Daily Endeavor Blog

Scott Adams has a great post up, consistent with what we teach every day at Endeavor Prep and baked into the tools at Daily Endeavor:

You are what you learn. If all you know is how to be a gang member, that’s what you’ll be, at least until you learn something else. If you go to law school, you’ll see the world as a competition. If you study engineering, you’ll start to see the world as a complicated machine that needs tweaking. A person changes at a fundamental level as he or she merges with a particular field of knowledge. If you don’t like who you are, you have the option of learning until you become someone else. There’s almost nothing you can’t learn your way out of. Life is like a jail with an unlocked, heavy door. You’re free the minute you realize the door will open if you simply lean into it.

Since December you’ve been able to sign up on Daily Endeavor using your Linkedin account, but I’m excited to share a new feature that takes the integration even deeper — Related People I Know.

Now when you connect with Linkedin on Daily Endeavor you can see who in your network is into what you’re into. When you pull up a Daily Endeavor job profile, first and second degree contacts in your network instantly appear.

When would this be useful? To start, it’s a whole new way to browse your professional network. Now you can leaf through jobs you may be interested in, and the related people you know automatically display inside the job guide.

If you’re doing informational interviews, it just got a whole lot easier. Let’s say you have a dream job in mind — or any type of job you happen to want to learn about — but the hard part is compiling the list of who you could meet. All you need to do is lookup a Daily Endeavor job profile, and instantly find contacts, and friends of friends, who can tell you more about the job you’re eyeing.

This is just the first of many applications in pairing up the social graph with the job graph. We’re really excited to be continue creating more. If there’s ones you want to see, let us know!

By the way, to make this mashup goodness happen our team worked closely with the team at Linkedin, using both their Profile Widget and the hot-out-of-the-oven JSAPI. The developer relations and api teams are great. Thank you gals and guys!

Politicians in the US have begun the annual budget debate, and by extension chatter on the staggering national deficit. All of this of course is measured in economic terms — how many dollars the economy generates, are we spending more than we’re generating, how much we need to borrow to pay the bills, etc. Even though the US deficit is mind-bogglingly alarming, it’s not the biggest crisis we face. There’s another more fundamental deficit that holds every country, and every individual back — how much we learn every day while we’re alive.

In a TEDx talk about this time last year, I raised the idea of a curve that describes how much people are growing. Instead of GDP, it plotted daily individual growth. As a shorthand I defined growth as the percentage of waking hours where we’re learning, or more specifically, trying something new. The claim I made at the time, and still stand by, is that this curve is the best underlying predictor of almost everything we care about.

If you show me a buzzword someone wants to increase (income, skills, profit, relationships, domain expertise, scale, leveling up, innovation, national competitiveness…), this curve would be the best predictor of achieving it.

How would we build such a curve, and what would it look like? In lieu of actual data on the 300MM people in this country, I estimated the curve based on a few assumptions. On the X-axis is age. The Y-axis is percentage of waking hours we’re trying something new. My back of the napkin would look something like this:

In the earliest days and years, learning is off the charts. Everything is new, everything is interesting, we’re trying new things almost every second, as my son’s wiggling limbs can attest. As we enter formal schooling, it drops. This is in part due to the fact that we’ve thankfully learned some stuff (tie shoe? check), in part due to efficiencies of play and the inefficiencies of school, and in part due to introducing the notion of negligible-learning time (e.g. watching TV). The school years are still quite high as predominantly we learn to negotiate our social environment.

Notice the exit from the college years, based on my experience with advising tons of people during this transition, there’s a huge drop. At first, the new job brings trying a lot of new things, but it’s quickly replaced by autopilot. This is in part due to individuals’ acclimation (close the monthly accounting books? check), the low pace of new responsibilities or challenges, the inefficiencies of learning at most places of work, and overwhelmingly, staying in the same type of job and doing it the same way for years and years. There are a few upticks along the way for negotiating new social environments, parenting, new leisure activities (I wonder if I can paint that? I wonder if I can hack that together?). But given the amount of time we spend at work (8 to 12 hours/day), our work life is a huge influencer.

This curve isn’t an estimate for everyone. In fact I’d argue for all of the outliers, for everyone you know that’s crushing it, their curve looks different. But I suspect this curve may be the mode.

Why does it matter?

The area underneath the curve is responsible globally for generating what’s new and making sense of it. It’s where we find new ideas, novel approaches to problems, new words and new ways to participate in relationships. It’s where every scientific experiment is located. It’s even behind all of comedy. It’s where we’ll find all the human tinkering that’s going on globally.

When we’re not trying new things, we tend to keep not trying new things. Said differently, if we’re not growing, we’re stagnating.

My experience is that when people are experimenting on a daily and weekly basis, they’re more flexible and adaptive, they have more ways to respond to good and bad situations, they participate more and they’re more in the mix, so they tend to stumble across more opportunities, all of which leads to more opportunity for growth (GDP included).

