Image credit: BrainyQuote

While success is most people’s goal, how they define it varies widely.

A couple of weeks ago Clay Christensen, who pioneered disruption theory and wrote The Innovator’s Dilemma, died.

KG sent me an a16z editorial about his effect on business, but I think the 2010 HBR interview called How Will You Measure Your Life? is much better when it comes to success.

Why?

Because it lays out his business principles tweaked so a person could build a personal culture that would assure happiness.

When the members of the [HBS] class of 2010 entered business school, the economy was strong and their post-graduation ambitions could be limitless. Just a few weeks later, the economy went into a tailspin. They’ve spent the past two years recalibrating their worldview and their definition of success.

In the spring, Harvard Business School’s graduating class asked HBS professor Clay Christensen to address them—but not on how to apply his principles and thinking to their post-HBS careers. The students wanted to know how to apply them to their personal lives.

The students had a front row seat to watch the economy go from hot to frigid, which taught them that careers weren’t everything.

On the last day of class, I ask my students to turn those theoretical lenses on themselves, to find cogent answers to three questions: First, how can I be sure that I’ll be happy in my career? Second, how can I be sure that my relationships with my spouse and my family become an enduring source of happiness? Third, how can I be sure I’ll stay out of jail? Though the last question sounds lighthearted, it’s not. Two of the 32 people in my Rhodes scholar class spent time in jail. Jeff Skilling of Enron fame was a classmate of mine at HBS. These were good guys—but something in their lives sent them off in the wrong direction.

Three simple questions, but three that few people, let alone MBA students, especially those at Harvard, focus on.

But what kind of life is it, if you are unhappy or have bad relationships with your family or cross the line, when with a little effort and planning you can avoid all three?

While Clay Christensen isn’t a silver life bullet, his thinking and approach come close.

Image credit: By World Economic Forum from Cologny, Switzerland – Leading Through Adversity: Clayton ChristensenUploaded by January, CC BY-SA 2.0

Poking through 11+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.

Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.

Surprisingly, it is Millennials who are giving a lot of thought to dying and, in doing so, changing the conversations around it. All I can say is, it’s about time!” I get it. They are dedicated to directing how they live, want to control how they exit and are far more pragmatic about it than previous generations. I’m no Millennial, but over the decades I’ve given a lot of thought to the subject, too.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

What do you think about when you take stock of your life? What do you strive for? What makes you feel successful?

But first…

What I’m about to write is NOT a judgment call—having been brought up in a judgmental family I don’t judge. Sure, I have opinions, we all do, but I don’t judge. The most I can say is “X doesn’t work for me, but Y does.”

Granted, I might recommend Y; I might even argue passionately regarding the merits of Y, but in the end it’s your decision and you need to tweak/modify/change Y to fit your MAP—if you decide you have any interest in it at all—because Y is a product of my MAP and no two MAPs are identical.

Back to taking stock.

Someone once said to me,

“I still have more than half my life left to live… Still, with each birthday I feel the anxiety of wondering if I am living up to my potential. … Often, I can’t wake up from my daydreams of a disciplined and directed life long enough to make that life happen. … I have learned from experience that I need both [self awareness and willingness to change] if I want to be successful in life and leadership.”

I found it sad because the focus seemed to be so personally judgmental and the person set such store on an intangible like ‘leadership’—which, to have any real meaning, needs to be bestowed and substantiated by others.

But that is just me.

I’m substantially older than most of you and have bounced and blundered through life opening doors as the mood moved me.

I’ve made and lost money as well as friends as our lives diverged.

I once read that success is found in what you do for others, but I believe it’s also in what you don’t do and based on both I am enormously successful.

I’ve given a helping hand to hundreds, thus facilitating their ultimate success.

More importantly, I work hard at not hurting anyone by word or deed, advertently or inadvertently.

I doubt that I’m always successful, but I do try like hell.

I do not lie, cheat or steal.

If I were to have a tombstone (which I won’t, since I’m being composted, which is much better than cremation) it would look like this.

Image credit: JJ Chandler (site no longer exists)

If you interview or work for a unicorn or unicorn wannabe that excels at raising money you would be wise to take a step back.

Forget charisma and founder vision and consider what is really going on profit-wise and sustainability-wise.

