Professional Geekery

Weekly Challenge: Find Your Precision

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When it comes to our careers, balance is appropriate.  Too much time looking for a job and you burn out, not enough and you don't find one.  You can take classes constantly, and neglect the rest of your life and your social obligations.

There's a sweet spot of effort in our careers that we have to find, where you can be incredibly precise, yet appropriate.  You can step on the Tiger's Tail and not have it bite.

  1. Pick your last job search.
  2. Now, list all the times you overdid it and the things you overdid – did you work too long, change your resume too much, be too aggressive?
  3. Now, list all the things in that search you could have done better, been more aggressive on, done more on.
  4. For each of the lists in #2 and #3, ask what you should have done to have the right level of precision.  Bit of hint – #3 is harder to figure out.

– Steven Savage

Weekly Challenge: The Parts of Victory

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I want you to think about one of your finest achievements this week.

Go on, pick one.  Don't worry about being arrogant or whatever, I'm sure it's something worthy of your analysis.

Now, turn it over in your mind and ask yourself this – what were the major parts of it?  Write down the major parts of that great achievement.  For instance if you're quite proud of your first novel think of the formatting, the editing, the writing, and the inspiration.

Now see each of those parts?  Break them down.  Write down those parts.

Keep going until you can't break things down anymore – or you get tired of it (I give you until you get to 14-20 different parts).

All our great achievements are made of smaller ones.  It's important to remember that, especially because, as we get used to them, we forget it.

It's also easy to forget how we built ourselves up, accumulated our strength, and made our dreams possible.

So take a moment to find the small parts of your life that became something awesome.  Next time you want to do something incredible, you mind find the perspective useful for building yourself up.

– Steven Savage

Weekly Challenge: Your Hidden Army

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We all have people we can call on – friends, family, co-workers, fans, and more.  It's easy to forget it – especially when we're having a bad day – but there's a good chance you have people that you can call on when it's needed.

The problem is that we forget this – ad we don't know when to reach out and bring people together.  This week's exercise is about both of these factors.

Here are the two parts of the challenge:

  1. List all of the people – and organizations/fandoms/communities – you can call on when needed.  This may not be due to a crisis – this could be to achieve something – and of course different groups and people may have different abilities that can help.
  2. Ask how you'd bring these people together when needed.  Are you a leader already, a moral center, a manager of ideas, etc.  How do you bring people together.

Now knowing these things:

  1. Does anything surprise you?
  2. Do you see any gaps in your life you need to fix.

You probably have an entire army to call on in life.  You just may not realize it – or realize how you can do so.

– Steven Savage