Strategy Sunday: 2023-11-26
A framework of timeless strategies to manage a career.
Welcome to the Sunday edition of my newsletter - ideas, mindsets, and technology to innovate your best self and boost performance in a craft you love.
🎧 Use the Substack app to listen to the audio version of this newsletter.
🌟 I hope you find one nugget in this post to practice this coming week.
✍️ Share your comments at the bottom of this post.
💡 Curating Ideas into a Framework
For many years, I have been curious about the strategies for guiding a successful career in the broader context of a fulfilling and meaningful life. I was looking for that magical handbook that would tell me how to think about my career and execute it. I often found pieces of wisdom but nothing that packaged the ideas into timeless strategies to meditate on. Today, the world’s knowledge is available within seconds through a voice or text query. Although this is the case, I still see a need to curate content relevant to a particular audience and problem.
In 2006, during my early days at Microsoft, I began to synthesize a framework of strategies that would eventually evolve into what I called the “Career Strategy Framework.” Some Microsoft colleagues tell me they still refer to that raw material. I originally intended to document and test these ideas to share them with my colleagues and kids. I thought, eventually, I would have this “playbook” that would save people time and get them to think about their careers more strategically. I translated many ideas captured in my Microsoft slide decks into articles on this site that I continually refine and extend.
Here I am, seventeen years later, still working on the piece of clay. My obsession with strategies that stand the test of time is one of the factors that influenced me to write and become a coach.
I boiled down the core ingredients to simple, timeless things you must do to manage a career:
Know who you are and your vision for your life.
Target your time, effort, and unique expertise to valuable problems that align with your purpose and sustainably compensate you.
Plan a career journey to build a strong position that mitigates external forces, knowing it will be long, challenging, and uncertain.
Continually learn valuable skills and sustain your unique, scarce expertise.
Sell your brand with authority and credibility to maximize demand for your unique expertise.
Connect to develop strong relationships with people who can help you.
Make good decisions that align with your character, vision, and purpose.
I know, it's easier said than done, especially when everything is changing.
These first principles form the enduring ideas in the Career Strategy Framework.
Practicing these strategies will increase the likelihood that you will derive meaning, fulfillment, and impact doing work you love. You can also think of these as mental models that provide a perspective I learned throughout my career. Each article summarizes a core idea and tactics to practice it. You will also find a list of resources at the bottom of each article with references to go deeper, such as books and videos from leading experts.
In today’s newsletter edition, I share three strategies from the framework I used or referenced to others in my coaching this week.
🧭 Values: It’s Your Compass to Life
Knowing and living our values guides better outcomes in work and beyond.
Values provide the foundational rock we can rely on when things get hard and a change is underway.
Values influence who we get into relationships with and the organizations we work for.
Values can be used to translate these core beliefs into behaviors we model and hold ourselves accountable to.
I highly recommend to coachees that they consider outlining five to seven values that will guide their career strategy and transformation. In the article below, you will find a template for documenting values and behaviors. 👇
🧠 Decide Automatically for Better, Faster Decisions
We make hundreds of decisions every day. This requires mental energy and cognition to make quality decisions.
Adopting automatic decision-making techniques can help us make better and faster decisions that align with our vision.
Stick to your guns and remove the personal nature of a decision by using your boundaries.
Build a daily routine that eliminates decision-making and negotiating with yourself.
Make your values visible where you spend time daily to reinforce your commitment.
In the article below, other ideas will shape how you decide automatically. 👇
💀 Connect with Your Mortality to Create a Sense of Urgency
We have time right now, but we waste a lot of it. The counter is that we don’t know how much time we really do have. The worst feeling will be that of regret on our deathbed that we did not act with a sense of urgency.
In the article below, you will find ideas to embrace your mortality and use it as an asset to accelerate the path to your true potential. 👇
🤖 Technology
This week, I have been experimenting with communicating with ChatGPT through voice using the iOS app. To make it more accessible throughout the day, I configured the “Action” button on my iPhone to launch ChatGPT. It’s an alternative to Siri. In addition to quick answers, I enjoy the open and free-flowing conversations. For example, on Saturday night, ChatGPT asked me what book I was reading and what I found insightful so far. We enjoyed a fun conversation as she shared more about the author and other interesting factoids. I could have talked back and forth for quite some time. I felt like a virtual date with someone interesting and knowledgeable. 😂
📚 Book Collection
I updated my online book collection over the Thanksgiving holiday. Here, you will find most of the books I have in my home office, with notes that are the yellow highlights from the book. Book notes are not a replacement for reading the book and are the key insights I found relevant to myself.
The collection is organized into genres:
Business | Entrepreneurship | Strategy
Career
Financial | Money
Health
Leadership
Product Management & Marketing
Self-Help & Personal Transformation
Technology
Many of these books are referenced at the bottom of my articles. I am reading a few books on change, transformation, and decision-making that I know you will find helpful when I share my book notes!
Thanks for reading, and I would love your help sharing my work with others!
- James