wasn’t able to do that because I knew the direction of the market, but because I had taken control of the direction of my career.

In the next downturn, what will you do?

At the least, are you prepared to respond to change? Or even better, are you positioned to take advantage of opportunity?

Either way, you want a plan.

How Big Is Your Ice Cube?

My mate said to me—”In their careers many people are either on a melting ice cube or a drifting iceberg.”

Those on an ice cube know they need to make a change, but those on an iceberg can still live with the illusion that they have time on their hands.

They know their career is adrift and that sooner or later they’ll have nowhere left to stand, but they will keep floating as long as they can.

This is one of the reasons I began this work back in 2000.

I looked at the career of investment banking and I didn’t like what I saw.

At Goldman in Sydney I worked with true masters of the universe—BSDs, pre-IPO partners. Not the modern-types, but five Ferraris in the garage type of guys.

I thought, now that’s a career on Wall Street!

But sitting in Menlo Park in 2000 with comp slashed in half and half the office fired around me, I began to see the career differently.

At the time I wouldn’t have said that the investment banking ship had sailed, but over the years I did my work that was how it appeared to me.

I saw the same at Carlyle. All those poor devils running themselves ragged doing generic deals hoping to be like the founders, DBD, but knowing they never will be.

I saw I could work till I was sixty and have a pretty interesting and lucrative career, but I didn’t love the job enough to find that appealing.

When you’ve invested decades in your career only to realize it’s not all it was meant to be, what do you?

On an ice cube you are forced to move. But on a drifting iceberg, like a boiling frog, you can hang around and slowly melt away.

As my mate said, “Neither of them is particularly appealing, especially as a budding master of the universe.”

“So, what do you do?”

"Should I Stay Or Should I Go?"

My friend is contemplating quitting his job and he is vexed by the decision.

Does he stay where he is?

Take the offer someone else is putting in front of him?

Or go seek another opportunity altogether?

Like being on The Price is Right, he feels he has one of three doors to choose and he’s unsure of how to make the decision.

It’s a tough choice, particularly when you lack a clear roadmap for your career.

As good little rational beings we tend to apply logical tools to these types of questions.

We draw up pros and cons.

Weigh up this versus that.

But the problem with weighing up marginally is that you are left with a marginal answer!

You can’t hide from the fact that if 60% of your ideas support “Yes,” then 40% of you is still saying “No.”

If you want an optimal answer you need to get beyond the marginal approach.

Einstein once said, “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”

If you are thinking on a logical level—pros and cons, etc.—then you will keep coming back to the same dilemma, weighing one option against another.

Instead you want to take your thinking to an entirely different level.

How?

Check out this chapter from The Guide.

Shoot Through Your Career

A friend of mine is a fashion photographer. He’d love to be able to just shoot, but he recognizes that while photography is his craft, it’s only one small part of his business. Picking up the camera and shooting is how he gets paid, but it’s all the other things he must do that ensure he builds a good business.

That means being responsible for the entire process of doing photography. It means surrounding himself with the right people – manager, agents, production assistants, and so on – building relationships, selling and marketing, as well as taking ownership of all aspects related to building a successful business. The hard part is while he’s an expert with a camera, he’s needed to learn the others skills that drive success in his business.

While it’s easy to see in his case the difference between his craft of photography and building a strong business as a photographer, it’s not always easy to see the same is true in your career on Wall Street.

For instance, when you’re an investment banker, your job is to do investment banking. If you’re an M&A specialist, your craft, doing M&A deals is your bread and butter, but that’s only a small part of success in building your career. While it’s easy to get caught up in the excitement and desire to “just do deals,” you too must be responsible for managing all other aspects of your career.

That’s become harder to do. In the old days of banking, many M&A specialists could simply be execution bankers. There was less emphasis on their role in marketing and sitting inside powerful merger departments they also had less need to manage other aspects of their career. Today, that has radically changed. All bankers today are relationship bankers. They must be just as proficient at driving relationships and revenues as they are at being able to drive a deal. So, to be a successful banker you must, like my photographer friend, develop all the skills you need to drive your career.

For many bankers this can be hard to do. I remember, in particular, after the Internet bubble burst and many M&A bankers were forced to become relationship bankers many of them failed to believe they had the skills. They were excellent in deal dynamics, but when it came to wining and dining clients and building long-term relationships many simply lacked the skills to build a strong business.

One way to do that is to see you are running a one man business inside your firm. That although you might see yourself as “an employee” of your firm, in fact you can see yourself more as a partner. You can see that you partner your labor with your firm, in exchange for your efforts, you get access to all the resources of your firm to build your business. In this sense, you are not an entrepreneur, like my friend the photographer, but you an intrepreneur driving your business inside your firm.

One of the most successful Partner’s at Goldman is said to have managed his career this way. It’s said that even as a first year Associate he saw himself as in effect renting the desk at Goldman. He would come in every day, pick up the phone and start calling clients. He is an M&A specialist, one of the best in the world, but his greatest value to Goldman is he’s paired his craft with building deep and powerful relationships and having driven his brand and business from within the firm.

