Why do I believe that my career will actually be multi-careered?
Simplest and most direct answer is I have an identity as a long term multitasker. So with that identity I will naturally be inclined towards doing many things over the course of time. I actually think that provides more balance for me short-term and long-term. Getting good and being an expert at something in my job over the course of months, quarters, and years.
It’s just like any new skill. I became skilled enough at Power BI at Capgemini. I was an SME on that within my immediate circle. Now was I a premiere Power BI developer in the world? No. But I taught my way to becoming an SME.
It’s like this chart of time, skill, and expertise.
[see pic]
It’s a series of growth and integration with each level of ‘hill’ that occurs. To go through each barrier though needs something specific yet obvious: to do or be something / someone that I haven’t done or been before.
It’s that difference between 211 degrees and 212 degrees Fahrenheit. Once you unlock that and go beyond that activation energy, it then becomes easy to have that be the norm. At each plateau, there’s a decision we have to make: is this level of mastery good enough for me? If it is, then I move on to the next thing to get that to a certain level. If not, then I have to understand what other people who are at a level that I want to get to are doing and thinking. That’s one of the things that James Clear talks about - with being around people who make the habit or practice I want to inculcate the baseline, and not something outside their reach that I have to strive for.
Evolving my company (both the organizational and social connotations of company).
If one of the primary purposes of life is to understand the self as fully as possible, then I think we have the understand where along that line for any specific subject we want to be to gain that self-depth.
For example, an athlete, a world-class athlete may spend a majority of their time refining their skill to become such a world-class athlete. In that process, they would have learned many things about themselves. The key I think is realizing how deep do you have to go in one area to continue to realize more about the self?
I think there are similarities here with this and Alex Hormozi’s content and with sales in general of going deep on an avatar, or niching down. Or actually the process of niching down.
So in marketing and sales, we may start when brainstorming about ideal clients / avatars / personas, with a vague demographic, like women. Then it may go deeper into that demographic with women with children. Then women with children between ages 2-12. Then that one with living in a certain zip code. Then that in a single family home making $150k+ household income / year. So that was narrowing down more and more. The quality of the avatar emerges as I add more detail.
With our life, what if we view it also in that way?
That let’s say when we’re born, we have infinite branches to potentially travel down. But by having too many options, that’s like saying “women” with that target persona. Through our experiences and lives then, those become more and more unique to us. Our life then becomes a constant “niching down” process of who we really are.
So the more unique our experiences and beliefs are, the more potential value that we can provide to those who are in that same unique bucket. So it’s symmetrical in a sense of our niching down and who we can provide the most value with.
[see graphs]
So this graph is actually both the chart for niches of the self as well as your avatar for who you can provide the most value for. So purpose, one definition of it, is niching down through your experiences until you realize you’re truly 1 of 1 in the world.
From that space and along the way, you will have also niched down on the type of person you can most impact. That’s where the value given and value received can align and simultaneously be the highest. Financially, that person would be willing to pay lots and lots of money for the value received because they have understood that niching down process.
So how do you expedite this process?
I think by having such a unique breadth and depth of experiences that you traverse the curve quicker. It’s not about speed here, necessarily, but the sooner someone discovers their niche, the more value they can provide to others for longer time and depth.
Now once that 1 of 1 point has been reached, then you get that experience and then you move back up a level in the content of that ‘niching down’ process.
So your audience, but also expertise, becomes more inclusive and encompassing.
So when someone says “find your purpose”, that’s a pretty vague and open-ended statement. What I’ve described here is a way to at least visualize that and semi-quantify that.
Revisiting a previous topic here about how long do you stay on a path of the mastery of a skill vs going to the next thing to learn. I think one way of doing that, not surprising at this point, is to graph it out.
[see pic]
If we’re zoomed in (or actually zoomed out as well) of the first graph that I drew, then I think when the macro graph is continuing to go at an exponential rate, you still continue down that road and ride it (solid line in the graph). If you feel that point of diminishing returns of depth of experience and learning about the self and Universe, then that may be time to stabilize that (could be temporary or permanent) and tackle something else.
So I think then the goal is to find things that you keep learning exponentially from. Ultimately, it ceases to become an exponential function and morphs into an infinite line up.
I think ideally, we’re having that exponential curve with everything in our lives. But as a place to start, maybe just pick 1 thing to go deep on to traverse the path and overcome the activation energy points. The rest of the activities can be good enough in semi-capable or proficient (or sometimes even beginner) levels.
But then as you reach higher and higher levels of mastery, you can decide which things to then move along the mastery curve. Then when you find that equilibrium and stabilize, the point and feeling of balance is at a level you haven’t experienced before. Over time, we keep raising our own standards of balance.
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