Let's Fight (our) Mediocrity, One Round at a Time!
All in Career
Follow your passion, and success will follow you! If you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life.
We have all heard it thousands of times! And every day we spend on LinkedIn or Instagram, we get bombarded with memes motivating us to leave our cushy corporate jobs to find and follow our one and true passion.
But guess what, it’s not that easy! Suppose you are 40 and you are a passionate triathlete training for the Ironman in Hawaii. Your chances of making a living following your heart are about as good as mine, turning my costly podcasting and blogging habit into a media empire of the likes of Tim Ferriss or Joe Rogan.
Luckily the world is not just black and white, and there is a smart alternative to tell your boss to love himself while storming out of your office to become a Yoga instructor in Bail.
Follow your passion AND keep your job! Basically, treat your hobby or passion project as a second career while maintaining your breadwinning job.
Read how a dual career can keep you sane and what you can learn from medical Rockstar Henrik Widegren.
OKRs, Objectives and Key Results is a framework widely used by technology companies to set strategic goals and align the organization behind them. Now, you might be not exactly Google, but OKRs might still have the potential to help you to achieve your goals. At least that’s what my recent podcast guest Simon Klaiber and I think!
Almost exactly three years ago, I got fired for the first, and luckily so far also the only time in my management career. Without a doubt, getting terminated was one of the lowest points in my professional life and something I am not proud of. At the same time, there is no reason for being ashamed for getting the boot (given that it was not for disciplinary reasons). Stigmatizing people for getting their job terminated is not helping anyone, neither is beating yourself up over it. That’s why I wanted to write this article for a long time, to share my personal experience and tell those of you out there dealing with redundancy or termination that life and your career will go on, even if it does not feel like that right now.
One of my LinkedIn contacts recently tagged one of his posts with “Daydreaming, after all, is just a form of planning.” When I saw this line, I knew it was the missing piece for this article that I have been pondering over for quite a while. As it turns out, I have without knowing prior to writing this article, practiced what NYU Professor of Psychology Gabriele Oettingen calls “Mental Contrasting for Goal-Fulfillment.”, a framework to tap into daydreams for motivation and more productivity.
Being a business' general manager is a lot, like being the coach of a football club. You put the best team together that you can afford; you do what you can do to make them play (work) well together; you motivate, coach, troubleshoot, and eventually, you take responsibility for the results.
Because of these similarities, it is pretty natural to look to successful sports coaches as role models for leadership. Jürgen Klopp is without a doubt one of the most successful coaches in football and I believe there are a few good reasons why this is the case. Hear me out!
Negotiating is an essential part of economic activity. No matter if you are buying or selling a product or service, negotiating your salary or that of your staff members, renting an office, or convincing your boss to increase your budget for the upcoming year, your success will often depend on your ability to strike the right deal.
Even after 15 years as an entrepreneur and manager, I am not the most confident negotiator. Reason enough to get two real negotiation pros into the Life-Sparring Ring to share some of their secrets. Enter Alexander Zimmermann and JB Deal.
I recently had a lengthy discussion with a young graduate on the topic of job security. He was thinking about switching from a career in business to a career in public service, mainly for the sake of a slightly higher salary and the promise of job security.
Here are the thoughts on the topic, that I shared with the young man.