Think about what that means in your career. How can you see that you have all the resources around you to drive your own business inside your firm? Can you see all the ways that your career success is distinct from your craft, and that like my friend the photographer, what matters is you develop the skills to drive your career? How can you see running your career as a business will have you shoot through your firm?

Stop Hating Your Job

Although it’s not always easy to change our jobs it’s always easy to change the way we think about them.

For instance, if you think of work as something you have to do, it will feel like an obligation, like something you don’t want to do.

Or if you think of it as “just a job,” then it will feel like just a job. It will be just a job. But it’s easy to change the way we think about our work.

What Ways?

Consider: Your work isn’t just a job. It’s how you earn your income, how you support your life and perhaps the lives of others. It is your livelihood.

Or: Your work isn’t just a job. It’s how you spend most of your days. It is how you spend your time.

Or: Your work isn’t just a job. It’s how you express yourself in the world. It is who you are to yourself and others.

Or: Your work isn’t just a job. That’s like saying your life is just a collection of hours.

No matter what job, you can think of it as you choose.

Look For What Is Good

I’ve seen this in my jobs from factory floors to Wall Street and read about it in books about happiness and Working. The happiest folks in their work are not those with the “best” jobs.

They are the folks that choose to look for what is “best” in their jobs and to be happy in their work. A common example being janitors seeing themselves alongside doctors and nurses as part of overall patient care.

They say more than 65% of people are dissatisfied in their jobs.

I’d suggest that dissatisfied is a pretty lousy option when you have two perfectly good options.

If we don’t like our jobs we can change them or change the way we think about them. Each goes hand in hand.

When we stop thinking about hating our jobs we have more time to think about what we like about them and/or how to change them.

Career Advice: From KFC to Goldman Sachs

I went to McDonalds the other night. I don’t remember the last time I did but it was likely also with my parents. We were on Sunset, in West Hollywood. Just like a child I stood next to my parents waiting on our Big Macs and my mother’s tailor-made cheeseburger – no pickles, no sauce. While we waited I watched the crew go about their work. And I thought about my work.

It reminded me of being a kid working part-time at KFC. I worked there a number of years, cooking chicken and serving customers. Truth be told, it was one of my most fun jobs. I learned many of my career principles from my part-time jobs, and it was KFC that taught me some of my most important. Standing at the counter with my parents, on my blackberry I started to type – My top 5 lessons from KFC to Goldman Sachs.

Always take the shift. At KFC I always took the extra shift. It gave me more money and it made me more reliable, which gave me more options. At Goldman it was about shifts and deals. Early in my career I always took the extra deal and worked the extra shift, the graveyard shift.

Be your best. Lil’ Wayne says, “be good or be good at it.” If you’re cooking chicken or working on Wall Street do it well. Putting more in means getting more out. This attitude will leak into every area of your life.

Clean as you go. At KFC it took 14 minutes to deep fry chicken. That mean’t you had 14 minutes to clean the kitchen before the chicken was cooked. On Wall Street you don’t go back and do it later. There’ll be something else to do later.

Multi-tasking. In a kitchen you are doing many things at the same time. It means being thoughtful about planning and sequencing of tasks and being focused enough to simultaneously do many things well. This is multi-tasking; it’s a life skill. Driving and typing on a blackberry is not; it’s a death skill.

Rotate jobs. No mechanic wants to only be able to change a tire. Rotating stations at KFC improved my experience and gave me more “career” options. I did the same at Goldman – four jobs and offices in eight years. It gave me more experience and options along the way and once I left.

Careers: Education is Continuous Learning

“20% of America’s millionaires never set foot in college and 21 of the 222 Americans listed as billionaires in 2003 never got their college diplomas.” Jack Canfield

There’s a renewed focus on improving the quality of our education system. I believe it oughta be one of our nation’s most important focuses. I also believe, however, that it’s crucial we each change the way we think about education. I believe we’ve entered an era of personal development where success will become increasingly contingent on our ability to self-educate, where adapting to accelerating change will demand continuous learning.

Changing our approach to education requires questioning the current approach. On that note, here’s some excerpts from a thought-provoking article by teacher and author Camille Paglia.

Vanishing of jobs will plague the rest of this decade and more…College education, which was hugely expanded after World War II and sold as a basic right, is doing a poor job of preparing young people for life outside of a narrow band of the professional class…

Jobs, and the preparation of students for them, should be front and center in the thinking of educators. The idea that college is a contemplative realm of humanistic inquiry, removed from vulgar material needs, is nonsense…

Jobs, jobs, jobs: We need a sweeping revalorization of the trades. The pressuring of middle-class young people into officebound, paper-pushing jobs is cruelly shortsighted…

Our present educational system defers credentialing and maturity for too long. When middle-class graduates in their mid-20s are just stepping on the bottom rung of the professional career ladder, many of their working-class peers are already self-supporting and married with young children…

The elite schools, predicated on molding students into mirror images of their professors, seem divorced from any rational consideration of human happiness…