Lean Start Up

38:00 "Sales people rule the world"

Quitter: Closing the Gap Between Your Day Job & Your Dream Job

While driving down to the University of New England I listened to the audible version of Quitter: Closing the Gap Between your day job and your dream job by John Acuff. John shares his experience of transitioning from his day job to his dream job. He had been employed at autosales.com and on the side was writing a blog Stuff Christians like in addition to other writing projects. Autosales.com was not his dream job, he wanted to be a writer. In Quitter he details the challenges and practicalities of changing careers.

  Career transformations usually aren't instant. I started my Masters program in mid 2010 and only recently started in a position that could be considered my "dream job". During that time my mortgage still needed to be paid and I still had to perform in my job. Acuff provides practical advice and a much needed reality check to job switchers. He encourages the reader to view their current employer as a patron who makes their makes their dream possible. He also explains that having a day job gives the job switcher the ability to say no and not compromise their dream.

 He also argues that we can't compartmentalise our lives. Our attitudes and behaviour and one part of our lives will affect others. We can't be lazy in our day job and not have that affect us in our personal lives. This is a lesson I wish I learnt earlier in my career. I was always waiting to be given the dream job before putting in a full effort. Of course I was never given the dream job because I hadn't proven myself by mastering the mundane.

My job title has recently changed from Disability Employment Consultant to Associate Account Manager. I've been surprised by the amount of parallels between the two jobs. As an employment consultant I had marketing duties where I would market clients on my caseload into employment. On my caseload at any point of time I had people who were not employable in the short term and others who were job ready. To perform in that job I needed to keep good records of what I had discussed with clients, prioritise job ready client and manage my time effectively. It doesn't take a genius to workout that these skills are transferable to account management. Imagine if for the last two years I had slacked off in my day job. Would I have developed good case management skills which could help me perform in my dream job working for a technology company? Probably not.

If you're currently using the phrase "I'm a .......... but," then I recommend you read Quitter and get some practical advice from someone who has been there.

Offically Graduated

After what has been a long journey I have now finally finished my Masters of Economic Studies!

Myers Briggs Test

I just completed a Myers-Briggs test that said I was an Administrator (ESTJ) Extrovert, Sensing, Thinking and Judging.

 Extroverted (E) 51.43% Introverted (I) 48.57%
Sensing (S) 55.88% Intuitive (N) 44.12%
Thinking (T) 70% Feeling (F) 30%
Judging (J) 65.52% Perceiving (P) 34.48%

ESTJ - "Administrator". Much in touch with the external environment. Very responsible. Pillar of strength. 8.7% of total population.

Take Free Jung Personality Test
Personality Test by SimilarMinds.com

What I learned from Steve Jobs' biography.

I recently finished reading Steve Jobs biography for the third time. I really love Walter Isaacson's book, he shows the real Steve Jobs. The man who went from being a smelly, vegan, drug taking hippy to being a technology tycoon.

The biography doesn't paint Jobs as an all knowing genius or an emotionally intelligent leader. While the book show Jobs was a genius in the area of design and had great ideas, it also showed a man who could be cruel, immature and eccentric. He was a man who saw the world in extremes. Things were either brilliant or shit. He was a man who would take credit for other people's ideas and overlook practical reality using his reality distortion field.

What the book demonstrates better than any other business book I've read is what it takes to be great. In the main, focus. Jobs had the ability to focus and be completely obsessed by a problem or design issue. In the book he is quoted saying that on every major product Apple produced their was a moment where he needed to hit the stop button and rewind. A moment when the team realised they had got something fundamentally wrong and would need to start again.

During his time at Pixar there was a moment when they needed to re-write Toy Story. With the Mac there were many times when Jobs wouldn't accept good enough. With Apple's famous Apple Stores a last minute decision about layout caused the stores opening to be delayed by months.

How many of us really have what it takes to do that. To realise that we have fundamentally missed the point on the essay and it will need to be rewritten. Do we do that? No, most of the time we accept good enough or even something that is lousy. Why? Because to redo something is hard. To find a second wind and start all over is next to impossible. But is this what separates genius from average.

As a society we like to believe the myth of the genius. We don't want to acknowledge the truth that we were just too lazy to produce really good work. We like to believe average is our lot in life rather then the reality that looked at the opportunity cost and settled for second best.

When Jobs returned to Apple in 1997 he brought a laser focus. He simplified their product lines and clarified what Apple did. Gone were the printers and PDAs. Apple made computers for creative types that focus redefined the brand and stopped them competing in markets they couldn't win and got them in markets where they could. Jobs wasn't the perfect man which the business literature tells us we need to be, instead he was a flawed human being he did great things because he focused and was able to get other people to focus. As someone who can some time offend others and can have poor emotional intelligence I find Jobs life story reassuring.


Disclaimer: I am not an apple fan boi, though their products are starting to grow on me. I love my ipad and miss my iphone but I find my Macbook Pro limited when compared to a PC. (The Macbook is a work computer, my personal computer runs Windows 8). Office 2011 is total crap compared to 2010 on Windows. One would think Microsoft dropping the ball on office would have open the Mac market up for some good alternatives. The lack of a serious Office suite on the Mac leads me to believe that no one does serious work on apple products. Also my blog is based on the Microsoft philosophy of releasing faulty products and fixing them with patches. Spelling and gramatical errors will be patched as required.