The twenty year career with one company is largely an artifact of an another age. Successful career management requires an entrepreneurial mindset and there are four disciplines that we should follow:
- Organized abandonment — whatever isn’t working, needs to go. We need a type of self-awareness that wasn’t necessary or even available decades ago.
- Systematic improvement — skills can level off or even decline and raw talent isn’t enough. If we’re not consistently putting in the work to identify our weaknesses and grow our game then we’re placing our fate in someone else’s hands.
- Continuous exploitation — if we’re putting in the work to raise our skill levels then we need to find new challenges (projects, transfers, job changes, etc.) to match our skill proficiency.
- Systematic innovation — there are always opportunities to innovate, no matter what our jobs may be. Either we’re working towards creating a different tomorrow or we’re waiting to become obsolete.