www.fastcompany.com: The science of career success is well-established. There are thousands of academic studies comparing the power of a variety of factors that predict performance and achievement across all possible jobs and careers. Unfortunately, it is usually ignored by those who provide actual career advice to the wider public.
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The best career advice I ever got (mind, I’m a little biased) was from my mother, who has spent a good chunk of her career advising young or early-career big business professionals. She told me to make three lists: things I enjoy doing, things I am good at, and things someone will pay me to do. Ideally, there are items that end up on all three lists, but that’s not always the case. I think of it as a self-analysis tool that can help in skill development and goal-setting, more than anything else. If there’s something you enjoy and could get paid to do, but aren’t very good at, that might be a good place to focus some energy. If there’s something you enjoy and are good at, you could consider finding a way to monetize that activity. In the entertainment field, it can be easy to get stuck in a track you don’t particularly enjoy, but have good skills in. Methods like these can help you rebrand or rebalance in order to move towards a more enjoyable career.
This article is amusing in that it feels like the writer refuted the four fairly unhelpful advice to the extreme. When we hear advice like ‘Follow your passion’, ‘Just be yourself’, ‘Play to your strength’ or ‘Just believe in yourself’, we know the implied meanings. For example, for ‘Just be yourself’, not many people will take the advice verbatim and really behave like you are watching TV on your own couch wearing pajamas in front of your future boss and coworkers. All four advice the writer picked serve to encourage people looking to better their lives. Putting yourself out there to get evaluated and picked by companies is nerve wrecking. And in the process many people get discouraged and lose the initial spirit. We all know, or at least I know, that the chances are hardly in my favor and that scientific studies may support it. But nevertheless I have to carry on and find a decent job that I’ll be happy with. And that’s where these advice will come in handy.
This is a great article and I think hints at some of the problems in our society that we have let develop. We value the productive worker almost to a flaw. This puts our careers and our work life at this pinnacle of what we do in life. It’s ok to not live to work. It is ok to work to live. And when you work to live your passion can be outside of work. While this might seem weird coming from someone currently pursuing a graduate degree in theater in a program that has already tallied up a strong student debt, but I am 100% here for a job I can leave at work so I can go home and pursue my other hobbies and passions. And that’s ok! Finding a job you can do, and do well, that pays for the things you love outside of work is not a bad thing. As long as you don’t find that job totally soul crushing, it doesn’t have to be the most exciting and wonderful thing about you. I’m glad that the academic research and this article back that kind of idea up
I appreciate how blunt this article is about the way to reach success. It touches on how people are always looking for “quick tips” and “life hacks” on how to achieve their dreams. This writer plainly states that the keys are “intelligence, hard work, and social skills,” but the public doesn’t often like to hear that. When browsing the internet, people want the easiest, most direct solution at getting what they want. The advice often given is “Follow your passions,” “Just be yourself,” and “Play to your strengths” but the author challenges how helpful these phrases actually are. One must implement an aspect of realism when choosing a career path, namely what their strengths actually are. Sometimes it’s difficult to reflect on one’s abilities, but the only way to improve is to focus on weaknesses that must be built up. Being optimistic and having confidence should not be overlooked, but this must be backed up with a solid set of skills.
I really think the author did a great job writing this article. He is very blunt and to the point and I think that serves this topic really well. I think the point he makes about people always trying to find the easy way to do things or the “life hack” is important to everyone no matter what you do for a living. Growing up, I was always told that one of the best ways to really differentiate yourself from other people and show your boss or interviewer how much you care is by working hard. People can tell when you are putting in your all because you care about your work. To me, and I think to a lot of people this is one of the best traits and employee or co-worker can have. With this drive, your employee will be willing to learn new things and strive for success.
I’ve read many an article giving advice to be successful, during doing so i’ve came across advice that is contradictory, redundant or just not helpful. So was interested is what Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic has to say in Four well-meaning pieces of career advice you want to ignore. I’ve also came across things that didn’t necessarily work for me as I function in a non neurotypical way, and have methods that work for me but not for others, so when it comes to advice and articles like this it brings even more uncertainty of progress. He talks about how a lot of these advice articles don’t touch on actual scientific information that gives us insight into how one achieves success, due to censorship and editing/filtering information to get the most notice from readers. This is never helpful because the actual information is not going to be viral or, is a real downer. All four of the things mentioned are things I like to read, and believe, so I will admit I did not enjoy reading them. When it comes to being successful I have a good understanding of what holds me back personally, most of it comes from doubt, so reading things like the stuff mentioned is still helpful to me. Of course the advice like “Just be Yourself” would be detrimental when executed as an extreme, but it is still a good thing to keep in mind to implement in a non extreme way.
Obviously have much you make isn’t particularly correlated with how much you like what you do. I’d imagine it is a bit correlated just because most very low paying jobs are hard to be passionate about (fast food restaurants, customer service at big chain stores, etc.) but no recommends doing what you are passionate about as a strategy for making more money. Also, I think you can “be yourself” without being problematically honest at all times. “Be yourself” is not the same as “be a difficult to work with jerk.” Yes, you do need to filter yourself, but I think you can be yourself and behave appropriately for the situation. I do think the point that you should work on your weaknesses, not just play to your strengths is a very good one. It is beneficial to be really good at some things, but it important to be reasonably good at anything you need to do.
