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Successful Careers Are Not Planned

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Peter Drucker, from his article “Managing Oneself” (pdf):

Successful careers are not planned.

They develop when people are prepared for opportunities because they know their strengths, their method of work, and their values. Knowing where one belongs can transform an ordinary person — hardworking and competent but otherwise mediocre — into an outstanding performer.

A helpful resource that fleshes this out is Daniel Pink’s The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You’ll Ever Need.

6 Principles for Making Ideas Stick

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In Made to Stick, Chip and Dan Heath point out that bad ideas often keep circulating, while good ideas often have a hard time succeeding.

Why is that?

That’s the question their book — which most have probably heard of by now — answers.

To make an impact, your idea has to stick. A “sticky” idea is one that is understood and remembered, and has lasting impact. A sticky idea changes the audience’s opinions or behavior.

How do you make your ideas sticky? They give six points. Here they are, from my notes on the book:

  1. Simple. This gets people to understand.
  2. Unexpected. This gets people to pay attention and maintain interest.
  3. Concrete. This gets people to understand so they remember.
  4. Credible. This helps show that your idea is true.
  5. Emotions. This gets people to care.
  6. Stories. This gets people to act.

The rest of the book unpacks each of those ideas. It is well worth a read if you haven’t already.

9 Core Principles of Writing

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Last summer, in preparation for writing my book, I read 15 or so books on writing and publishing. I then went back through the books and typed up the most important points from them into a single document (which came to 66 pages).

Out of all of this — and based also just on what I already knew about writing from classes (especially from two incredible English and composition teachers in high school) and just plain writing a lot — I pulled together what I take to be the top 9 core principles for effective writing.

Here they are:

  1. Omit needless words
  2. Use the active voice
  3. Be clear
  4. Be concrete and specific, permeating the work with details. For non-fiction, interviews are a helpful way to do this.
  5. Build your work around a key question
  6. Create tension
  7. Be yourself
  8. Write with nouns and verbs, not adjectives and adverbs
  9. Give the reader room to play their role (for example, when you state an amazing fact, don’t then say “that’s really amazing.” Let readers do their own marveling)

If you have other core principles that you think should be included in this list, I’d love to hear them.

5 Points on Sustaining Interest in Your Presentations

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Also from my notes on Chip and Dan Heath’s article:

  1. Before the audience will value the info you’re giving, they have to want it. Demand has to come before supply.
  2. Therefore tease, don’t simply tell, by opening knowledge gaps and filling them.
  3. “Great presentations are mysteries, not encyclopedic entries.”
  4. “Curiosity must come before content.”
  5. Don’t structure your presentation by asking “what’s the next point I should make” but “what’s the next question I want them to wrestle with.”

And, here are a few great points on using data well:

  1. Don’t lead with the data — that leaves it abstract, and doesn’t move people emotionally. Tell a story about an individual first, and then say “our research suggests that there are 900,000 stories like this, in Mumbai alone.”
  2. “Data are just summaries of thousands of stories — tell a few of those stories to help make the data meaningful.”

Tim Keller on Discerning Your Calling

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The other day I linked to Michael Horton’s article on discerning your calling. Tim Keller also has a very helpful article on that as well (online as a pdf).

You’ll notice these articles are in agreement with the same basic three questions to consider, but they complement one another in a helpful way.

Here’s the summary from the end of Keller’s article:

Your vocation is a part of God’s work in the world, and God gives you resources for serving the human community. These factors can help you identify your calling.

Affinity—“Look out.”
Affinity is the normal, existential/priestly way to discern call. What people needs do I vibrate to?

Ability—“Look in.”
Ability is the normal, rational/prophetic way to discern call. What am I good at doing?

Opportunity—“Look up.”
Opportunity is the normal, organizational/kingly way to discern call. What do the leaders/my friends believe is the most strategic kingdom need?

Your life is not a series of random events. Your family background, education, and life experiences—even the most painful ones—all equip you to do some work that no one else can do. “We are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do“ (Eph. 2:10).

(HT: Resurgence)

5 Principles for Starting a Presentation Well

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These are from the notes I took from an article by Chip and Dan Heath (authors of Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die):

  1. Don’t preamble—parachute in.
  2. “The first mission of a presentation is to grab attention.”
  3. A preamble is a laborious overview of what’s going to be covered. Don’t start with this. Don’t follow the “tell them what you’re gonna tell them, tell them, then tell them what you told them.” Steve Jobs doesn’t present this way. Ronald Reagan didn’t present this way.
  4. Example: Rebecca Fuller presenting on tactile museum exhibits. She parachuted in by shutting off the lights and saying “this is what it’s like for a blind person in most museums.” It wouldn’t have improved here presentation to say “today I’m going to give you an overview of the challenges faced by the visually impaired in most museums.”
  5. “If you bring us face to face with the problem, we don’t need a lot of upfront hand-holding.”

The most important point: parachute it. “Telling them what you’re going to tell them” usually reduces interest.

If You Wait for Favorable Conditions, You Will Never Act

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Lewis:

The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable. Favorable conditions never come (from “Learning in Wartime,” in The Weight of Glory, 50).

Ecclesiastes 11:4:

He who observes the wind will not sow, and he who regards the clouds will not reap.

For Writers (And Everyone Else): 12 Tips on Overcoming Procrastination

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These are from my notes on writing and are pulled from a bunch of books I read last summer. While the focus is how to overcome procrastination in writing, these principles can easily be adapted to be applicable for anyone, in about any context:

  1. “Almost all writers procrastinate.”
  2. Turn it into rehearsal.
  3. Lower your standards. Writers block is a product of some kind of disproportion between your standards and your performance. Get rid of the standards that inhibit you, write, then raise your standards during revision.
  4. Just start typing.
  5. Adopt a daily routine. “Fluent writers prefer mornings.”
  6. Draft sooner. Avoid over research, which makes writing seem tougher. Write earlier in the process so you discover the information you need.
  7. Discount nothing.
  8. Limit self criticism in early drafts.
  9. Rewrite.
  10. Set the table (= pull everything together and get things ready; make short plan).
  11. Find a helper.
  12. Keep a daily record of accomplishment.

When you Get Stuck

  1. Just start writing. “Writing is the means to achieving the clarity of what you should write.”
  2. It’s OK if you just produce a few pages a day for the first several weeks. Things will snowball if you get momentum.

How to Discover Your Calling

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A great article by Mike Horton on discovering your calling. Here’s a key point:

God does give us the desires of our hearts. He is not out to get us, or to make us wander the vocational wilderness forever. Sometimes we are “dumped” into short-term vocations which to us seem utterly meaningless and yet in some way providentially equip us with a skill which will be vital in our as yet unknown calling in life. We just cannot figure out God’s secret plan, but we can trust it and learn from natural as well as biblical sources how we might better discern our calling.

The questions, What are your skills?, What do you really enjoy?, What would get you up on Monday morning?, are in the realm of nature. Super-spirituality may look down on such mundane questions and try to steal into God’s secret chamber, but biblical piety is content to leaf through the book of nature. God has created us a certain way, given us certain habits, skills, longings, and drives.

Sometimes we over-spiritualize things and think God doesn’t care about whether we are in a role that is a good fit, or that considering our own desires and giftings in choosing what to do is somehow unspiritual.

Not true. Sometimes God will have us doing something that is not the best fit, but seeking the right fit is a good — and spiritual — thing to do. It is a matter of good stewardship to seek the best way to maximize the gifts, skills, and interests that he has given us.