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How to Learn Anything…Fast

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This is a great message by Josh Kaufman, best-selling author of The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business. The encouraging upshot is that acquiring basic proficiency in a skill does not have to take a huge investment of time, but rather can be achieved in about twenty hours — if you do it right. Towards the end, he gives four steps.

I’m sort of getting tired of receiving so much content in my inbox on adapting our work to COVID-19. Nonetheless, Josh’s advice here has a very useful application to our current context. For example, if you do not have a commute because you are working from home, why not take the time you are saving from your commute to learn a new skill?

One reason you might not be doing that is that it can still seem a bit overwhelming. Josh takes that challenge away. He shows you how in just 45 minutes a day, you can develop a valuable new skill in about 30 days. Now that would be a great way to bring yet another silver lining to this unfortunate time in our society right now.

For more guidance, you can also check out his book The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything…Fast.

Job Searching During the Coronavirus Economy

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At least 30 million have become unemployed since mid-March. Suddenly, job searching is very relevant.

To help seniors at The King’s College who are launching their careers in the midst of these economic conditions, I wrote a series of articles a few weeks ago on King’s 101 (our website for making the most of King’s).

The principles in these articles are helpful for anyone looking for a job, at any stage in their career — not just college students. One of the articles also highlights positions from 75 companies that are hiring right now. Those companies have many positions beyond entry level, so that may be especially worth checking out for anyone doing a job search right now.

Here are the articles. Please also pass them on to anyone you know who could benefit:

 

 

Coronavirus and Your Job Search

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My full-time job is to help students at The King’s College launch their careers. So I’ve been paying attention to how this Coronavirus pause is going to be affecting their job search.

This is one of the most helpful articles I’ve seen so far. It’s concise and insightful. It’s from The Muse, which is one of the best career development websites out there.

So if you were already in the middle of a job search when this Coronavirus pause hit, this article can be of use to you. Or, if you have found yourself out of work because of the economic hiatus we are on, these may also be of use.

The article is called What Does the Coronavirus Pandemic Mean for My Job Search? Here is a fantastic except:

As companies move to remote work to fight the coronavirus pandemic and an increasing number of workers are being laid off or furloughed, you might be wondering if you should continue to send out resumes or just assume that no one is hiring for the foreseeable future. It’s true that economists are predicting a recession, but career experts say it’s best to keep networking and applying, provided you change your approach a bit to acknowledge these are uncertain times.

“Companies might not be hiring today, because they’re trying to figure out how to do business virtually, but they will be hiring,” says Danielle Beauparlant Moser, managing director and executive coach with bltCareers in Asheville, NC “The people who continue to relationship-build and share their ideas will be in a better position when companies start hiring.”

Invest in Yourself or Others in 2020

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At some point we all need help getting from point A to point B. We make resolutions to change and we go after them with intense focus for a few weeks. You know what happens next. 

You miss a day, cheat the plan, or run into opposition—and you start to lose focus and the desire to get back to your noble pursuit. Imagine if things could be different.

I’m convinced that one of the main reasons we fail in our desires to change is because we’re so accustomed to working on our own. But we’re not meant to journey alone. We were meant to do it with other people. 

That’s why we’re advocates for coaching at What’s Best Next. Some of you have personally experienced the benefit of having a WBN coach help you grow in gospel-driven productivity—an approach to life that understands God has a lot to say about how we spend our days. 

Do you know someone in your life that would benefit from productivity coaching? Maybe it’s you, maybe it’s a new team member, maybe it’s a friend moving to a new role outside their comfort zone. What’s Best Next would love to be a partner on the journey. 

Send them our way or contact us today if you’re ready!

 

 

Productivity with Your Resume

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One crucial aspect of productivity is getting into the context where you can be the most productive—which means getting the right job. When it comes to the job hunt, resumes are still an essential tool.

So here are six resume dos and don’ts from Brian Brenberg, chair of the program in business and finance at The King’s College. The six tips are:

  1. Don’t fudge the facts
  2. Do include jobs you think nobody cares about
  3. Don’t make spelling and grammar mistakes
  4. Do invite people to critique your work
  5. Don’t assume a good resume will get you a job
  6. Do know your resume inside and out
You can also watch him discuss the points in this video segment. Brenberg is always entertaining and insightful—the best possible combination!

How to be Awesome at Your Job

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I was on Pete Mockaitis’s How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast the other day, and really enjoyed it. You can listen below or at the website, where you will also find helpful links to the various books mentioned and some relevant previous episodes (for example, his episode with David Allen).

Pete is doing great work and I highly recommend his website and podcast for specific, actionable insights that will boost your work performance.

Here’s a summary of the show:

Matt Perman explains how to tell the difference between important tasks and urgent tasks, and how to make room for what’s important in your life and work.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Why you should plan your day with your time, not your tasks
  2. Four tips for effective personal management
  3. Two ways to prioritize like a pro

337: Choosing the Important Over the Urgent with Matt Perman

 

 

Lifetime Value and Business Courtesy

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This is a basic marketing principle which Seth Godin summarizes very well. Seems obvious, but it is often overlooked!

If an Apple upgrade breaks your phone and you switch to Android, it costs Apple more than $10,000.

If you switch supermarkets because a clerk was snide with you, it removes $50,000 from the store’s ongoing revenue.

If a kid has a lousy first grade teacher or is bullied throughout middle school, it might decrease his productivity for the rest of us by a million dollars.

Torrents are made of drips.

The short-term impact (plus or minus) of our work or our errors is dwarfed by the long-term effects. Compounded over time, little things become big things.

In other words, courtesy and generosity are not only good for business — they are essential for business when you look at things from the long-term perspective.

How Do You Define Value in Your Work?

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From Great at Work, which is now the best book on personal effectiveness I have ever read:

As our study suggested, we should evaluate the value of our work by measuring how much others benefit from it. That’s an outside-in view, because it directs attention to the benefits our work brings to others. The typical inside-out view, by contrast, measures work according to whether we have completed our tasks and goals, regardless of whether they produce any benefits.

This may seem obvious in retrospect, but how many of us intentionally work this way? It is so easy to get caught up in accomplishing tasks, defining our productivity that way, rather than defining it in terms of the benefit our work actually brings.

If we take this outside-in view, I see two benefits. First, we will have more success in our jobs. That seems obvious, right? Second, we will be able to become more efficient, because now we have a criteria that allows us to identify unnecessary tasks or unnecessary steps in our tasks.

Beyond this, the outside-in view is very much in line with the gospel ethic, which is others-centered.

There is one nuance, of course: do not let this stifle innovation or too easily justify the status quo. You know the benefits of your work by how people act, not mainly what they say in response to your initial idea. Focus groups, for example, are usually a bad idea. As Henry Ford said, “If I had asked the public what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.” What actually produced the greatest value was when Ford democratized the automobile — something people weren’t asking for initially.

How Do You Respond to Dissenting Opinions?

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Dissenting opinions are useful even when they’re wrong.

That’s the argument Adam Grant makes in one of his chapters in Originals:

“Minority viewpoints are important, not because they tend to prevail but because they stimulate divergent attention and thought,” finds Berkeley psychologist Charlan Nemeth, one of the world’s leading experts on group decisions. “As a result, even when they are wrong they contribute to the detection of novel solutions and decisions that, on balance, our qualitatively better.”

When we have expertise in a particular area or more context than others or feel the need to move fast, it’s easy to discount dissenting opinions.  Or worse, to be threatened by them.

Humble confidence means truly listening to dissenting opinions, not shutting them down.

Coupling our confidence with humility honors others and (it shouldn’t be a surprise) leads to better results.