Entry-Level Rebel

Decision making is hard, especially when it comes to something as mobile and multifaceted as your career. With so many factors to consider and so many of them changing rapidly, sifting through the relevant information and coming to a solid conclusion can be maddening, especially for those with relatively little career experience to draw on. That’s where heuristics come in. What’s a heuristic? (more…)

For both the young and the young at heart, continued learning is key to keeping your skills sharp and your career on track. Your organization probably offers some form of formal training and, of course, there’s a whole world of resources out there for self-study, but one of the most powerful ways to learn is simply picking the brains of talented colleagues. Unfortunately though, simply asking someone to tell you everything they know rarely reaps rewards. So how can a knowledge-hungry employee successfully suck as much skill and wisdom as possible from the brains of colleagues? (more…)

As a confirmed perfectionist, I can personally attest to the many problems caused by an unbending desire to get everything right all of the time. Sure, perfectionism can drive you, but more likely it’s keeping you from taking risks, thinking big and starting to learn messy and difficult (and therefore interesting) things — all of which often mean looking silly or not knowing the answer. Plus, it’s an exhausting time sink to obsess about minutiae and performance.

So if you’re also afflicted with this hard-to-combat personality trait, what can you do to ease up and accept that, like every other human on the planet, you will occasionally make mistakes? (more…)

The video of Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s predictions for the next five years of the internet, which we posted last week on Entry-Level Rebel, uncovered plenty of reader interest in the topic of the next gen web. If you’re one of those of you with a professional interest in (or a personal passion for) the issue, there’s more food for thought out this week in the form of a 30-minute talk from Nicholas Carr, tech pundit and author of The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google, given at Google’s conference on cloud computing in London last week.

In it, Carr likens the shift from factory owners producing their own energy with the likes of the water wheel to purchasing it from off-site providers to the forthcoming shift from in-house computing to cloud computing, and makes a number of thought-provoking points about what this radical shift, in which “every person gets their own data center,” will mean for business. Perhaps a bit long for the casual computer user, the video’s a great deep dive for the truly interested.

Read More on BNET:

• An Interview with Nicholas Carr
• Nicholas Carr on Google’s Goal: Free Hotdogs Not World Domination

Yesterday we posted a TED talk from Stefan Sagmeister which suggested that one way to boost your creativity was to take a one year sabbatical to Bali. While that’s certainly one (very enjoyable) plan, those of us that don’t have a one-way ticket to the South Pacific, may still be in the market for other, slightly less expensive, methods to boost our innovative thinking and generate fresh ideas. Thankfully, a recent interview from the HBR editor’s blog suggests that the key to improved innovation isn’t a tropical vacation (I won’t tell the boss if you won’t) but rather five habits of mind shared by many successful, innovative business people. (more…)

The New York Times Today has a less than cheerful article noting that, with economic pressures so intense, more and more of us are being asked to work harder for less. At the same time the business community can’t stop talking about innovation and how to inspire it, nurture it and profit from it. These two trends, one could argue, are mutually exclusive. As anyone who has ever tried to do anything creative can tell you, innovative, off the beaten track thinking comes from an inner well that is not inexhaustible. Make people work more and more with less time to refresh and their ideas will get grow exhausted along with them. What’s the solution? Perhaps more sabbaticals, argues successful design firm owner Stefan Sagmeister in this enjoyable and thought-provoking TED talk. (more…)

Think of meditation as the province of Buddhist monks, gurus in caves and yoga devotees? Then perhaps you’d be surprised to learn that a wide spectrum of successful career-minded folks from Tiger Woods to Harvard Business School professors engage in the time-honored practice of training the mind in focus and clarity. Still think meditation sounds too touchy-feely for you? As an article in the London Evening Standard points out, high-flying organizations from Google to NASA offer meditation classes to staff. (more…)

If you’re like me, you’re a little baffled as to what all this Google Wave hype is about. It’s a communications thingy, an “email killer,” and invitations to the test version are going for $5,000 on eBay. But what exactly does it do? Silicon Alley Insider comes to the rescue with this neat, two-minute video explaining all you need to know about Google Wave so as not to sound like a Luddite.

Last week when I posted an item on an interesting little psychological study that seems to show procrastinating in college is correlated with later burn-out at work, I wasn’t expecting too much passion in the comments. But when the first commentator, RobinvdS, noted that the information in the study wasn’t exactly actionable (fair enough) and asked of procrastinating, “how do you get rid of it? How do you get people convinced that they need to get the things done?,” a great outpouring of procrastinator pride was unleashed. (more…)

Think your life is complicated? Kevin Roberts, CEO Worldwide of Saatchi & Saatchi, runs a major company, sits on several boards, blogs, speaks, writes and teaches. How does he manage to keep all these balls in the air? Ian Sanders, author of Juggle! Rethink Work, Reclaim Your Life, asks him in this interview and gets advice on organizing your life that explodes the conventional wisdom. “Success is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration?” Nonsense, says Roberts. Management and leadership? They’re over-rated. His advice: when it comes to prioritizing responsibilities, forget focusing on multi-hued email flags and elaborate arrays of post-it notes, and instead strive to get these four things into every workday:

• Responsibility
• Learning
• Recognition
• Joy

That’ll make you happy and people who are happy with their work tend to be good at it. And if you think this advice only applies to continent-hopping executives, Roberts has an answer for you entry-level types about halfway through the video.