[From Unsplash]
Good morning,
Peter Bregman’s 2011 book 18 Minutes raises some compelling questions that most of us don’t think about. Or perhaps, we choose not to think about. He offers some pointers on how we might answer those questions in our personal lives.
“Who am I if I take away my work? That’s a question to which we’d better have a solid answer. And yet many of us don’t. Fortunately, once we realize this we can do something about it.
“We can diversify.
“I don’t mean diversifying your money, though that’s a good idea too. I mean diversifying yourself. So that when one identity fails, the other ones keep you vibrant. If you lose your job but you identify passionately as a mother or a father, you’ll be fine. If you have a strong religious identity or view yourself as an artist, you’ll be fine. If you see yourself as an athlete, or even simply as a good, loyal friend, you’ll be fine…
“Here’s the thing, though: It’s not enough to see yourself in a certain way; you need to act on it. Build yourself on it. Build it into your year. Your day. It won’t help if you identify as a father but rarely spend time with your children. Or if religion is a big part of your identity and yet you rarely engage in religious activities.
“One obstacle is money. For many people, an obsession with work is really about having enough money to support themselves or their families. How can we work less and still survive?
“Perhaps it’s not the only way to not only survive but thrive. Stepping away from your work might just be the key to increasing your productivity.
“And having multiple identities will help you perform better in each one. Because you learn things as an athlete or a parent or a poet that will make you a better employee or leader or friend. So the more you invest yourself in multiple identities, the less likely it is that you’ll lose any one of them…
“And if you still believe that doing nothing but work is necessary to support your lifestyle, then it’s worth looking at ways to moderate your lifestyle so you don’t kill youself trying to maintain it.”
Finding beauty
A profound piece that had our attention was a first person account by Jodi Ettenberg on CNN.com. She used to be a lawyer who loved to travel the world. And then, a botched up medical procedure led to a cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) leak and she is now bed-bound. In this essay, Ettenberg describes how her world fell apart, the grief and anger she felt, the learnings she has had over the years, and how she now looks at beauty.
“I often described my bed-bound state to friends as feeling like a puppy looking out the window as people played outside.
“When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, the wider world got a taste of that isolation, and the mental toll that it can take.
“Like me a few years prior, nearly everyone had to stop not only their travels, but also many daily activities that they previously took for granted. And many people were largely cut off from physical contact outside their households.
“The collective grief that ensued highlighted how hard it is for anyone to be alone in the darkness. It takes effort to ask for help, or to reach out to others when feeling depressed.
“It takes a willingness to be vulnerable, to share the anxieties that arise when the world becomes smaller. But doing so alleviates some of the burden that comes with relearning what it means to be human in a new landscape.
“I recognized a lot of my mental struggles reflected back at me during the pandemic.
“Conversely, my community messaged to say that they understood more of the heartache I processed during my journey. Though some of the world is opening back up, I will still be in bed.
“My challenge is to maintain my focus on the beauty of the small, not the larger things I cannot participate in.”
Dig deeper
Skills vs degrees
People who bet on the future tell us that increasingly businesses will look more for skills rather than degrees. Given the number of skills learning platforms, it seems to be a decent prediction to make. What does the real world data tell us? Joseph Fuller, a Harvard Business School professor, and his team studied the data for IT companies, which have been facing supply crunch, and found that, while skill-based hiring is on the rise, for most part degrees matter too.
They write: “Each company we studied had recently announced the elimination of degree requirements companywide. What we found, however, was that in practice they all continue to make higher than average demands for college degrees. Oracle, for example, requires degrees in well over 90% of the IT postings we sampled, including all of its network administrators. The national average is only 52%.
“That said, we found marked differences in how often companies require a degree for IT positions, even when hiring for the same one. Consider the job of software quality-assurance engineer. Only 26% of Accenture’s postings for the position contained a degree requirement. Likewise, only 29% of IBM’s did. But the percentages were dramatically different at Oracle (100%), Intel (94%), HP (92%), and Apple (90%).
“More broadly, by the end of 2021, Accenture and IBM had consistently distinguished themselves in their efforts to walk back degree inflation: At Accenture, only 43% of postings for IT jobs contained a degree requirement, and at IBM, only 29% did. Other major technology players who had made similar policy announcements accomplished much less.”
Dig deeper
Minimalism
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Warm regards,
Team Founding Fuel
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