Desire for Mission is a Career Limiting Belief
An ideal job is one that pays well, that gives you a career path, and that allows you to make an impact on the world. But at the beginning of your career, or whenever you face onerous career constraints (e.g. you have to support your parents), dropping mission from your list of requirements is perfectly fine.
What you should rather focus on is the hard skills you acquire doing that job and the kind of growth possible within that industry, and within the skillset you're honing.
What about compensation? Well, it's the simplest to figure out. Picking a job that doesn't pay well has obvious consequences. You're either ok with a low salary or you are not, and if you aren't, there's not much you can do about it. But picking a job with limited growth opportunities is usually a terrible option.
When you're starting out, focus on a hard skill — preferably one that scales across industries. And pick an industry that allows you to work on and nurture that skill the best.
Rory Sutherland’s Marketing Secrets
Marketing is more about understanding the context and medium in which consumers make their decisions.
And when we speak of context, emotions are what usually drive our decision-making, not long-term thinking or logic.
Build a business, not an audience
"With feel-good platitudes and remixed content you’ll only attract fellow beginners. Everyone else recognizes the content immediately for what it is. Hence, the primary value of your much larger audience is that you’re able to sell them a “How to grow your Twitter following” Gumroad course for $47.
A high-quality audience is an endless source of opportunities. A low quality one is at most a Ponzi scheme.
Many people learn this the hard way. They get lured by the promise that they’ll be able to create content effortlessly and build an audience this way. This is exactly what beginners want to hear and hence what gurus are preaching. “Everything is a remix”. So just progressively summarize a bunch of books and then start sharing pieces you remixed from your summaries.
Students of these courses spent months recording videos and writing thousands of words only to discover that they never said anything meaningful."
Some food for thought
That's all for today, folks. We'll see you with another edition tomorrow. Till then, take care and enjoy this pre-Diwali festive fervour.