I want to see this curve pushed up! If the area underneath the curve represents all individual growth globally right now, can you imagine what could be unleashed if it moved up, even a little bit?

Even without country-level data, each of us can estimate our own daily growth curve. How many hours are you awake every day on average? How many of those are spent on things that are so well known they’re on autopilot? How many are spent on trying something new, or trying the same thing in a different way?

Maybe percentage of time isn’t the way to go. It’s a handy constraint for estimating big blocks of time, like pitching a client in a slightly different way, but it’s not so great at picking up smaller moments, like looking the cashier in the eye the next time you buy something.

Maybe things are much better than this chart depicts. Maybe they’re much worse. Either way, I want to help push the curve up and here’s an estimate to work with.

What hiring managers use as your “resume” is changing. It’s becoming less backward-looking and more about the present. It’s not just where you’ve worked, it’s a deeper look into you. Very quickly, it’s becoming the conversations you’re in and what you have to say. If they can find you, the person considering you wants to know: what are you really into?

Why the Resume Exists

While most people think of resumes as something indispensable for job seekers, it’s in fact the hiring managers who initiated and have come to depend on them.

As originally conceived, the resume played a critical role for a hiring manager — a sorting mechanism for their time. The resume does not determine whether someone should be hired. The utility of a resume is as a filter. A resume answers whether a person should be considered — Is this person worth spending more time on?

The resume excels at being the quick look in the rear-view mirror. We all know it well — it’s a list of employment, usually full-time. Within that skeleton, there are three types of information that a hiring manager can use to sort people into worth-more-time or not.

• Area of work (subfield experience, functional expertise)
• Reputation of what you worked on (company, project)
• Results (numbers, measures)

In other words, resumes are a short-hand for the arc of a story. They answer in brief: What did you do? With who? How did it work out?

If you’re considering someone for a team, and you know nothing about them yet, it’s easy to see the utility of a resume. It provides an initial reference point for comparison. It can start to give a sense of patterns over time. It can begin to answer the amount of growth required of the person in order for them to thrive in the new role.

What Hiring Managers Really Want to Know

Hiring managers face two hard problems that resumes can’t wholly solve:

1. they need to discover talent, and
2. they need to distinguish between them once they’ve found them.

Since they’ve been around, resumes have always been necessary but not sufficient on both counts.

Besides the most well-known complaints (easy to spoof, keywords are grossly inadequate, they’re free to replicate so thousands can show up for an open job), resumes have always had structural limitations in the questions they can quickly answer. After getting a historical baseline, hiring managers have filled the gaps in other (time-intensive) ways, usually through interviews and references.

So if you were going to make a hiring manager’s job easier for them, let’s figure out: what else do they want to know? (Or better, put yourself in their shoes — what else would you want to know if you’re considering someone to join your team?)

Even more helpful than the potential hire’s full-time role 3 or 10 years ago, when distinguishing candidates TODAY it’s immensely helpful to know what they’re really into right now. Where someone is investing their attention now is the best proxy for what truly motivates them, and as a result, a more distinctive predictor of whether they might thrive in the specific role at hand.

Think: what is this person so into that they’d talk about it even if they weren’t getting paid? What’s something either they’re learning quickly or teach a lot about? Hiring managers are looking for a fast and reliable way to gauge a candidate’s intrinsic motivation.

Current genuine interest is not the only input for a hiring decision, but it’s a huge one. Current genuine interest fuels a person’s willingness to expend the real effort required to grow and get the hard work done. It also helps signal what else — people and insights — they can bring to the table.

Beyond the historical list that a resume provides, hiring managers want to know:

• What are you genuinely interested in?
• What have you learned about it lately?
• Who are you learning from (and who’s learning from you)?
• How fast do you learn? Is it superficial or is there clear-thinking that’s leading to a point of view?

The hiring manager faces the needle in the haystack problem — and if you want to be readily hired, part of your job is to help them solve it. They’re trying to find a very specific person for a very specific role. Put another way, once they find you, the person considering you for a job is trying to discover if what you’re really into is what they really need.

As a job seeker, your job is to help make your answers to these questions as easily discoverable as possible. Your resume, built for a different purpose in a different era, isn’t going to get you there. Here’s what will: showcasing what you know, a few sentences at a time, around a very specific job (i.e. in a way that makes it easy for hiring managers to find you).

Remember, hiring managers are awash in a sea of resumes. They’re trying to separate the wheat from the chaff — they want to discover the few bits you’ve said online that are relevant to their open role without wading through the noise of all the other conversations you’re in. They want to quickly see who’s sharp at being an analyst in management consulting or doing curriculum development for new teacher development.

This is by the way precisely how Daily Endeavor and our partners can help you. At Daily Endeavor you can showcase what you know.

The main question for you: what have you done recently to make your interests and insights discoverable for hiring managers with a very specific job in mind?

PSFK held a salon this week on happiness over at the Soho House. In 11 Insights About Happiness they recap the conversation. Here are a few:

Moving from scarcity to abundance really does lead to different behavior:

Wanting to become happier is not a selfish pursuit. Happier individuals are more likely to go out of their way to aid and support others.

