NEVER TELL PEOPLE WHAT YOU DO
How to Advance Your Career
By Bruce Kasanoff
This book is published by Helpful Humans Media. The ISBN number of this title is 978-1-941115-03-9. This book is copyright 2016 by Bruce Kasanoff. All rights reserved.
About the Author
Be generous and expert, trustworthy and clear, open-minded and adaptable, persistent and present.
—the author’s personal and professional credo
Bruce Kasanoff is one of the most prolific writers on LinkedIn, where he focuses on doing well by doing good.
As a social media ghostwriter, Bruce works with many entrepreneurs and executives to help them share their best ideas. You can learn more at Kasanoff.com .
Contents
About the Author
Chapter 1: Introduction
Chapter 2: Never Tell People What You Do
Chapter 3: Remember This: G2C2
Chapter 4: How to Tell a Story People Will Remember
Chapter 5: Generic Thinking Can Wreck Your Career
Chapter 6: Show Empathy When Others Are in Distress
Chapter 7: When You Are in Distress
Chapter 8: The Best Talent is Bringing Out Talent in Others
Chapter 9: 20 Ways to Get a Raise
Chapter 10: The Secret of Life—No Kidding
Chapter 11: Be Quiet, Have a Purpose, Make Friends
Chapter 12: Epilogue: Is Your Company Mindful or ADD?
Chapter 13: Credits
Introduction
I write every day, and I am impatient. To me, it would be a sacrilege to lock myself in a room for a year, write, and never let other people read what I had created that day.
On the other hand, I recognize that people like to read more than a few hundred words at a time, which is why someone, long ago, invented books.
With the exception of a few words here and there, everything in this book has been shared somewhere, sometime before. But this is a collection of my words that resonated most with readers, so you could say they are time-tested.
Expect me to jump around a bit in the pages ahead. My intention is mainly to share my conviction that if you help others, and if you are clear about what you want, then you can create one win-win relationship after another.
If you like what you read, I have two requests:
Tell others—via a review on Amazon, and by simply telling your friends and family.
Drop me a line. I’m at [email protected] .
All the best,
Bruce Kasanoff
November 2016
Never Tell People What You Do
It’s a simple question, and you’ve probably answered it hundreds of times. “What do you do?” If you’re like most people, you probably get the answer dead wrong.
Your standard reply might entail a factual description of your current job.
The right answer is what do you WANT to do.
The best way to pick up this habit is to take a trip to Los Angeles. Ask your cab driver what he does. “I’m a screenwriter,” he might say, “Working on a thriller about two schoolchildren who stumble onto a plot to blow up the Hoover Dam.”
When you go out to dinner, ask the same question of your waitress. The odds are 50/50 she’ll say, “I’m an actress.”
Twenty-four-year-old interns are “directors.” Forty-four-year-old ad-agency execs are “producers.” Everyone talks about his or her aspirations, not what paid the rent this month.
Now, some may argue that Los Angeles is La-La Land, and there is nothing to be learned from people who are dreaming big and perhaps spinning their wheels. But I disagree.
As proof, last year, I watched my son move to LA to become a television writer. He knew the odds were steep. So did I—but he’s been writing fiction since he was seven years old, and has proven his ability to work incredibly hard in pursuit of his dreams.
This is what I admire so much about my son and people like him: he is willing to say what he wants, and he is willing to work as hard as it takes to get what he wants.
That is a killer combination.
You are probably much closer to your goals than an aspiring Hollywood actor. The main thing standing in your way is your willingness to say what you want and to work as hard as it takes to get what you want.
Which of these best describes what you say in your LinkedIn profile (or any other platform you use to introduce yourself to potential employers, partners, or investors)?
a. What you’ve done
b. What you want to do
One of the main purposes of LinkedIn is to help professionals discover career opportunities, so you might guess that this is the one place where people say what they want to do.
You would be wrong.
Most people say what they have done.
Here’s a typical LinkedIn headline:
MARKETING MANAGER at ACME CORPORATION
If I need to hire a marketing manager at Acme Corporation, this person is qualified—but if I need anything else, the headline doesn’t tell me much. In fact, it tells me nothing about this professional’s dreams, aspirations, strengths, career path, or special qualities.
My clients tend to be successful professionals on a quest to become even more successful. Even so, many hesitate to be honest about what they want.
In some respects, they are afraid of success. “Dare I say that my dream is to _______?”
Somehow, saying what you really want seems too bold, grandiose, ego-driven, or outrageous. It’s not. It’s how amazing people do remarkable things: by daring to say their dreams out loud.
A few words about fear…
What you want most in this world often resides alongside the things that scare you the most. That’s one big reason why some people don’t follow through. It’s why they inexplicably don’t act on opportunities. It’s why some remain in neutral while other, “less talented” people have long since shifted into drive.
