Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been categorized as “Careers”
Let’s get to the many questions that “underachievers” have been asking me. Now I call them “underachievers” because these people think of themselves that way; they simply don’t yet understand how the world works and how the rules are different for them. Your job is bad for you not just because it’s not at the right level. It’s too small …
You’re a GenX-er who has, since the 1980s, done your time waiting for the Baby Boomers to die off so that you can be invited into the corporate office. You’ve worked hard, done the things you were told and waited on that rung of the corporate ladder, stuck while the Baby Boomers ahead of you sat, Peter Principled, fat and …
Trust, it seems, is the glue that makes organizations sing. But you don’t necessarily need much of it to succeed. And you can simply eat off the store trust (social capital) built through long years of hard work by those who came before. Come to think of it, it doesn’t take long to eat through a century’s worth of social …
I spent months of my life working on this, bringing to full realization the many and varied lands, peoples and beasts of JRR Tolkien’s Middle Earth! And I did not — not — do this so that five minutes into the game some players could, and I quote, “Open an evil can of hobbit butt-whup on those Rivendell pretty boys.” …
Let’s take another gander at how a hidden high potential can either get or stay in a that low-level job. It’s counter to prevailing advice you get, so you may want to pay attention. Before I start, I have to emphasize that I’m only talking about Hidden High Potentials (HHPs) and not Normal People. Normals give HHPs advice which is …
Sometimes when you’ve been the Hidden part of “Hidden High Potential” for way too long, you just want to find something that pays the bills. You look for a job, any job.
This is hard to do, even when times are good. When times are hard, it seems impossible.
Just ask Julie Neidlinger. She knows all about how hard it is to get a job when you’re grossly overqualified. The story she tells is an excellent example, because it’s such a common one to so many of you Hidden High Potentials. She went looking for an office job in the state with the lowest unemployment rates in the nation, lower than my region had during the good times.
I was looking for something Monday through Friday, normal business hours, regular paycheck, nothing retail or selling — I just want to be able to put aside money and rebuild my savings.
For some reason, in this type of work, I am not hireable. I do not know why.
So I’m going to tell her, and give some hints as to how she might be able to pull this off, and close with the core truths that are more useful.
Research published last month in the International Journal of Epidemiology shows a link between being bored at work and dying early. Back in the late 1980s, 7,500 civil servants in London — aged 35 to 55 — were polled about their jobs. Thirty years later, Annie Britton and Martin Shipley of University College London went looking to see what happened …
Hidden high potentials (2HiPo’s) have a significantly higher risk of being scapegoated by teams than do normal people. People with too much going on are irritating and usually seen as a threat, which is why 2HiPo’s also adopt some strange behaviors that serve to obfuscate their high level of capability. There’s not much that I can see you can do …
In your personality, tweaking one thing will change several others. Did you ever think that you could learn something about your career and personal development from chicken breeding? ‘Tis true! Read on, true believer: [Chicken] Breeders working over several decades chose the most productive birds to reproduce, resulting in white leghorns that each year can lay 300 to 320 of …
One of the mistakes I made early on in my career was to believe that if I had some great accomplishments that I would gain success, including things like money and community respect. This is clearly false, and I’ve recently had a series of communications with an organizational thinker that confirms it. But first let’s look at some of the …