You’re quarterbacking:

Creating opportunities to be happier is important; people shape these environments and conditions on their own terms.

Context matters:

Self-tracking is more easily adapted and effective when it’s focused on an event or goal (i.e. marathon, a race).

…or discovering what you want from your work life.

Every job, every project sheds some light on what you may want more of (or less of). We track our weekly meetings, our calories, our reps, but how many are tracking what they really want from the immense portion of our lives dedicated to work? It’s hard to manage what’s not being measured.

By the way, if you’re looking to set goals (find a new job! quit smoking!) and get people in your life involved, there are two great sites with different approaches (and phenomenal founders) that are worth checking out: Health Rally and Social Workout.

• 30 Places We Want to Work by @GOOD — Their criteria alone are worth checking out, if they’re either a strong fit or anti-fit for you, you’re making progress. (GOOD Magazine)

• The Eight-Word Mission Statement by Eric Hellweg — Distilling down to the core helps produce real focus, in this case: “verb, target, outcome.” (Harvard Business Review)

• Serendipity Finds You by Paul Buchheit — Don’t let “other plans” and “ego-fear” blind you to opportunity knocking. (Paul’s blog)

• 10 Types of Crappy Interviewees by Matthew Inman — Common traps to avoid, including not being ready to say what you want to do next. (The Oatmeal)

In an interview with New Work City, Kaomi Goetz at WNYC makes the case this morning that “co-working” offers community to solo workers. I’d like to take the case even further. Coworking can be a literal life preserver, not just for entrepreneurs or freelance contractors, but also anyone actively conducting a job search.

As Dan Gilbert points out on This Emotional Life, one of the root requirements for happiness is connection with other people. We are not a solo species. And yet one of the dark spots shared by starting a company, working freelance and navigating a professional transition is the swift and surgical removal of a daily flow of social interaction.

Coworking offers an alternative to the social starvation. Like the barcamp movement, coworking recognizes that the expertise you seek is sometimes in the room around you. Coworking spaces allow individuals pursuing their own path to also fill their work life with people.

Free Agent Nation

Over 10 years ago, Daniel Pink wrote a seminal piece in Fast Company that chronicled more and more people beginning to work on their own terms and schedule. The widespread web enabled this shift to start to occur.

By the early 00′s, lightweight, inexpensive tools and web services (e.g. weblogs, wikis, skype) started to kick in to make working remotely even easier. Bootstrapping new companies began finding the best people wherever they lived and happily funded bandwidth instead of office space. For years at Socialtext well over 70% of the company, including myself, lived thousands of miles away from our High Street home in Palo Alto.

With the rise in remote working came the rise of solitude. When Brad Neuberg, Chris Messina and Tara Hunt began promoting coworking a few years back, they gave voice, and a beginning antidote, to working alone. Check out the video for more backstory.

Job Search is Social

One of the most difficult parts of making a professional transition is keeping your social game fresh. Conversation is at the heart of any job and any job search. When you’re working, there’s a constant stream of conversations every day. When you’re in between jobs, the stream can become a trickle.

Consider becoming a member at a coworking space to keep yourself out of the social cave. Most have lite plans where you can go once per week or a few hours per month. The routine of getting up, going to the office and working at a desk can help the search feel more like an explicit project you’re undertaking (which it is). Given how most opportunities come from other people’s networks, you’re likely to meet new people that can help, if not directly meet people who are hiring.

Most importantly, working somewhere consistently, even if on a limited basis, will give you the opportunity to have real conversations with people. This is the most valuable experience of all to keep active.

As Peter Chislett, Deputy Mayor of New Work City says, “it’s not the space, it’s the community. It’s the connection with other people.” I believe it.

Coworking resources

For other coworking spaces, check out:

• Coworking for a global listing

• New Work City

• HubSF

• Hub Berkeley

• The Network Hub in Vancouver

• Centre for Social Innovation in Toronto

• Affinity Lab in DC

• Conjunctured in Austin

• C3/Cambridge Coworking Center

Some people crave routine, others feel suffocated by it. Different periods in life demand different routines. I can remember the feeling in college when I finally nailed the routine that allowed me to get everything done I wanted to and at the same time enjoy life. Once in stride, it feels great. Foraging however during a transition to a new schedule can be frustrating. I’m still in one of those transition periods now.

Christine Huang over at PSFK pointed me to Daily Routines, an archeological dig of how artists and others construct their days. While these are anecdotal for but one period of life for some of these folks, they’re an interesting read nonetheless. At the time, Toni Morrison preferred early mornings for prime thinking time because she wasn’t on Mom duty yet. Franz Kafka was all about the night.

A few to check out:

• Thomas Friedman

• George W. Bush

• Joseph Campbell

• Charles Darwin

• Toni Morrison

• Franz Kafka

• John Grisham

• Ernest Hemingway