Grow or die: How to keep innovating in your career
How to avoid stagnation after being successful in your role.
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I’m sure you have heard the advice “Say ‘no’ more often”. But how do you know what to say “no” to?
Also, the advice “Say yes to everything, try new things”. But how do you avoid burnout?
On top of that, I wrote about aligning your actions in a single direction in The Alignment Strategy: Do work that matters.
How do you keep innovating and up to date? Today we’ll find a strategy to avoid stagnation in our careers, renovating ourselves in cycles.
Takeaways from this article
How to approach your learning and exploration.
How to make time to explore.
Once upon a time…
You awaken on a foreign, medieval planet. Alone.
You spin 360 degrees to see your surroundings. Which direction to walk toward? Where are you going to find water, shelter, and food?
The truth is that you don’t know, and you can’t know.
The smartest thing seems to explore your surroundings up to a certain radius and create a map. Make progress in many directions, but you are not going too far.
As you find relevant resources, you index them into your map. You know they exist and where to find them, nothing more.
The more you explore, the easier it is to draw into your map 🗺️. You take as reference your previous knowledge of the area to add new resources.
You seem to remember things better. You are exploring following your curiosity, and curiosity drives you to investigate some of these places.
After a few days, you find an old wizard from that world🧙🏻. Luckily the guy is a wizard so he made you understand that world’s language. He just had maps of all the surroundings and gave you a copy. Such an effort you could have saved by having someone that already walked the path!
With this initial knowledge, it doesn’t make sense to keep going further in every direction. You haven’t found yet a sustainable source of water, food, or shelter. And it seems there’s a desert in one direction… who wants to explore sand?
The time to come and go from the starting point is higher. You are exhausted from dedicating time to all directions. It’s time to prioritize.
It’s harder than you thought. You say goodbye to places you have walked every day. You liked those places, but you can’t be everywhere at once.
It’s the moment to stop exploring and start exploiting, pushing in the direction with more chances of flourishing.