I am in my third career now at age 74. It is time I have thought about how I was able to supercharge career development. More than just a passing thought.
Now, why is this subject important? I think it is important because, as far as I know, each of us has one life to live.
Even if you believe in reincarnation, it doesn’t do you any good from one life to the next! Why shouldn’t you do significant things in this one life? However, you define significant.
But so far as I know much of what I say applies to many fields. Contributions and outstanding work are characterized the same way very much in most fields, but I will confine myself to management.
Luck?
Einstein. Note how many different things he did that were good. Was it all luck? Wasn’t it a little too repetitive? Consider Peter Drucker. He didn’t do just management theory. He did many good things.
You see again and again that it is more than one thing from a good person. Once in a while, a person does only one thing in his whole life, and we’ll talk about that later, but a lot of times there is repetition. I claim that luck will not cover everything.
And I will cite Pasteur who said, “Luck favors the prepared mind.” And I think that says it the way I believe it. There is indeed an element of luck, and no, there isn’t. The prepared mind sooner or later finds something important and does it. So yes, it is luck. The particular thing you do is luck, but that you do something is not.
It takes courage
One of the characteristics you see, and many people have it including great leaders, is that usually when they were young, they had independent thoughts and dared to pursue them.
For example, Einstein, somewhere around 12 or 14, asked himself the question, “What would a light wave look like if I went with the velocity of light to look at it?” He could see a contradiction at the age of 12, 14, or somewhere around there, that everything was not right and that the velocity of light had something peculiar.
One of the characteristics of successful leaders is having courage. Once you get your courage up and believe that you can do important problems, then you can. If you think you can’t, almost surely you are not going to.
Courage is one of the things that Drucker had supremely. You have only to think of his major works. What Drucker was saying was this: “Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest.”
Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works ten percent more than the other, the latter will more than twice outproduce the former.
The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity – it is very much like compound interest. I don’t want to give you a rate, but it is a very high rate.
Given two people with the same ability, the one person who manages day in and day out to get in one more hour of thinking will be tremendously more productive over a lifetime.
I took Drucker’s remark to heart; I spent a good deal more of my time for some years trying to work a bit harder, and I found I could get more work done.
Also drive and commitment
On this matter of drive, Edison says, “Genius is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration.” He may have been exaggerating, but the idea is that solid work, steadily applied, gets you surprisingly far. The steady application of effort with a little bit more work, intelligently applied is what does it.
That’s the trouble; drive, misapplied, doesn’t get you anywhere. I’ve often wondered why so many of my good friends at IBM and Lockheed who worked as hard or harder than I did, didn’t have so much to show for it.
The misapplication of effort is a very serious matter. Just hard work is not enough – it must be applied sensibly.
And creativity
Now again, emotional commitment is not enough. It is a necessary condition. And I think I can tell you the reason why. Everybody who has studied creativity is driven finally by saying, “creativity comes out of your subconscious.”
Somehow, suddenly, there it is. It just appears. Well, we know very little about the subconscious; but one thing you are pretty well aware of is that your dreams also come out of your subconscious. And you’re aware your dreams are, to a fair extent, a reworking of the experiences of the day.
If you are deeply immersed in and committed to a topic, day after day after day, your subconscious has nothing to do but work on your problem. And so you wake up one morning, or on some afternoon, and there’s the answer.
For those who don’t get committed to their current problem, the subconscious goofs off on other things and doesn’t produce the big result.
Supercharge career development … the closed door
Another trait, it took me a while to notice. I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most.
But ten years later somehow you don’t know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important.
Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, “The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind.” I don’t know.
But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder.
Worth the effort?
