Career Advice, Money and Finding Your "Zone of Genius"
Hey there -
I'm continuing to tinker with things, and think through my next full-time career move; as you'll see below "career advice" has occupied a lot of real estate in my mind lately.
Here are the five things I learned this week...
1. Some profound career thoughts by Sam Altman in this twitter thread.
Sam was the President of Y Combinator, hugely successful angel investor, and most recently founded OpenAI, a "research company, discovering and enacting the path to safe artificial general intelligence".
2. More career advice was pulled from Shaan Puri, who mentions the concept of finding the "Zone of Genius", from Gay Hendricks' book The Big Leap. I distilled the information into a simple Venn diagram the other day while reading about it (levels = incompetent, competent, excellent, genius).
Here's a quick read if you want to dig in further: How to Get Into The "Zone of Genius" And Unlock Your Highest Potential.
3. As I continue to try writing more in 2020, LinkedIn is one outlet I'm leaning into (oftentimes begrudgingly, I might add). Last week I shared a template that was "accidentally"(?) sent out by AWS. I think it's worth a read if you are interested in writing (or reading!).
4. It has always struck me as "wrong" when people would complain about paying for avocado at Chipotle (or whatever), but they wouldn't think to ask for a raise at their job - just seems you're optimizing for the wrong thing(s). I acknowledge this comes from a place of privilege. But I also want to mention my believe in the concept of: the answer to the question you never ask, is always "no".
Check out this tweet by Ramit Sethi, that explains it succinctly. Ramit is the author of "I Will Teach You to be Rich" (he admits the title is just a clickbait title for marketing purposes). But fair warning: he can come off as a little - um - scammy, but I still value a lot of his principles. TLDR: "...Stop asking $3 questions & start asking $30,000 questions".
5. And finally, speaking of money, quick h/t to Google (Alphabet, technically) for joining the Trillion Dollar Club this week. Crazy. They are the fourth technology company to join the club in the last two years (Apple, Amazon and Microsoft were the three that beat them to the punch).
Enjoy the long weekend, and here's to MLK!
PS - if you're seeing this newsletter for the first time, you can subscribe here.
Cheers,
Brendan