08/14/2024
I celebrated my one-year job anniversary just shy of a month and some change ago.
Needless to say, August 2024 was my best August yet: Birthday and back-to-back conferences.
And my job-versary was the barbeque gravy.
A lot has happened since this date a year ago.
So, without further ado,
Let's dive right in.
We begin.
1. Know your place
↠ To thrive in a particular setting, it calls to know where you stand in the grand scheme of things and learn how you contribute to the grander picture.
↠ This takes time as a new environment has its own circumstances and challenges, so you'll also have to adjust. And adjustment, too, takes time.
↠ Knowing where you lie can help you cultivate your value proposition depending on what you do there.
ACTION: Just like you thrived in school, learn the workplace too. Then, learn how to flourish in it.
2. Master your communication
OBSERVATION: No one is a good communicator until they learn how to communicate with others accordingly.
↠ Eloquence and tact are one thing together, but if your message can't get across to your team, miscommunication occurs, leading to misunderstandings.
Personal revelation: Changing how I spoke - not what I spoke - to the recipients of my message was the greatest improvement in my communication.
ACTION: Learn how to communicate so your colleagues understand; Tweak your speech for them to interpret well.
3. Cultivate empathy
↠ Empathy is seeing situations from others' POVs or "being in someone's shoes."
↠ You will work with colleagues with conflicting ideologies - I mean, they learned their thought processes elsewhere, and so did you.
ACTIONS:
Understand that your colleagues, too, want to succeed, and their actions reflect their career goals. So do you.
Understand where they are coming from and why they reason the way they do.
Take nothing personally when conflict arises.
In a conflict, tailor your proposals from "I'm right" to "What can we do to achieve this?" Everyone wants to win.
{I touch on empathy here.}
4. Corporate and school are different environments
↠ "The Real World" vastly differs from college.
↠ From dealing with peers and agemates, you now deal with colleagues and workmates, creating a dichotomy of characters and personalities.
ACTION: Take your time to learn your new environment and the people in it, and adjust accordingly. (Refer to #1.)
5. Take your time to learn
↠ Learning on the job differs from in school primarily due to the discrepancy in feedback loops.
⇒For instance, in school, your feedback is immediate, as seen in tests and assignments.
⇒At work, however, your feedback is delayed because you must first learn the job (which takes a while) and then do the job itself, whose results might not manifest for the first X months.
↠ It's partly why many new hires feel lost and unsettled as they're unsure of what to do during the first X months of their job.
Personal rule of thumb: It will take you 6-8 months to settle into your role - four if you're fast. Take your time to learn.
6. Learning is a superpower
↠ Learning is essential for professional development, and most employers provide free employee training.
↠ Most CEOs, executives, and career-glittery successes attribute their success to continuous learning and applying their lessons in different career stages.
ACTION:
Stay curious. Be a lifelong learner - It will take you places.
Learning does not end with a degree - It is eternal.
7. Job satisfaction = Liking what you do + Who you do it with
↠ I invented The Law of Job Satisfaction that I use to gauge how much I like my job (which I do):
↠ If you like what you do, that's the equation half done.
↠ If you like who you do it with, that's almost all of it completed.
ACTION: Balance both - Liking what you do and who you do it with. You have some work to do if there's an imbalance on one end.
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8. Hone in on competency, resourcefulness, and reliability
↠ Competency is knowing your stuff. People love someone who knows their stuff.
When you master competency, you become indispensable to your team and a role model to colleagues wanting to learn from you.
↠ Resourcefulness is using the resources at your disposal to garner a particular result.
Use the tools in your arsenal to craft the best outcome possible, after which your creativity shall skyrocket once blessed with more resources.
↠ By reliability, your team can count on you to show up when needed.
Starting out, you won't have much to show apart from your eagerness to help. Assist your team members wherever you can, and learn some skills to fill their gaps in the process.
Challenge yourself to come in as clutch as often as possible.
ACTION: Hone in on competency, resourcefulness, and reliability.
9. Leadership is impressive
↠ People like leaders. They like someone who can usher a team on specific tasks when the need calls for it.
↠ And in every team, anyone can be a leader.
ACTION: Cultivate your leadership early in your career. Shadow acclaimed leaders and take on projects where you can lead; Your late twenties will thank you.
10. Your Job is your Job
↠ Put frankly, no one cares who you are outside your job.
↠ You could be an Olympic Gold medalist, an acclaimed tuba player, or a nonprofit founder...but at your job, they want results first. That's what they're paying you for.
↠ This is not to discourage you from pursuing extracurriculars but rather to provide a reality check that you are compensated for your work at your workplace; All else is secondary.
ACTION: Know your place. (Refer to #1.) Understand that your job is the level playing ground to cultivate your results - The rest is trivial.
11. Be Teachable
↠ As a twenty-something-year-old, you have much to learn in your career and life - Inclusive of any achievements you've had in college.
ACTION: No matter your status, stay humble and be teachable. Most mentorships start this way, and life-changing opportunities follow.
12. You Will Mess Up
↠ Failures are inevitable - You will mess up at some point. Everyone has such moments.
↠ No one expects you to master your craft five weeks into your job. Learning takes time, and mistakes expedite that.
↠ Your mess-ups can be career lessons for you to learn, shape yourself up, and get you on your feet towards succeeding in your job. (Story for another day: My biggest mistake that was my wake-up call and steered my career forever.)
ACTION: Learn from your mistakes. Note how they occurred, and remedies for next time...because a mistake avoided is better than one solved.
13. Master Personal Finance
↠ Today's education system underemphasizes personal finance skills to thrive in today's economy; Only 22.7% of US high schoolers can access personal finance courses.
↠ Once in a job, the income windfall is tempting for someone earning considerable chunks at a go. Effects include lifestyle inflation, lavish spending, taxes, and eating out, etc.
↠ And as of December 2022, 51% of six-figure earners live paycheck to paycheck.
↠ I often quote myself:
Just because you have a job doesn't mean you have money.
ACTION:
Money management and personal finance can help you control your income and cashflow, as does Maslow's Hierarchy of Financial Needs.
Start with opening a Traditional 401K with your employer, a Roth IRA, and employing the 50-30-20 rule.
Plug: I have a friend who emphasizes money mastery and wealth-building (probably the next Dave Ramsey? Idk. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯). Follow my guy John Henry - Millennial Wealth - for wealth-building insights.
'Hope this article helped you.
If you're starting your career, I wish you nothing but the best of luck and massive success in it.
Go ace it - You've got this.
Peace, love, God's blessings, and success,
.
.
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~T.K.K
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