Daily Endeavor Blog

If you’re been through a layoff, looking for a job, and looking to connect with other past employees, head over to Socialtext. They’re making their wiki service available for free as an impromptu alumni network for companies that have had deep cuts (e.g. 5%). It’s only hours old and already PeopleSoft, DivX and Yahoo have started to self-organize.

• Dream Delayed for Financial Security: A second act story (WSJ)

• The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: The society in which you live should help you develop (Youtube)

• Marissa Mayer’s Simple Advice On Who To Hire: Smart people who get things done (Techcrunch)

• Ask Annie: ‘Dilbert’ on how to save your career (Fortune)

World 2, come in. World 2, this is World 1, do you read me?

Jessica Hagy has the talent to distill. Like a lot of it.

She unfurled a beauty yesterday that nails the main correlate to a sense of entitlement: disappointment. High expectations are good. Expectations of guarantees are more than risky; they’re guaranteed to come up short.

We’ve all known a few people who, when they finish school, say “Ok world, I’ve slogged it out, now drop off all the riches right into my lap and be off with you.” Armchair critics will respond with “too self-involved” or some other quick explanation.

Sure there are always one or two overly entitled people who need a Reality Check, but the vast majority of people are following perfectly healthy self-interest based on what they know. What looks like entitlement in many cases, may in fact be individuals trying to follow their own path the best they understand it.

Straddling two worlds

Graduates are in one of the few life positions (the other is probably before/after having kids), where they’ve mastered one world and are on the precipice of a new, highly different one — one they know very little about. How could they? They haven’t lived in yet.

When transitioning from one world to the next it’s easy to overestimate how valued your experience will be. You have great experience, it’s valuable. Rather, the calibration is difficult, especially given all the cues going on. After all, you’ve just accomplished every academic task set in front of you for 20 years, you’re at the top. That’s a huge achievement and milestone, and everyone around is saying so (and they’re right).

It’s also easy to underestimate the enormous volume of others (millions) who headed off into World Two each year before this one. They too are looking for spots, but they haven’t been on campus for a year or more, so they’re not on the radar.

It’s not your fault. It’s the nature of the transition, or more specifically, the nature of living apart. The mis-estimations are due a complete lack of mixing between the two worlds. For example, I truly don’t know what it’s like to be a parent because I haven’t been one yet.

When combined, these two — mis-calibrating how some hiring managers may view you and underestimating the large number of others vying for similar spots — can look a lot like entitlement. But I don’t think they are. They’re natural perceptions that can arise in anyone when heading from one world to the next.

This brings us back to Jessica’s graph. She’s right. When there’s real sense of entitlement, disappointment reigns. Yet even when there’s not entitlement at play, but instead people honestly trying to negotiate the very large college to career transition, there’s still often a big set up for disappointment.

Let’s change that.

Andrew Zuckerman released a book and short film called Wisdom not too long ago. It’s a sincere achievement that captures the intellect and emotion, not to mention the lessons, of some truly remarkable individuals like Nadine Gordimer and Jane Goodall. He introduces it:

Inspired by the idea that one of the greatest gifts one generation can pass to another is the wisdom it has gained from experience, the Wisdom project, produced with cooperation from Archbishop Desmond Tutu, seeks to create a record of a multicultural group of people who have all made their mark on the world.

In his portraits, Zuckerman highlights, among other things, that learning is what makes people come alive. His subjects are testament to it.

To say it even more bluntly: at any given moment, you’re either learning, or your decaying. Each moment may be small, but they accrue over time and to great effect. Why not seek out work that turns you on?

Here are a few of my favorites.

Your best work is your expression of yourself – Frank Gehry

You don’t stop doing things because you get old. You get old because you stop doing things. – Rosamunde Pilcher

Who I am and what I need are things I need to find out myself – Chinua Achebe

One of the reasons I haven’t slipped into some kind of retirement is that I feel I’m learning something new all of the time – Clint Eastwood

You can’t get to wonderful without passing through alright – Bill Withers

I think you’ve got to learn to love something deeply…it sounds sentimental as hell, but I really think it is – Andrew Wyeth

Pick up the book for someone you’d like to see keep growing. Thanks to Mac for the pointer.

Allison Aubrey at NPR files a story this morning that happiness it turns out is truly contagious. She reports on the research by Nicholas Christakis (Harvard Medical School) and James Fowler (UCSD) that shows how happiness spreads:

What we found through a variety of analysis is that happiness always spreads person to person, whereas unhappiness only sometimes spreads.

The pass-along rate for happiness not only appears to be higher, it also continues further, spreading up to 3 hops along one’s social network. When there’s good, people tend to spread it. Given 30-50% of our waking hours are spent working, work life has a significant impact on what’s shared. If you’re doing what you love, there’s a greater likelihood you’re boat can lift others, and others may do the same for you.