Fast growth is good mainly for VCs, not employees.

If you can discipline yourself not to be dazzled by shiny words and concepts you can learn to sort the wheat from the chaff.

Do that, and you won’t need to buy this sign or tattoo the words on your frontal lobe.

Image credits: Sarah Rebecca on Instagram  and Zazzle

Decades ago, when I was a recruiter in Silicon Valley, I preferred working directly with managers, avoiding HR, so I worked primarily with startups and smaller companies as opposed to large corporations — unicorns didn’t exist back then.

Aside from disliking HR’s bureaucratic read tape, I found I could provide better matches by understanding the culture of the hiring manager, whether founder or not.

Yes, there is an overarching company culture, but the manager-specific cultures that exist in every company rarely duplicate it and may not even bare any similarity.

Culture is the direct result of values.

Culture is only ageist, misogynist, bigoted when that manager’s values are ageist, misogynist, bigoted.

To thrive in a culture, you don’t need to duplicate your boss’ values, but they must, at the least, be synergistic.

Accepting an offer from a boss whose values are incompatible, let alone diametrically opposed, to yours can mean setting yourself up for disappointment or worse.

Image credit: pmillerd

Hey guys, are you doing your all to optimize your existence?

Success, money and disrupting an industry just doesn’t cut it anymore.

“Optimizing” is the male version of the same techniques women have been forced to use for decades to avoid being labeled old, AKA, unhireable.

Of course, old is relative.

The stretch number used to be 30 for women and no top for men.

While aging out for women hasn’t changed much, men’s has dropped like a stone, especially in the rarified atmosphere of Silicon Valley and other tech environs.

So what’s a guy to do?

The same thing women have been doing for decades.

These men are turning to procedures like Botox, fillers, laser treatments, and radio frequency microneedling, a technique that stimulates collagen and rejuvenates the skin. In some cases, they’re going under the knife for eye and neck lifts, according to the Post.

Who would have thought that any form of gender parity in tech would be driven by rampant ageism?

Image credit: paul stumpr

Poking through 14+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.

Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.

Who you are includes all the previous yous in your life. And each you developed unique skills appropriate to what you did and what was going on in that you’s life.

That cumulative effect made the current you deeper, richer, more valuable, smarter, and more adaptive. It doesn’t matter if the skills were developed in response to a need at work or a situation in your personal life. They are there to use if you choose, but first you need to acknowledge them — which can be difficult in a world that worships youth, AKA, no experiences / no depth.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

For decades, I’ve said that people have two sides to their head, personal and professional, and rarely do they use the skills from one side in dealing with the challenges on the other. For example, when you have two employees arguing by email with each other and copying the entire group use the skills you use with your kids. They work on the adults because, in situations such as this, the adults are acting like kids.

Sad as it is in a world where career change is more drastic than ever before, it seems that these self-inflicted barriers are increasing; not so much in general skill usage, but rather in “specialized” skills.

I know several investment bankers, unhappy with what they were doing, who moved to companies in senior operational roles, but don’t use/adapt many of their banking skills to the new environment. The same is true for many of what I call radical career changers—engineers who move to financial services; salespeople who become technical and vice versa.

Because I run into it more and more, I’ve spent time figuring out why it happens and the easiest way to eliminate the barriers. Partly, it’s because people often go back to school for their new career, and so assume that their old skills don’t apply, but it’s also a language thing.

Every type of work has its own language, i.e., applying industry/job specific definitions to various words; because the meaning changes, the associated skill is often relegated to the “previous life.”

Humans are cumulative animals, without an effective delete key, so, when you’re adding new skills be sure to keep using the old ones by remembering to recognize when it’s the language that’s changed, rather than the action, and learning to tweak previous skills to apply to your new situation.

Image credit: Luigi Mengato

“Kindness is cool” according to Amanda Giese, Founder/President of Panda Paws Rescue, in the opening credits of her show on Animal Planet.

Kindness is a lot more than cool; in fact, kindness can save lives according to new research.

And that applies to work, as well as the world at large.

Old research

A 1978 study looking at the link between high cholesterol and heart health in rabbits determined that kindness made the difference between a healthy heart and a heart attack.