This article is weird. I don't like it. The sub text that I am gathering from this read is to bury your personality and uniqueness in order to appear exactly what a company needs. And in some ways that is true, you cannot act completely regular during an interview, but this article leans far more towards never allowing that regular you to come out. I also hold some resentment towards the advice of not playing to your strengths. Why? Yeah, blah blah gym, muscles. If I never played to my strengths I would be a math major probably still trying to get a bachelors. I am going to do what I am good at, because I enjoy what Iam good at. And I want to enjoy the work that I do. So, you will have to forgive me article, if I disregard every argument you have put forward. Maybe next time, buddy.
I don’t entirely agree with this article, truthfully, but I think that some of the points it makes are kinda important. I think that a lot of people in the world, especially our world of theatre, are not quite as grounded as they should be. I think that parts of this article are accurate (adapt to your situations, work to improve your weaknesses) but I think it chooses the wrong metric to measure success. I think that personal fulfillment and happiness are much more important than annual salary. I also don’t believe that saying “believe in yourself” implies ego, which is an assertion that I do not agree with. I believe that this is largely a statement used to encourage those that are not very confident in themselves already. Also, in my experience, I have never believed in myself more just because someone told me to, that just is not how self-confidence works.
Giving a quick perusal through the comments on this on it seems to be quite divided on agreeing or disagreeing with the article. I have to say I think I find myself squarely in the middle. I highly agree with many of the points make and feel that they are all grounded in some form of truth. Now whether or not someone is willing to hear it is a whole different story. I also think that if some of the points are taken to concretely and mainly looked at face value that they could be greatly misleading and thus damaging to what someone might choose to do. The real weight in this article comes from how a person internalizes it for themselves and how they think of themselves. One major point that I liked was that they talked about the importance of understanding how people perceive them and knowing that it is something we all have to think about in everything we do nowadays.
I had a difficult time with this article— not because of its bluntness or harsh realism but because of its social implications, especially in the creative world. Inadvertently or not, have we created a power structure in which individuals cannot follow their passions, be themselves or believe in themselves and find success? In most aspects of the young and growing creative world, I like to think that original concepts and authentic execution are currency. As a New Yorker, I see evidence of this everywhere in the indie theatre scene: bold, spirited, talented artists celebrated for being unabashedly themselves. Rather than reading this article and feeling discouraged or enlightened, I hear the advice through a filter that does not come from a creative voice. I agree with the broader concepts that say that an ability to make compromises are essential to one’s likability and that developing new skills is important for any professional, but these are not radical pieces of career advice. I hesitate to say that any aspect of this article is genuinely advice. Rather it is broad social commentary on the state of professional structures with the premise that humans naturally value and seek to validate our individual merit.
As a soon to be graduating senior, I hear lots and lots of career advice, some asked for, and some unsolicited. I’ve heard all four of those pieces of advice quite a lot over the last 6-8 years and even more so in the last 4 months. And I have to agree that for me, those pieces of advice are not so helpful. Follow your passion? I made that leap 4 years ago, that decision was already made and it’s too late to back out now. But while I agree with this article’s main point (stop giving this as advice) I disagree with a lot of their reasoning. I do think following your passion is important, especially if you can afford to. Just because there’s no link between passion and salary doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile. I do agree with the ‘play to your weaknesses’ and ‘improve yourself, don’t just be yourself’ bits. But in the end, I feel like I’ve moved past a lot of those meta-skills. The advice I want now is how to do taxes in a way that doesn’t make my head hurt, or fun tips for getting my student loans re-financed. Or where to get my resume printed for cheap. So unless it's advice like that, I'm not super interested anyway.
I am not sure what to think about this article as a whole. On one hand a lot of the advice they are warning against is pretty obvious and over said t most people looking to enter the job market, but on the other hand none of it is wrong or blatantly false. I think this article might be a bit too harsh by saying that all of this is bad advice no matter what, but I do agree that a lot of these phrases and sentiments are not as helpful as they could be. I think these are more meta things to think about when choosing a job in the first place, but once someone is clear about where they are going and what they want to do, this advice becomes reiterating things they have already thought of, not giving them an idea of next steps. I think this article would be more aptly named "Four well-meaning cliches you might want to avoid".
When I walked into this article and saw the headers I thought “oh no, seriously another one,” but I read the first paragraph because you never know what you are going to find, and sometimes even the stupidest articles have one or two pieces of wisdom. But I was surprised. I probably should have focused more on the “well meaning,” part of the header. I agreed with pretty much everything that was said but I did find the last piece of advice about the critique of “just believe in yourself,” rather confusing. Yes, I got the part about it is hard to believe in yourself but narcissists can still go far, but there was no real advice there. I suspect the message was you do not have to believe in yourself, you just have to work hard. But I think everyone wants to believe in themselves. The last article I commented on was about imposter syndrome. It makes your life a thousand times harder not to believe in yourself. I get that even if you do not believe in yourself you still need a job, but I wish it had suggested ways to help you believe in yourself.
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