Aubrey interviews Robert Provine from the University of Maryland who rightly cautions happiness, and mood at large, are often momentary and of course influenced by situational events. Nevertheless, if our days and years are filled with anything, it’s other people and a vast collection of moments. Christakis and Fowler show us one way how the people around us can impact the moments we have, for the better.

I’m excited to share we’ve opened the first seats for the Core Course in 2009 at Endeavor Prep. The first course is January 6, followed up the second beginning February 10. It’s been a great experience so far and I’m really looking forward to what we have lined up for the new year.

If you’re graduating soon and thinking about what to do, or if you’ve been out a few years and starting to get the quarter-life itch to carve your own path, I hope you’ll join us. To get some flavor, see what others have been saying.

Though a lot of cultural angst is spent on individuals “doing it on their own,” nothing great ever comes together in a vacuum or without a raft of other people. It’s much the case with Endeavor Prep.

We’ve built up the service, the sites, all the operations and infrastructure with deep wells of expertise from all over. We’re super fortunate to have such a great team and extended team supporting our work. Thank God we’ve been using wikis (thank you Socialtext) as our shared workspaces to pull of it together. It’s allowed us to find the best experts and work with them where they live. A quick look at even the first dozen people displayed in one of our workspaces includes New York, Barcelona, Bloomington, Santa Cruz, Palo Alto, San Francisco, London, DC, Santa Monica, Toronto, Corona Del Mar and Boston.

Building this company has been a triumph of the collective. The iterative prototyping approach — build, use, learn, repeat — is the straightest line to discovering how to serve our customers, and it is 100% powered by people and their tremendous contributions. We’ve been advised, informed and helped along by well over 200 people over the last year. This is in addition to the learning that’s been provided by a similar number of undergrads and recent grads, as well as the folks who work with them, over the last three years. I’m deeply grateful to all of you.

Customers, investors, advisors, friends — all of you — thank you.

On September 11, 2003, I made a guest post on my friend Ross’ blog. What’s transpired since then is a long and varied tale, but in many ways centers around the very question in that post:

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

For me, the answer to Mary Oliver’s venerable question can be distilled to: Don’t settle, do what you love. It’s one of the true engines that powers people’s lives and the economies and world we live in.

This blog is going to tell a story. It’s going to take a few years because, as it turns out, it’s a story that’s never been written before. It’s the story of how 100 million people sought out and did what they loved.

Here’s where the story starts. There are three parts that you need to know.

First, who? There is a tremendous force arriving on the scene, and at just about the right time. It’s the sheer creative force of people coming into their own. Maybe they’re 24, or maybe they’re 19. Maybe they’re your friend, your brother or daughter. Or maybe it’s you. This great wave of individuals goes by many names (Millennials, Gen Y, Net Gens, you name it). The labels are not so important, it’s the individuals that are at the center of the story — who they are, and what they choose to do. This generation is going to re-shape the world as we know it. It’s already begun, and it’s fantastic.

Second, have you ever wondered why is it some people truly thrive in their work life, while others do not? This is the question we set out to answer as part of a research project at Harvard over three years ago. The pattern we found isn’t a lack of talent (there is tons) or opportunity (there are more types of jobs today than ever before). We found most people never discover what they truly want to do. Too many people settle. That’s a problem — not only is there great cost to the individual (”wow, my job really sucks”), but also to their companies, colleagues and the economy.

Consider the alternative. What if more people found a career path of genuine interest, however they define it? What if more people were able to find work that lit them up — how would their lives be different?

In our experience, these people excel, and not just economically. These people have more opportunities to grow and more ways to — dare we say it — be happy. They make better colleagues, managers, entrepreneurs, and probably neighbors too. Because they’re working from abundance, not scarcity, there’s an unmistakable productivity that’s unleashed.

As a result, we set about addressing the unmet need — helping people answer the question “What do I want to do?” –  which led us to develop Endeavor Prep, the career search prep course.

Lastly, why now? Most people (96% when we asked) want to find the right job for them, yet many (too many) people wake up at 30 or 50 and say “I guess this is what I do.” Figuring out what you want to do is a crucial rite of passage that, crucially, many people are missing. It’s not something to figure out in one hour, or even in one job. It’s an iterative process that you can learn. Because it’s iterative, tremendous gains accrue to those who start early. We want those gains to accrue to  you. In fact we want them to accrue to the entire generation.

Plain and simple: We want to see 100 million people thrive.

Though we’ve been at it for a while, we’re just getting started. And we can’t do it alone. I hope you’ll come along for the ride.