New research

Just to give you an example — because I know that there are probably a lot of CEOs or managers listening to this — but studies have shown that the strongest predictor of a man’s death from heart disease isn’t cholesterol or blood pressure. It’s his job. Or her job. Everyone knows it’s important to have a good doctor, but it’s also important to have a good manager and to give people the skills that they need to be good managers. –Kelli Harding, professor of psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center, and author of The Rabbit Effect: Live Longer, Happier, and Healthier with the Groundbreaking Science of Kindness.

Kindness starts with empathy, the capacity to understand or feel what another person is experiencing from within their frame of reference…

The key here is “their frame of reference.”

This is why it’s so difficult for a man to truly understand what women go through or for a Caucasian to walk in the shoes of a person of color.

So while kindness may start with empathy, it’s also what takes over when empathy can go no further.

Kindness is the most essential trait to teach kids if you want to assure their success.

It will serve them well their whole life.

It’s a critical trait for team members.

It’s the hallmark of the best bosses.

It’s not something AI will ever be able to mimic.

Mark Twain said it best.

Kindness is a language which blind people see and deaf people hear.

And everybody benefits from.

Want to learn more about the benefits of kindness? Here’s a reading list of recent books.

Image credit: Ron Mader

It used to be that work was part of life.

As tech connectivity increased, it became more life is part of work.

Now, instead of a work/life discussion, it’s a work/work conversation.

A year ago I wrote about Millennial optimization and burnout.

This year engineers are talking about how founders take advantage of it and that working for a big company is a viable alternative.

It’s a convenient narrative for the founders and CEOs who count on employees to put in extra hours—often without extra compensation—in order to keep their companies afloat. (…) Basecamp founder and CEO Jason Fried noted on Twitter, “If your company requires you to work nights and weekends, your company is broken. This is a managerial problem, not your problem.”

Working extra long hours was considered the way to get ahead, but it was also the road to burnout.

So, what’s changed in a year?

The advice to get ahead.

Instead of working long hours, nights and weekends for others the recommendation is to use all those unpaid hours working for yourself.

The answer may vary depending on the specifics of your job. But in general, you’re far more likely to get ahead by channeling your enthusiasm and ambition toward your own independent projects—not the company’s. (…) That is, after all, how many founders and CEOs achieved their own success. (…) Other ambitious young people may find that the best way to advance their careers is to dedicate their free time not to the jobs they have, but to the jobs they want.

In other words, continue with the 80-100 hour weeks, just shift part of those hours to your own projects.

Great advice.

Doing so would mean there’s a second party responsible (blamable) for your depression/anxiety/burnout/atrophied social skills/blown relationships/etc.

The truth is that whether those 80-100 hours is for yourself, someone else, or split, they will ruin your health and, eventually, your life.

Image credit: andrew leddy

A couple of years ago I wrote about a stupid, soul-gutting Silicon Valley myth about work and people’s value.

It spelled out the idiocy of believing that only the best were hired by startups, let alone unicorns, and everyone else was second caliber. As I said then, what a crock.

Throughout a long career as a recruiter and since I’ve said the same thing and it hasn’t changed.

The right place for you to work is the one that satisfies what you want — whether that’s the opportunity to work on bleeding edge technology, build a network, upgrade your resume or even plain, old curiosity.

The wrong place is the one you join with an eye to getting rich quick or for bragging rights.

For some people those reasons still stand, but a lot has changed.

For many Silicon Valley engineers money has taken a front seat to most considerations and it’s startups that are suffering, since they can’t compete salary-wise with giant companies and unicorns (which are nothing more than giant companies that haven’t gone public — often because they aren’t profitable and likely never will be.)

That’s understandable, considering the cost of living, but when you add the aspirations so many consider “necessities” then salary becomes even more important.

The problem, for both employers and employees is the same.

Money is not and never has been a source of loyalty — in either direction.

When companies feel the necessity to lower their burn rate the highly paid are often the first to go.

And my old adage that people who join for money/stock/perks will leave for more money/stock/perks still holds true.

Loyalty is the result of managers and companies giving a damn and employees invested in a mission that has meaning beyond money.

Silicon Valley is big on smoke and mirrors; the two biggest are

• Startups, including unicorns (think WeWork), will make you rich is the smoke.
• The inevitability of technology is the mirrors.

Image credit:  theilr