In today’s fast-paced world, it is easy to pin our personal worth to the amount of work that we do. It almost seems like our pursuit for happiness no longer resides in finding what we are passionate about, but in the amount of productivity and hustle we can generate on a regular basis.
In this episode, author and agility expert Jeff Gothelf is here to remind everybody that this is not the case. We inherently have value by virtue of being human beings, and we are capable of finding new ways to share our own narratives. Each one of us has a tremendous story to tell. These are ideas that resonate consistently throughout his new book, entitled Forever Employable.
It’s time to break away from the mold and see how we, as individuals, can enrich the path for future entry-level professionals within our industries—through the pandemic and beyond.
Traditionally, a successful person was always thought of as an extrovert. They would be known for their charisma and communication skills, and those who were introverted were at a disadvantage.
But in this day and age, there are a thousand ways for people to express themselves without necessarily meeting an audience face to face. Giving yourself the freedom to experiment with a variety of different channels and content will help you figure out two important aspects of being forever employable.
First, it will help you figure out the content you are comfortable sharing with your audience on a consistent basis. Second, it will help you find out where your audience is and how they want to hear from you. When you combine these two, you discover your unique way of generating opportunities.
Building a platform and a network does not require a specific skill set or personality trait; it only calls for experimentation, ingenuity, and an open mind.
Jeff shared his experience with his first book, entitled Lean UX. At this point, he has been talking about Lean UX to a variety of audiences and conferences around the country for over thirteen years. He believes that it’s the most successful book he has written.
He shared that while the first few years were exhilarating, he eventually had doubts on whether he could continue sharing his insights and his book. However, he said that the people he opened up to about his concerns reassured him that his ideas remained relevant.
According to those who advised him, the content in Lean UX is crucial to solving an “evergreen problem” or core problem. These are components of work that remain relevant to a job role despite the changing demands of the business landscape. One example Jeff gave was a project manager’s responsibility to unite a diverse group of people under one vision.
This meant that Jeff found the content that he was most comfortable sharing with other people—he just needed to find new and creative ways to present it to different audiences. The constant reinvention is both internally and externally driven: it’s internal because he needed to be able to sustain the passion that he had for his content by propagating it in different ways, but it’s also external because he was pushed to keep it relevant for the demands of the market.
After Jeff’s discussion on creating one’s own narrative, Alex related his advice to Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, where Campbell explores how most mythological narratives or “hero’s adventure’ share a similar fundamental structure.
“I feel as we're building that brand, setting that steak, we're going through all those different stages of the architect of the development of what we are, our brand or our business to actually become that great hero at the end...we deal with different rivals, right, different challenges, personal, interpersonal, whatever it might be, but the way myth carries, it's potent regardless of the length of time,” he explained.
Jeff’s parting words encourage us to take our future into our own hands. Loyalty to a single corporation or business entity may have worked for the past generations, but the variety in work set-ups and business models that we have the opportunity to experience today allow for more flexibility in our career path.
According to Jeff, the most important part of our career journey is making sure that we take control of our professional lives. Create a presence that is uniquely our own. Having others write our narratives for us is a waste of our true potential.
When TARTLE was first conceived, it took four more years of testing and experimentation before the platform stabilized. Whatever it is you are passionate about, it’s worth sharing and you are worthy of pursuing it. Your data is priceless.
Sign up for the TARTLE Marketplace through this link here.
