Matthew Syed
Bounce – Mozart, Federer, Picasso, Beckham, and the Science of Success , (p. 85), HarperCollins Publishers, 2010
Purposeful practice is about striving for what is just out of reach and not quite making it; it is about grappling with tasks beyond current limitations and falling short again and again. Excellence is about stepping outside the comfort zone, training with a spirit of endeavor, and accepting the inevitability of trials and tribulations. Progress is built, in effect, upon the foundation of necessary failure. That is the essential paradox of expert performance.

James 1:2-5, 12
The New International Version
Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds, ³because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance. Perseverance must finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything. ⁵If any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to him.

¹²Blessed is the man who perseveres under trial, because when he has stood the test, he will receive the crown of life that God has promised to those who love him.

Walking through the Colorado Springs Airport the other day, on my way to notch another step in my march toward annual 1K status on United Airlines, I was stopped by this advertisement by Daniels College of Business at the University of Denver: The Top Ten Jobs of 2015 Don’t Exist Today. Though I don’t know what that statement is based on, at an intuitive level, I think it’s true.

So what are the implications?

1. Your job is not safe. And it’s not just the threat of outsourcing to other countries, but that due to the accelerating change being brought to bear on business models by technology and globalization, the chances are pretty good that your job will be obsolete, extinct, gone the way of the dodo bird.

   It’s also now clear that jobs aren’t coming back. It’s not just jobs that have gone away, we’ve witnessed the demise of whole industries.  The investment banking industry was gone in a year.  Private sector jobs are shrinking.  The only job growth that we’re really seeing is with the federal government.

2. If you are training and getting educated for a job that exists today, you may finish up your training just in time to see that the job no longer exists.

   You have to face the reality that you will need to be an aggressive and active learner for the rest of your life.  I’m witnessing friends in their forties and fifties who have just lost their jobs.  They were in technology work and thought that they were on top of their games until they were laid off.  Then the fact that their technical knowledge was woefully out of date smashed them in the face.  Younger and less expensive talent had leaped ahead of them.  Unable to now get work at even minimum wage, they are struggling.  The lesson is that you have to keep learning, to keep up with the leading edge of the knowledge in  your field. And you will have to do this on your own because many companies, cash strapped as they are will not make those kinds of investments in training.

3. If you’re starting college this year, chances are what you imagine as your best career path today may not exist by the time you graduate.

   You cannot think any longer in terms of a career path, as if there was some sort of concrete pathway from here to retirement.  Careers will come and go, as do businesses and industries.  You will have to keep thinking as if you were an entrepreneur in terms of what value is needed today, how you can create significant value to a company/market/society.  View a job as a temporary gig and learn how to springboard to the next emerging opportunities and needs.

4. Our workforce is ill prepared for this challenge. Our schools are ill prepared for this challenge. Our government is ill prepared for this challenge.  Even business is ill prepared.

   Let me repeat.  YOU HAVE TO TAKE CHARGE OF YOUR OWN PREPARATION.  And if you are parents, wake up!  You will have to do more to prepare your own children to survive in this world.  You will have to help them develop the entrepreneurial skills, the creativity, the guts, the initiative to make their own way.

So what’s a person to do?

1. Accept the fact that jobs are no way to think about the world of work.  Think in terms of skill sets that you develop and apply to projects. Think about yourself as a Company of One (to borrow from the Army’s slogan).

   If you are thankfully still employed, don’t get comfortable.  Begin NOW to experiment with projects, small contracts, moonlighting in order to learn and hone new skills of value creation.  It may be more of what you do or it may be something different, but begin to hedge the risk of depending on your current job.

2. Continually work to evolve and grow your value. Develop fresh ways to add value to an organization.  This will require constant, 24/7 learning.  This will require constant networking and observation to the innovative edges of your industry or field of knowledge.

   I have nothing new here to say.  Just underline this point.

3. Don’t think of yourself in terms of a job description but as a portfolio of knowledge, skills, experience, and value-creating capabilities that are uniquely, innovatively, and freshly applied to organizations and their challenges, to markets and their demands, to customers and their needs.

   Reevaluate your portfolio NOW.  Don’t list the jobs that you’ve done.  List the things that you did to create value and success.  What did you most enjoy? What aspects of what you did brought you the most success while also being the most satisfying?  Step back and look at these things.  What kinds of work map to these?  What are needs that you see that are crying out for these capabilities?

4. You cannot…let me repeat…you cannot look to a job or an organization as your source of security.  In this 2008 campaign season there is a lot of rhetoric about saving jobs, preserving jobs, bringing back the jobs.  Sure some things that are outsourced may come back and sourced once again in this country.  But I’m afraid that a lot of those jobs aren’t outsourced away from our reach, they just disappear forever because of the changes in how business operates and  produces value.  And no government, politician, union, or school can change that.

