Advice Every Young Person Needs To Hear

The link between effort and success is not direct. The world is complex and therefore hard work does not necessarily mean the right outcome

The link between effort and success is not direct. The world is complex, and therefore, hard work does not necessarily mean the right outcome.

Say you just graduated from college, and you’re about to face the world.

Would you find that until this point, your life was somewhat theoretical? In a sense that the link between your work and the result was fairly direct. If you studied a lot, you most likely got a good grade. So there was this linearity in your life. Now what you discover happens in the real world, there is a lot of randomness. There is a lot of good luck and bad luck.

You may be looking for a job for three months, you have a bunch of interviews, and you can’t get a job. That’s real life. There is a link between effort and success. It’s not direct. The world is complex, and therefore, hard work does not necessarily mean the right outcome. Eventually, it leads to the desired outcome. That link is not direct.

My advice would be to be process focused. So when you look for a job, don’t just focus on the outcome, but try to improve the way you look for a job every single day. Try to make sure your resume looks better and different from your competitors. Approach job search. If everybody else goes on LinkedIn and applies, find different ways to apply for a job. If that means contact the hiring manager directly, do that.

What I found, and actually this is kind of interesting, as an employer, what I found that when people reached out to us directly, when we had our open positions, when people reached out to us directly and said, I understand why your company is special, and this is the skills I can bring to the table.

That person suddenly was not just another John Doe that applied, he became a real person to us. Trying to do different what other people are doing, I think is very important. I cannot put enough emphasis on persistence. Okay, this is coming from a person who had the same job for the last 26 years, okay. But 26 years ago, when I was applying for IMA, and this was in the early days of the internet, before the mainstream internet, so I literally opened yellow pages and I faxed my resume to every single investment company in Denver. I’m sure very few people did that. By the way, I still applied for jobs that were advertised in the newspapers and such, but I landed this job because the CEO of the company received my fax even before they posted the job. So the best way to compete with others is to have very little competition. So I faced almost no competition. So was there luck involved with that? Absolutely. But I would argue that luck was created by me as well. Another advice I would have is that you can be experienced a lot of adversity.

You’ll be applying for jobs and you may not be getting them right away. Create the small victories in your life. Something that gives you a sense of accomplishment. I know this is a very baby boomer kind of advice, but start by making your bed. And I’m not even baby boomer, but start by making a bed, okay? Because when you come in the evening and you see a well-made bed, actually it’s gonna give you a feel that you actually did something that actually worked okay? Go for a run, work out, and just have this little victories. I think that would be my advice to the young person.

Now, there’s a part two to this. Now, you got a job, and your employer gives you a choice between remote work and going to the office. You find that probably two-thirds of your colleagues are not going to work. I would argue show up to work every single day. Here’s why. What you learn is that relationships really matter in the business. You know, doing a great job is very important, get it wrong. It’s not everything. The relationships do matter. If you spend 20, 30 minutes a day with your boss or your colleagues, having interpersonal communications, that puts you in a higher, that place in that person’s mental real estate than somebody who they meet on Slack or just on Zoom call. Okay, there is like IMA, people who live in Denver, they have to come to the office. Because what I find that in any creative job, randomness plays a huge role. People bumping at each other at the water cooler or over a cup of coffee, starting a conversation, that sparks a lot of ideas. Somebody poking their head in my office, asking a question. These things do matter if everybody else is not showing up to work what you should be doing should be there All the time and I promise you this that will put you ahead your competition I’m gonna generalize that generalization is gonna be appropriate for every company 

But when you work for large company, you’re usually large companies looking for very specific skill set Because they have a lot of people doing different tasks and they’re special in that. So therefore, they want to put you in a kind of a mindless coma and focus just on this task.

And therefore, it creates kind of atrophy of your other skills. When you work for a small company, you end up wearing different hats. And therefore, you get to learn a lot more things. Think in the world we are facing, where you’re going to be dominated by AI. Ability to interact in different domains, doing different tasks, and be able to synthesize is going to be incredibly important.

Because I think very narrow, specific tasks, AI will do that. But AI will not be doing a great job synthesizing from different domains. Okay, this is coming from a person who worked for a large company just for a few days and got fired every single time. So take it for what it’s worth. And the reason I get fired every single time is because I could not put myself in a mindless coma and just focus on every single time is because I could not put myself in a mindless coma and just focus on one single task.