In other words, the problem isn’t that they don’t care. The problem is that they care too much.
Our fears and dreams are inexorably linked. Obviously, different people behave and react differently. Some are profoundly inspired by their dreams, and any fears they may have pale in comparison to the lure of getting what they most want in life. Not everyone works this way, however; for a significant number of people, dreams and fears are packed tightly together.
When I was speaking a few years ago about bringing out talent in other people, here’s what the live blogger wrote as I reached that point in my presentation (the italics are what she wrote):
“Dreams and fears are neighbors.” Whoa. I heard a collective sigh from the audience when this came out.
In a perfect world, we’d all be courageous and tenacious, honorable and pure…but we all are part of humanity, and the human condition is such that we are far from perfect.
You just have to be okay with feeling a bit scared, and saying what you want anyway.
I’m not telling you to lie. I’m telling you to be bold enough to share what you want. Your resume says what you’ve done. That’s in the past.
When I was in the training business, an executive asked one of my colleagues whether we had a two-day training program customized for his industry. “Yes, we do,” said my colleague, who then spent the weekend creating such a program. He combined initiative, imagination, and effort…and won a new client.
The happiest and most successful people nearly always have a sense of what they want to do next, or how they wish to grow. They are able to say where they are headed, instead of where they have been the past few years. If you were to meet Elon Musk, I’ll bet he wouldn’t talk much about Paypal; he
would probably tell you about how he plans to make space flight routine.
When you say what you want, you give others the opportunity to help you make your dreams come true.
When you are too embarrassed or cautious to say what you want, you make it impossible for others to help you.
Be bold. Be brave. Be honest.
With that said, you may not know what you want. Many people don’t—or they are afraid to admit what they want.
Map your strengths, passions, and obligations: What are you best at, what do you love best, and what do you have to do? The place where these three elements overlap is your sweet spot, and this is where you want to spend as much time as possible, according to Mick Ukleja and Robert Lorber in Who Are You and What Do You Want?
They write, “When you align your talents and passions, they support—even amplify—one another.”
I would add that when you draw a map like this (i.e. three intersecting circles), even if it’s on the back of a napkin, you create a more realistic picture of how the things you love to do match what you are really good at doing. The two are not always exactly the same.
Adopt a growth rather than a fixed mindset: In Mindset: The New Psychology of Success , Carol Dweck observes that people with a growth mindset believe that through effort, they can develop cherished qualities and abilities. In contrast, people with a fixed mindset feel their abilities are carved in stone.
Guess which group does better in life? Yep—people with a growth mindset.
She writes, “The passion for stretching yourself and sticking to it, even (or especially) when it’s not going well, is the hallmark of the growth mindset.”
Think about the things you do for fun (playing video games, going skydiving, reading mystery novels, etc.), and consider where those interests might lead you if you were to build upon them.
Let your answers get messy: To sort this out, I turned to my friend Jim George, author of Time to Make It Stop: The How of Now . He told me, “When deciding what you love, remember that you don’t have to come up with just one thing, one catch-all activity that covers all the bases. Most of what successful people do is actually a synthesis of two or more things they love.
“Just allow whatever you love to do to come up in your mind. Save the editing for later. What do you love enough to do even though you “shouldn’t” do it? If you won the lottery, and money was no object—if you could do anything at all—what would you do? I promise you, there is a career in that somewhere.”
Jim said that it takes a bit of creative thinking and a new perspective to gain important insights. He added, “Forget money for a moment. Forget about earning a living. What lights you up? What distracts you from the things you ‘should’ be doing? Whatever that may be, there are people—lots of people—out there who either want or need what you do, or share your interest in it.”
Remember This: G2C2
If you can remember G2C2, you can remember the four elements that will elevate your career from pretty good to great.
My theory of life goes like this: we all know the right things to do, but on a day-to-day basis, we forget them. For example, when it’s 8:45 a.m. and an unimportant “emergency” strikes, you begin the process of forgetting what is actually important.
I look for simple devices to remind me. My favorite is G2C2.
Growth : The best way to increase your odds of career success and personal satisfaction is to keep growing. The more you expand your skills and expertise, the more opportunities you will create.
I don’t think of this simply as a spectacular career strategy; it is, in fact, a spectacular life strategy.
According to Psychology Today , back in 2008, Toshimasa Sone and his colleagues at the Tohoku University Graduate School of Medicine concluded a seven-year longitudinal study of 43,000+ Japanese adults. The upshot? “The researchers found that individuals who believed that their life was worth living were less likely to die than were their counterparts without this belief.”
