Omar Usman – Career Savings Account 3 Things I Learned from the Book Do Over Jon Acuff
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In this video I'm sharing 3 things I
learned from the book Do Over by John
Acuff.
This book talks about establishing a career savings
account to deal with different types of career
do overs that we go through. So he
talks about character,
skills, relationships, and hustle,
and he says we need all of these
in our account because we go through different
career transitions.
So we might hit a career ceiling,
in which case we need skills to break
through it. We might establish a career bump
when we unexpectedly lose our jobs and we
need relationships to get through the transition.
We might have a career jump where where
where we move into a new role and
that's where we need character to help us
out. And then we've got career opportunity, and
we need hustle in order to find those.
The first thing that I learned from this
book was that
the relationships that we already have are far
more valuable than we realize. So we all
keep hearing we all have heard that saying,
it's not what you know, it's who you
know.
And we use this phrase almost as an
excuse
that I've got the skills
and know what I need to know but
because I don't know the right people I'm
being held back. Well, if that's really the
case then it means we need to get
to know the right people.
And as soon as we say that we
have this image in our heads of going
to, like, this
very awkward networking meeting and handing out business
cards in a stuffy environment, all these different
things. What John says is, no. Look at
the network that you have and see what's
actually there. Just take stock of your
friends, your coworkers,
your acquaintances,
your family members, all these different things and
see who in your network
works in a similar role that you do.
Who in your network is in the same
industry as you? Who in your network is
working at a level
that's maybe 1 or 2 levels above where
you are or where you're trying to go?
Who within your network maybe owns a business?
Who has this really good life experience and
can help you out? Who in your network
is an expert in you so that they
can actually give you advice that is in
your own best interest? See, all of these
different types of people, we already know a
lot of them. And they're within the the
friends and acquaintances that we've already got. So
sit down, take some time out and see
who in your network does all these different
things. And now what do you do once
you've got that network? Well, a couple of
things. Number 1, you've got to invest in
the relationship. See, a lot of times we
don't actually
intentionally invest in these relationships.
We're just set up to do a job.
We don't actually build our careers and that's
why we don't have career savings accounts. By
the way, I talked about this when I
shared 3 things I learned from the book
Body of Work by Pamela Slim. I'll link
to that in the description and hopefully here
somewhere.
But it talks about the fact that times
have changed. We've got to craft our own
careers and our own body of work. And
so your relationships play a large part in
that. Make sure that you're investing. How do
you invest in those relationships?
Number 1, add value.
Find ways to meaningfully
contribute
and add value to the people around you.
Now don't do this in a quid pro
quo, I did you a favor, you did
me a favor type of way, but just
out of just actually creating a relationship with
someone. And then when it comes time to
seeking their advice or seeking someone's input or
seeking someone's help, make sure that you do
it in a smart way. You know, seeking
mentorship is something that is talked about a
lot. Everyone knows that it's really important, all
these different things.
But we've got people in our own circles
that can mentor us and sometimes it's in
different areas. Someone might be a mentor to
us, let's say, as a parent or as
a spouse or as, you know, as a
co worker in the business world, whatever the
case may be. But sit and talk with
people and get advice from them and when
you do, ask smart questions. So if you're
speaking to someone, let's say, who's 2 levels
beyond where you are now and you're trying
to go there,
you might say, Hey, what advice would you
give to someone who's, you know, in my
position 5 years behind where you are? What
would you say that someone needs to do
in order to move ahead successfully?
Now that sounds really obvious,
but the reality is most people just don't
do it. They don't sit down and actually
have that conversation,
much less ask that question. We don't actually
just take the initiative to do that, go
have coffee with someone.
But when you ask them those questions, what
you're really getting out of this is something
that John Acuff calls cheat codes.
You want to get the cheat codes to
help you shortcut the process
so that you're not making the same mistakes
everybody else did. And that helps propel you
further ahead. The second lesson that I learned
from this book was that the skills that
we already have are more valuable than we
think that they are. But also we need
to develop a lot more skills than we
think that we need to. Let's break this
down.
So first is that we have a lot
of skills that we don't we sometimes undervalue
them. And the reality is if something comes
easy to us or we've been doing something
for a long time such that it's second
nature, whether it's a technical skill or something
else, we tend to think that it's not
that complicated, it's not that difficult, it comes
easy to me, therefore it must not be
that valuable.
I remember going to a job interview.
