Building Great Careers: Playing the Long Game
#MakingBetterDecisions, #Goals, #focusonwhatmatters, #Wealth, #Careers
I started writing on building great careers in my last blog. As I tried to organize my thoughts further on this series, after a few iterations, all the topics have neatly fallen into a few categories — “Mindset”, “Approach/Strategy”, Nuts and Bolts/The Essentials”, “Creativity/Innovation” and “Miscellaneous”. In this blog, I emphasize the value of long-term mindset in building a great career.
“In the stock markets, a small percentage of people end up being successful in the long run, whereas the majority of people, in spite of being successful in the short run, end up losers in the long run” — Parag Parikh
Parag Parikh, in his quote above, may as well have spoken about careers instead of stock markets. I know a lot of runners who run 5K to 15K distances regularly. When many of them attempt their first full or half marathon distance, they inevitably tend to run a little too fast in the initial few kilometers and pay heavily for this transgression later on in the run. They end up performing much below their potential. Long distance runs require carefully planned pacing strategies — else one will suffer — even if one ends up completing the run.
Many things in life are similar to these long-distance runs — wealth creation, maintaining good health, relationships etc. Career journey is certainly like a long-distance run — if one carefully develops it, it can turn out to be a fulfilling journey.
The best way to succeed in the career journey is to play the long game — by taking up actions that yield the most value in a long time-horizon.
There are many benefits to playing a long game — these benefits combine to create a definitive advantage in helping you achieve your extraordinary career goals.
With a long time horizon, you need not lock yourself into specific goals early on in the journey. You don’t need to decide that you want to build or start-up or lead a large team or become a technology guru early on in the career. You will have time to understand your natural inclinations and then consolidate your efforts in growing in the right area. Pertinently, you need not fix a goal that may not naturally align with you. You do not have to take on a borrowed goal for one of your life’s most important priorities.
With time, your job skills tend to become obsolete and that is OK. Because in the long run, it is not the constantly changing technologies or the latest management paradigms, that give you the edge. Your big career goals are founded on the core capabilities and competencies that you develop and sharpen and compound with time.
Long game allows for absorbing impacts from necessary forays into non-career related priorities that inevitably happen in life like, caring for elderly parents/relatives and/or young children, your own health events etc.
“I’m not concerned with noise because I’m playing the long game.” — Jay-Z
Long-game relieves you from the pressure of having to win every day. Failure need not be an ego-crashing retrograde event but a useful and meaningful step on the way to success. Let us say that you have been passed over for a promotion. This could happen because of adverse external factors (like a bad boss or even bad economy) or because of your own inadequacies — you may not have delivered to the level of value expected of you. You can put such events in the right context, learn what you can and make necessary changes. You can adjust to the ebb and flow of your natural energies. You don’t have to win every day.
“Be radically proactive about any behavior that pays off in 10 years.” — James Clear
For psychological health, you will need healthy relationships with friends and family and a genuine sense of self-identity that is different from your career identity or your family identity. Long term horizon allows you sufficient leeway and time for building these relationships — and also to exercise and sleep well every day.
In the long run, you can compound value from assets that you develop along the way — relationships, network, knowledge, experience etc. And as you know, extraordinary value almost, always comes from compounding benefits.
Long-game allows you time and opportunity to develop a multidisciplinary mindset. In the last several decades, somehow, we have started to place a lot of value on (hyper) specialization. This is in sharp contrast with the great personalities of the past — for example, Newton was a theologian, mathematician, alchemist and astronomer and yes, a scientist too. Benjamin Franklin was a scientist, writer, inventor, diplomat, publisher etc and also a politician. From a skills perspective, it may be important to be specialized but a “specialized” mindset cannot be good for making good decisions — for specialized mindset means narrow mindset. The nearly lost art of multi-disciplinary depth can be a very powerful thing in making sense of the world around us. It can help us understand potential long-term consequences of our actions. It helps us develop mental models that help us in consolidating and most importantly compounding our learning. Over a period of time, it is this compounding of knowledge and capability that will make all the difference.
Bottomline
“Act fast on things that compound. Never let a day pass without doing something that will benefit you in a decade.” — James Clear
Achieving success in career, like all other important priorities in life, is like running a marathon race but most people seem to treat career journey as a sprint. Career lends itself nicely to be played as a long game as all the essential capabilities (networking, strategic thinking, good health etc) that contribute to a successful career tend to compound their value with time. Long-horizon keeps “burnout” at bay and also allows one to develop indirect but critical contributing factors like a healthy sense of self and meaningful relationships with friends, family and society in general.
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Thanks for taking time to read this. In this newsletter, I share my learnings that could help you improve your decisions and make meaningful progress on your goals and desires. I share stuff that I have personally experienced or experimented with. If you find this newsletter worthwhile, please do share it with others — of course, only if you do not mind it.
A bit on my background
I worked in India and the USA with most of my work experience with large global organizations. My last corporate role was the Head of Technology for “Treasury and Trade Management Solutions” for Citigroup South Asia cluster. At Citi, I set up from my Business Unit and grew it from a team size of 1 to over 1900 Citi employees in a span of eight years.
I quit Citi in 2021 to focus exclusively on my interest area of improving decision making. In the last 2 years, I studied this topic closely and developed a training course to systematically improve decision making ability. I’m also an Investment Advisor (RIA) registered with the Securities and the Exchange Board of India (SEBI). As an RIA, I analyze and prepare financial plans to help people achieve their financial goals.
I have done MBA in Strategy and Finance from Carlson School of Management at University of Minnesota and B.Tech in Mechanical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay.
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