The Japanese word for this sense of purpose is ikigai . It means believing that your life is worth living. Google the word, and you’re likely to find an image that looks like this:
Here’s how Psychology Today summarized the researchers’ results: “95% of respondents who reported a sense of meaning in their lives were alive seven years after the initial survey, versus about 83% of those who reported no sense of meaning in their lives.”
Now imagine that you are one of those fortunate professionals who believe that your abilities are not fixed—that is, with effort, you can grow your abilities. Here’s my picture of what that means:
The yellow represents the growth in your “What You Do Well” circle. Through persistent effort, it gets bigger. As it grows, the potential overlap increases between your best abilities and the other three circles.
To put it simply, you get more ikigai .
Can I prove that doing this will extend your life?
No.
Would I take that bet?
Yes.
Here’s the deal. You can’t control whether or not a volcano will erupt in your backyard, or whether your boss will suddenly decide to hire his daughter and fire you.
You can control the amount of effort you invest in expanding your skills, growing your experience, and opening your mind. All of these are likely to deepen your appreciation of your life and the role you play in our world.
May you enjoy more ikigai with each passing year.
Grit : Can you spend five years focused upon a single goal? That’s grit. You can’t accomplish anything big without it. Fortunately, with effort, you can grow your ability to display (and harness) grit.
If you don’t have true grit (sorry), then make it one of your top priorities. It won’t be easy, but it is vitally important.
University of Pennsylvania Associate Professor Angela Duckworth devotes her time to studying grit, which she defines as “the tendency to sustain interest in and effort toward very long-term goals.”
Duckworth’s research has demonstrated that grit predicts success in a number of endeavors. For clarity’s sake, I have eliminated Duckworth’s scholarly references from the following text from her site:
Grit predicts surviving the arduous first summer of training at West Point and reaching the final rounds of the National Spelling Bee, retention in the U.S. Special Forces, retention and performance among novice teachers and sales agents, and graduation from Chicago public high schools, over and beyond domain-relevant talent measures such as IQ, SAT or standardized achievement test scores, and physical fitness.
Reading Duckworth’s words, a light bulb lit up in my head. What if you could use a growth mindset to become grittier? Would that represent a killer career strategy?
There’s reason to believe this could be true. I found this passage in Duckworth’s research statement:
It is now well-established that traits change across the life course (Roberts & Mroczek, 2008). So, while there is enough stability to traits to sensibly describe one individual as grittier than another, it is also true that children and adults change their habitual patterns of interacting with the world as they accumulate additional life experience.
In other words, your level of grit is not fixed. She explains further:
Individuals who believe that frustration and confusion mean they should quit what they are doing may be taught that these emotions are common during the learning process. Likewise, individuals who believe that mistakes are to be avoided at all costs may be taught that the most effective form of practice (deliberate practice—see research by Anders Ericsson) entails tackling challenges beyond one’s current skill level.
Growth + Grit = Long-term Success
The most exciting part of these two traits is that they are both within your grasp. You can decide to adopt them. It doesn’t matter if you are rich or poor, a genius or of “average” intelligence. If you set your mind to embracing this formula, you will change what you are capable of accomplishing.
More importantly, you will change what others are capable of accomplishing.
Compassion: Yes, your goals are important. Yes, you have to stand up for yourself. But you also have to stand up for others.
Without compassion, you won’t be any good at selling.
Without compassion, you won’t be any good at serving your clients.
Without compassion, you won’t be able to maintain satisfying and strong relationships with others.
The truth is, you can be successful without compassion. I’m just not sure you can be happy without it.
A few years back on LinkedIn, Heléna Kurçab wrote a comment on one of my articles:
One of the foundational quotes that continues to guide my life is by holocaust survivor Victor Frankl:
“Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
You don’t have a choice whether or not the economy tanks, the stock market soars, your company is bought, your job is threatened, the biggest jerk in the world is promoted to be your boss, your best friend questions your ethics, or your significant other truly loves you.
You only have a choice about how you respond to such events.
To the degree that human beings have power, that power lies in our response. Sure, you can initiate change…but that’s the easy part. You can decide to donate $50 to a charity like you have every year for the past ten. You can sit down and write a check, then mail it. Easy-peasy.
But then you lose your job. Do you still donate $50 to charity? Maybe yes, maybe no. Perhaps you give them a week of your time instead…that would be a good outcome. Maybe you ignore their needs because you are too stressed out…that would be a bad outcome.
Kindness fosters more kindness. It opens eyes instead of closing them. It is contagious, and it feels wonderful.
Kindness does NOT equal weakness. Quite the contrary. It takes tremendous strength to be kind to someone who is slowing you down or who thinks differently than you do. Kindness bridges such gaps, and brings out the talent hidden in so many people.
Never Tell People What You Do Page 1