JT1 | Fire These Four Engines To Launch A Rocketship Career

Hi there and welcome to JobTok, the show where we give you practical and honest insights to help you accelerate your career opportunities, improve your job prospects and become a more valuable professional. Whether you’re looking to improve your own career prospects or help develop your team, you’ll find a lot of honest, insightful, behind-the-scenes information on this show, kind of what you might expect from a pretty supportive mentor.

Thanks for joining this first episode. Today we walk through an overview of what it takes to build a solid foundation for career growth and success using a framework that we will use for our future discussions as well.

Discussion Topics: Fire These Four Engines to Launch a Rocketship Career

• There are four engines you need to fire up to accelerate your career or build a high-performing team.
• The first is to create a visible impact.
• The second is to build your knowledge and your networks.
• Just for fun: your job may not be the worst-paying in the world.
• Third – make others successful.
• Last, but not least, focus on the long term.
• As a bonus, I’d like to share with you a Japanese life-management framework that I found really insightful.
• In short, a successful career is one that balances all four of these elements.
• We are a new show, so please help share this episode with your friends and colleagues

Transcript: Fire These Four Engines to Launch a Rocketship Career

My name is Amit Ray and over a 20-year career, I’ve had the privilege of contributing to my employers in multiple roles while also enabling the careers of hundreds of talented people along the way. Thanks to this amazing variety of experiences and interactions, I’ve had pretty much thousands of opportunities to develop a deep understanding of what it takes to succeed in the corporate world. Through this show, I hope to share my learnings with you so you can shape your career according to your own aspirations.

Though this show is kinda conversational, from time to time I’ll share links to resources that might help you develop your career journey. You’ll find them linked in the episode description as well as on my website CrazyTok.

As an early or mid career professional, you may be wondering how to create impact, get noticed or otherwise accelerate your career. Or perhaps you are a manager wondering how to do the best for your people – and get the best out of them in return.

But it’s hard, because you can’t really show up in executive meeting rooms to see how you’re being evaluated behind the scenes by management or HR. And neither can you zoom out somehow to see how others might be handling their own career challenges and copy the best tactics. And maybe what you really want is unbiased, honest advice, like you’d get with a mentor or a very accessible role model.

Well then, you’re in the right place. In this show I share a lot of practical tips and advice as well as some quality research that you could incorporate into your career journey and people management strategy.

Since today is our first chat, I thought I’d lay out my four holistic Career Growth principles at a high level, like a teaser of sorts so you get a better sense of the kinds of topics we will cover on this show. Maybe this overview will also help you start to think through how these concepts might translate into your own career.

Stick around till the end so I can share with you a really exquisite way of evaluating work and life harmony that I find particularly insightful. Maybe you’ve seen it already but if not, I think it might be quite eye-opening.

1. Principle 1: Create Visible impact
2. Principle 2: Build Your Knowledge And Network
3. Principle 3: Make Others Successful
4. Principle 4: Focus on the long term

Principle 1: Create Visible impact

• Create value: This is all about the actual work you are doing and how you’re doing it. In this sphere come things like work ethic, reliability, improvements, your relationship with your manager etc.
• Showcasing your value: This is about how you present your work to others eg speaking up in discussions, making presentations, how you communicate, teaching and coaching others, and last but not least, how you take charge of your performance appraisal process.
• Building influence: This is all about building relationships with your peers, your manager, stakeholders, senior management, etc so you can get their support for your deliverables and build your ability to influence the organisation in your favour.
• Getting and taking opportunities: Here we talk about identifying new roles, keeping in touch with the job market, how to take advantage of organisational changes, and ways to build an impressive profile.

Principle 2: Build Your Knowledge And Network

• Skills: This is about your learning curve and how you improve your skills and capabilities. In this regard, we’d cover things like how to handle feedback, how to be continuously learning, how to collaborate better with others, how to find and engage with mentors, and how to seek out new experience.
• Network: Your professional network can spell the different between a rocketship career and just plodding along. Here we cover fund things like building an internal network of supporters and how they can translate over time into a network of champions across companies, industries and geographies.

Fun fact

BTW if you’re worried about being in a dead-end job, cheer up. It could be worse. According to a random and clearly very superficial analysis I found online, starting models earn less than cashiers and rock stars and stand-up comedians come in well under bell boys. So much for the passion economy. Even worse is the passion-inflaming economy. Cult leaders, exorcists and nuns never need to worry about taxes, earning exactly $0 for their services. But on the other end of the spectrum are another breed of tax-evaders. As a mafia don, you can expect to earn $50 million just in your freshman year, building up to a comfy retirement egg of about $1 billion saved over your lifetime. Better use some of that money to make offers they can’t refuse or you likely won’t live long enough to enjoy those saving.

Principle 3: Make Others Successful

And speaking of offers they can’t refuse, another area we will cover over many, many sessions is people management – hiring, delegation, understanding, trust and relationship building, feedback, training and development, workload management, mobility, engagement… wow, there’s a lot to talk about. Related to people, there’s the team–setting vision and direction, org structure, stakeholder management, resourcing and support, delegation, credit and recognition, communication, bonding, inter-personal conflict and relationships.

Principle 4: Focus on the long term

Finally, while we will spend a lot of time talking about career growth and acceleration, it’s all going to be for nothing if we don’t also ensure longevity and sustainability. From time to time, I will share my personal experiences with work-life balance and sustainability practices such as working out, sleep, diet, mental rejuvenation, social contact.

Last of all is the point that brings it all together. It’s something that I believe all of us encounter at some point in our careers. Why are we doing all this? What’s the point of it all? How do we chart a course so we can sooner rather than later follow our passion, give back to society, leave a legacy or just live a life of meaning and fulfilment. I don’t pretend to have the answers to these questions, but it is worth a few discussions on this topic as we move forward in our journey to career growth and fulfilment. Because ultimately, when we reach the end, it’s not the career milestones we will celebrate. It’s that we made a difference and lived a life worth living.

Ikigai: Key To Work-Life Balance

At the start of today’s episode, I promised you a way to evaluate how you integrate work and life into a state of harmony. Like so many other harmony-related frameworks, this is a Japanese concept called Ikigai. It’s about finding your purpose in life at the intersection of four critical elements – what you love doing, what you’re good at doing, what the world needs and what you can be paid for. I love this concept because it is so simple and yet so comprehensive. It perfectly marries passion with the cold reality of economics so you can build long-term career success and live a life of joy, not just as a mindless mercenary or a poverty-stricken passionate.

Summary: Fire These Four Engines to Launch a Rocketship Career

We’re almost at the end of today’s episode. In summary, in the coming weeks and months, we’ll be talking about how you can be more intentional about your career growth and develop into a polished and highly valued professional. We’ll give you unbiased, unfiltered tips and insights towards your work impact, your people impact, tools, and techniques to improve your skills and capabilities as well as principles for making work sustainable and enjoyable so you can enjoy a long, fulfilling career shaped to your own aspirations. I hope this first episode got you interested in learning more and hope you’ll subscribe to be notified about future episodes.

And oh yes, we are a new podcast and really need your help to spread the word. New episodes will drop every couple of weeks. Please tell a couple of your best friends or work colleagues to tune in. Getting ahead alone is so ’80s Wall Street. Bring them along for the ride. After all. success is best when savoured with friends, no?

As a reminder, our show notes and resources are linked in the episode description and on our website CrazyTok Media. We hope you find them useful

In our next episode, we’ll discuss the nature of modern careers and give you a mental model of how to think about your own path forward. Hint: it’s no longer a corporate ladder! Hope to see you next time

This was Amit Ray, with JobTok. Thanks for listening