   Be honest with yourself. What are you trusting in?  What do you look to as your source of security?  Not sure how to answer that?  Then think about what you would be most fearful of losing?  If you are married, discuss this with your spouse.  Build a personal, family, and financial battle plan to create margin and resiliency in your life.  It might be a ten year plan, but get under way.

5. Teach these entrepreneurial and value creating skills and mindset to all young people.  (I’ve wrestled with this as my two oldest children are in college.)  We can hope for government and other institutions to come to the rescue, but I just don’t see that any institution can respond quickly enough.  It’s all happening too fast.   We must be more responsible than ever to grow our own ability to produce value.  It’s a risk we must take.  And as we’re learning and developing new adaptable ways to find tomorrow’s opportunity and  growing tomorrow’s skills for ourselves, my hope is that we’ll also be creating new opportunities for our neighbors.

My two oldest are now graduated from college.  One is following an entrepreneurial path; the other is headed to grad school.  And there is a younger one still at home.  My wife and I continue to interact with all of them to coach them and advise them, while also discussing with them the unfolding dangers and challenges of our times.  We also are working to strengthen and develop the basic worldview, values, character, faith, discernment and judgment of the children.  This is foundational to stability in turbulent times.  I’m convinced that in the days ahead in this “new normal” that the only wealth and safety net will be the extended family and the resources and foundational character that it provides.   This is something that the U.S. has largely lost unlike other cultures.

Please write in and let me know what you are seeing and doing about these economically challenging times.

But one reason I hear frequently is “I don’t have time to develop people! I’m too busy running the business.” Statements like that set off all kinds of alarms and red alerts about the leader’s commitment to the future survival of the organization; about the leader’s priorities, about his understanding of his own role and responsibility in the organization. But I have to concede there is some validity to time issue.

Whenever I am advising clients on leadership and leader development initiatives, I am highly conscious of the pace and time demands on leaders. And I go to great lengths to help them reorganize their priorities and responsibilities, not just add to them. Most of us live lives so full that we can’t stack one more thing on the pile.

This tension caused me to remember something that was pointed out to me many years ago when I was studying how Jesus developed leaders who eventually changed the world. A thoughtful study of his life will show that he did not send his men off to seminars and training programs. They did not go through intense psychological testing and assessments. They didn’t go off to get their MBA’s and other graduate degrees. In fact, it was common knowledge that they were very common and unlearned men. The key it was pointed out was that they had been with Jesus.

When you analyze how Jesus spent his time in public, you will see that there is a marvelously balanced use of his time. A third is spent before large groups, a third in small group settings, and a third with individuals. However, the biographers of Christ, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, over and over use the phrases “with him” or “with Jesus”. Whether Jesus was interacting with crowds, small groups, or individuals, he managed to have some or all of his key people “with him.” And in the process they learned more about who he was, his character, his purpose, his values, his work and his expectations for them. They learned from the Master by being with the Master. Wherever he was, whatever he did, they were with him.

My recommendation to you, whether you are a senior executive or just starting out in supervisory and management work, never do anything alone — to the extent that you can manage it, always take someone with you. Going on a sales call? Take someone along to watch! Negotiating a contract? Settling a labor dispute? Working on strategic planning? Whatever it is, have someone go with you. Then as you walk, drive or fly back, ask them what they saw, what they thought, what ideas they had. You will learn so much about their potential as future leaders, and you will be giving them invaluable learning. And, as a by-product, they may give you ideas and insights you may never have thought about.

And let me encourage senior leaders to not just take along the usual suspects. Dip a grade level or two lower down and begin to expose younger people to your world. You might be surprised at the payoff from this activity.

And guess what, this is all done without adding another thing to your schedule! So who will you take along with you today?

Click here to download 168 Hours: Worksheet

Jon Gordon
Training Camp – A Fable about Excellence, (p. 76), John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2009
Each day you think of your mind as a garden and you pay attention to your thoughts. You know that if you don’t weed out the negative thoughts, then they will take over your mind. You also know that if you continuously plant positive thoughts, eventually the weeds of negativity will have nowhere to breed and grow. It’s a process and it works. Just as you practice running, blocking, and catching, you must eliminate negative thoughts. You realize that being positive or negative is a habit, and you choose the positive.

Philippians 4:8
The New International Version
Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.

Marshall Goldsmith with Mark Reiter
What Got You Here Won’t Get You There – How Successful People Become Even More Successful!, (p. 16-17), Hyperion, 2007
UNUM, the insurance company, ran an ad some years ago showing a powerful grizzly bear in the middle of a roaring stream, with his neck extended to the limit, jaws wide open, teeth flaring. The bear was about to clamp on to an unsuspecting airborne salmon jumping upstream. The headline read: YOU PROBABLY FEEL LIKE THE BEAR. WE’D LIKE TO SUGGEST YOU’RE THE SALMON.