They were very particular in this job interview
about having
a SQL background and database scripting and all
these different things. And, you know, I studied
that in school, I've done it at work
for 5 years, and I was like, okay,
but I was still nervous because they were
gonna give a test at the interview to
see how good your scripting skills were. When
I got in and took the test, it
was something that people learn within the first
6 weeks of an introductory database class in
the computer science program. Meaning, someone who's been
through that degree program or done a little
bit of work experience with it, they know
how to do this very easily and they
could knock that exercise out in maybe 5
minutes. But for someone who's not in that
arena, someone who doesn't deal with that day
to day, for them, this is a very
difficult skill to come by, something that might
be very difficult to learn, and therefore it
holds high value.
I might not think that it's much but
for someone else it might be something big.
Again, the things that I'm good at might
not be someone else's strength and vice versa.
The things that I'm bad at will be
someone else's strength as well.
So make sure that you take account of
the things that you've done. Maybe you worked
a summer job at the mall but don't
undervalue the fact that you learned how to
deal with difficult customers, you learned conflict resolution,
you learned all these different skills
in that job that you had, make sure
that you're taking note of these. All of
these things are part of your skills inventory.
Now the next part of it is making
sure that you're also developing new skills. Now
see a lot of, you know, before we
used to kind of relegate this to our
company because we're expecting to be with the
same company. They'll develop us. They'll teach us
the things that we need to know, and
we know that that's no longer the case.
So we have to make sure that we're
taking the initiative to to take care of
the learning process for ourselves. So that might
mean technical skills, but it also means soft
skills. Things like exceeding expectations.
Things like being someone that people like working
with.
Things like being grateful. You know, there's certain
things one really great example that John gives
in the book is be the person
that
loses
the political war at work but wins the
relationship. The thing that happens in the professional
world is that talent, pure talent, often levels
off. See, everyone's already been through a process.
You've been through school. You've been through a
degree program. You've been through an interview process.
You've been doing this work, you know, for
5 years, 6 years and so have your
coworkers. There's not gonna necessarily be a huge
disparity in technical skills. My dad's been a
pharmacy director for over 30 years. And I
asked him one time, I said, look, all
these pharmacists are really smart. They all had
to, you know, had to have a certain
type of grades, had a certain type of
admissions test score, they had to go to
college for a you know, they had to
go through all these steps that weed everybody
else out. These are people that are normally
at the top of their class, they're top
performers, high achievers, all these different things.
So when they get into the hospital,
why is there so much turnover? And he
said, look, the thing is, from a purely
skills point of view, they're replaceable.
If someone calls in sick, another pharmacist can
come in and pretty much do the same
job. There might be some people who are
super exceptional from a skills perspective,
But in general,
the skill level is more or less the
same. It's it's a negligible difference from person
to person.
The thing that causes turnover
is the soft skills. Do people actually like
working with you? Do they enjoy being around
you? If they don't,
you're really not that valuable to the organization
because they can replace you with someone with
a similar technical skill set. On the flip
side,
if everyone loves being around you and they
love having you at work, it's much harder
to replace you because they might be able
to replace the technical skills but they can't
replace the soft skills as easily and that's
something that people are drawn to. So make
sure that you're working on your soft skills
as well as your technical skills. Now when
you're working on new skills,
make sure that you have the approach of
a tourist. And this is a great analogy
that John gives in the book. So when
you're a tourist, you go off, you don't
care how goofy you look, you don't care
what you're doing, you're just going to explore.
You're just researching, you're asking tons and tons
and tons of questions, just trying to see
what it is. And remember, your skills don't
have to be related to work. It might
be learning photography or graphic design or something
that's not necessarily related to your day job,
but it's just learning new skills.
Have that attitude of a tourist,
develop those new skills, harness those new skills,
practice them. The more skills that you have
in your arsenal, in your career savings account,
the better of a hammer that you have
to break through a career ceiling when you
get stuck.
The third thing that I learned from this
book was that without hustle,
all you have is wasted potential.
See, hustle is the amplifier. Your career savings
account is your relationships,
plus your skills, plus your character,
multiplied by your hustle. It's the fuel that
helps everything else out. But the thing that
we have to be careful of is making
sure we don't confuse hustle and hassle. Don't
just become busy in learning, you know, in
doing all these different things,
But rather, your hustle is like a scalpel.
You focus
on the things that you need to work
on Your relationships, your skills,
your character, whatever these things are that you
need to work on to help progress your
career, you get focused on them and you
hustle
and you put in more effort and you
work harder and smarter than everybody else. But
at the same time, with that scalpel of
hustle, you're also eliminating the other things that
you don't need to be working on. Hustle
is that effort that you put in that
amplifies all these other things and helps you
to get through those career transitions, those do
over phases that we all inevitably go through.
That's 3 things I learned from the book.
Do Over by Jon Acuff. There's a link
to the book in the description.
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