#41: building an intentional career
👋 Welcome to the 41st volume of Out of Curiosity, a weekly newsletter promoting ideas to help get 1% better everyday.
Every week, I go through nearly 100 pieces of content (from books and podcasts to newsletters and tweets), and bring you the best in this newsletter together with what I publish on my blog and podcast.
To get future issues delivered to your inbox, click on the button down blow 👇
In this issue:
🎙 Building an intentional career
🤓 How to be a genius
💼 10 lessons in 10 years of entrepreneurship
🚫 Enough
🎙 Building an intentional career
I recently had Steph Smith on the podcast. She leads the content team over at Trends, and also writes on her own personal blog on topics like remote work, productivity, writing and learning.
We covered quite a lot of fundamental topics to do with life and careers.
Life is just like a bunch of hills or mountains.
Some of them are small, some of them are big. But you can't really connect the top of two mountains. But in order to get to the highest mountain, whatever the highest mountain means to you, you need to explore a bunch of different mountains.
And what I find that a lot of people do is, they choose a mountain first, and they go up it, and then they just continue going up this mountain, because there's like a sunk cost of going back down that mountain. They don't want to become a beginner. They put all this effort into exploring one thing.
But, remember, you chose to go up that mountain based on the information that your brain, your AI, had at that time.
🤓 How to be a genius
If IQ is overrated, curiosity and persistence are not.
Nor is a having a childlike imagination through adult life, the capacity to relax so as to allow disparate ideas to coalesce into new, original ones, and the ability to construct a habit for work so as to get the product out the door.
If you want to live a long life, get a passion. Geniuses are passionate optimists who on average outlive the general populace by more than a decade.
💼 10 lessons in 10 years of entrepreneurship
Your secret ingredient is people. Quickly recognize and invest in your force multipliers.
Embrace the gift of feedback. What feels like friction is actually polish.
People might not remember what you say. But they always remember how you make them feel.
Develop your storytelling abilities. This will amplify everything you and your company want to say.
The best people will join your company for a “why,” not a “what.”
🚫 Enough
We spend our 30s/40s working hard, grinding, and growing and then spend our 40s/50s easing off.
But it’s during that first stage where our kids are so impressionable, and when they actually want to hang out with us.
The second stage they might be out of the house, or at least teenagers who are too cool to want to hang out with their lame parents.
What if we inverted these two stages?
Whenever someone asks me how we have grown as we have over the years and says they want to do the same, I always share that is unwise to grow for the sake of growth alone but to do it only if it fulfills a bigger purpose. Find your purpose first and then let that purpose guide your decision-making and what it will look like.
The world is not a problem to be solved.
It is a living being to which we belong. It is part of our own self and we are a part of its suffering wholeness.
Until we go to the root of our image of separateness, there can be no healing. And the deepest part of our separateness from creation lies in our forgetfulness of its sacred nature, which is also our own sacred nature.
—Thich Nhat Hanh
Until next week,
Reza