The ad was designed to sell disability insurance, but it struck me as a powerful statement about how all of us in the workplace delude ourselves about our achievements, our status, and our contributions. We

• Overestimate our contribution to a project
• Take credit, partial or complete, for successes that truly belong to others
• Have an elevated opinion of our professional skills and our standing among our peers
• Conveniently ignore the costly failures and time-consuming deadends we have created
• Exaggerate our projects’ impact on net profits because we discount the real and hidden costs built into them (the costs are someone else’s problems; the success is ours)

All of these delusions are a direct result of success, not failure. That’s because we get positive reinforcement from our past successes, and, in a mental leap that’s easy to justify, we think that our past success is predictive of great things in the future.

Romans 12:3
The New American Standard Bible
For through the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think more highly of himself than he ought to think; but to think so as to have sound judgment, as God has allotted to each a measure of faith.

Mr. Porter traces the path of frustration with information exchange from the late 90s forward under the heading of grazing.

We began with Site Grazing – entering the address of websites in search of new content. Pretty soon that got frustrating because there were just too many sites to keep track of—especially with no assurance of anything new.

Enter Feed Grazing in the form of Really Simple Syndication web feeds that told us a site we followed had new content. The frustration came when we added one too many feed readers to our RSS list. All of a sudden we were back more or less where we started, with too much sorting to do.

Which led to the development of Grazing Lists that promised to help us find our way through the crowd of information aggregators. But why was a particular feed is on the List? Not knowing led to more frustration.

The emergence of Post Grazing services addresses that frustration by identifying the newest content from blogs dedicated to subjects like technology or finance.

Mr. Porter supposed the next truly sticky adaptation would be Personalized Post Grazing to zero in on our personal preference and reading habits. In this too, he was proved right as the capacity to select a specific sort of post grew more and more granular.

He concluded with a caveat:

However, there may still be frustrations at the personal post level as well. One is our changing tastes. What if we track tech news for years and then find ourselves burnt out, and yearning for a different kind of news? What if we don’t feel that we’re discovering enough diversity in our personal recommendations…what if we feel like we’re missing out? With every level that we reach, we’re happy for only a short period of time. We will continue to want increased efficiency, and increased denseness of information.

Mr. Porter’s article represented—as nearly as anyone has—what’s behind the way I’ve presented notable news items and trends to others in my circle of friends. For years I circulated copies of articles that engaged me along with brief editorial notes about why I was sending them. It’s worth to note that the articles I forwarded were a rather eclectic mix of subject matters . . . determined by the underlying foundation of my worldview. I suppose InsideWork.net is a natural extension of that passion.

The articles in those big envelopes I mailed were a compendium of material on selected topics gathered in my weekly “grazing” of newspapers, magazines and trade journals I thought contributed to a holistic perspective on what was happening in the world.

This is why one of my concerns with RSS feeds has been a fear of what could be called “narrowcasting.” When people pre-select what they’ll read based on a comfortable set of interests they run the risk of living in an information cul-de-sac. The handiness of having that comfortable flow of material sent to them can outweigh the value of challenging perspectives across a variety of subjects. This is the tyranny of convenience where the narrow-caster zeroes in on one thing to the exclusion of others.

People scan newspapers and magazines looking for articles that interest them. But the very process of grazing through the paper forces them to see and observe—maybe even read—articles they wouldn’t have thought to seek out. Those serendipitous exposures then create connections in their perspectives on life—their worldview—they might never have experienced otherwise.

This notion has influenced the way I approach the Bible—which can easily be read in daily ten-page chunks over a couple of months. I don’t expect to get everything in every passage every time I read. My mind wanders, my attention is captured by something in the text even as I continue reading. I no longer get frustrated about that. I plow ahead, knowing I’ll be back this way soon. Grazing the scriptures habitually this way I find connections I never made before.

I think it was Karl Barth who said Christians should greet the day with the New York Times in one hand (I might substitute the Financial Times) and the Bible in the other. This makes a great deal of sense to me—connecting as it does my temporary address in California with my permanent address in the kingdom of God.

I think this is the discipline of those who are developing a biblical worldview. If we’re going to cut a wide swath through the biblical text and the best thinking about the cultures where we live and work . . . grazing is about the only way to tackle the problem.

I try not to limit myself to print or computer-based media. I keep CNBC on in the background in my office and I listen to the New International Version of the Bible on my iPod (I chose an audio edition of the NIV with no music, no dramatizations—just the plain text—with chapter markers so I can scan forward and backward to what I want to hear.

My colleague Dan Wooldridge talks about the importance of healthy rituals—trigger points and patterns that order our lives in relation to God. We all have our rituals—coffee, news, sports, drive time radio . . . the question is, are we as consistent about creating meaningful spiritual rituals as we are about getting our caffeine . . . our financial news . . . our political fix?

All this falls under tooling our lives to walk with God. We come to work with skills and tools . . . I think we need to approach our spiritual development the same way—asking how do I work the biblical text into the breadth and depth of my life until I master it (or it masters me)?