The Simple Dollar (14 page)

My father’s loyalty to the company was bought with a long series of promises. Today, though, we see countless examples of how such loyalty to an organization often falls through in the long run.

Where is my father’s loyalty now? It still lives on in an altered form: his friends. Many of the long-term friendships he built in the workplace are still thriving. These workplace friends visit him often, and he’s often engaged in any number of activities with them.

In the end, his loyalty wasn’t to some monolithic organization that was supposed to take care of him. His loyalty is to the people around him, the ones who actually came through on that promise.

Today, we all face a similar question. As we can clearly see, loyalty to a business that’s likely to downsize us at the first sign of economic trouble isn’t an entity that can earn our trust. Yet being loyal to no one but ourselves is an empty bargain as well—when the chips are down, the man or woman who is only beholden to himself or herself has no one to help him or her.

The solution stares us in the face every single day: our coworkers and peers.

Organizations are transient. Once you leave, an organization no longer supports you or cares for you, nor do you support or care for it. What you do still care for, however, are the people that remain—the peers still in your field, the former boss who might write you a great recommendation down the road, the people who will still give you advice and perhaps toss some work your way in the future.

The same phenomenon holds true even within an organization. In the end, your true loyalty is best served if it’s directed toward your peers, particularly as we move more and more toward an information-and collaboration-based economy. It is your coworkers and your peers who have the power to make you successful—or ensure that you don’t succeed, either through negligence or through sabotage.

Quite often, loyalty toward your coworkers overlaps very nicely with efforts that help the company. If you work hard to support your coworkers in completing a great project, that project benefits the company. If you help your coworkers with the problems that they have, the solution to that problem benefits the organization.

Similarly, if you request help from peers in your field—or offer them help in the same way—it benefits the organization. You need to only look at the open source software movement, where companies employ people to write, share, and support software freely usable by everyone, for evidence of this phenomenon.

In this peer-based loyalty, you see the phenomenon of the community, discussed in
Chapter 5
, “Running to Stand Still,”
come back into clear focus. Your coworkers and professional peers are the community in which you conduct your professional business, and you’re best served by putting forth effort to improve that community.

What does that mean? Share your knowledge freely. Be helpful. Don’t gossip, and don’t spread negative information. Strive to build lots of value-based relationships with people in your workplace, as well as others in your field who work elsewhere. Participate in community forums, where people share information and resources that everyone can access. Pass along information and opportunities to appropriate peers.

If you don’t know where to find such resources, start your own. Initiate a new group on Facebook or LinkedIn where people can share comments, ideas, and resources as well as simply get to know each other.

As a personal finance and personal growth writer, I participate in a number of different forums where people engaged in the same area can share ideas and opportunities. I strive to help them when I can, offering advice and information and assistance whenever possible. I’ll advise new writers on ways to market their writing, provide guest articles to publishers who need them, and encourage group participation in writing and brainstorming projects.

At some point, I’ll need help as well and, thanks to my participation in this community, I’ll have all the professional help I need.

Such communities of peers don’t require an organization or a single common focus. They just require people
with overlapping interests who are genuinely interested in helping each other. Over time, such a group develops into a true community, supporting the people involved in a myriad of ways.

That’s where the new loyalties lie.

In the past, the value you can provide to others needed to be bullet points that could be neatly summarized on a resume.

As the world becomes more connected, however, the evaluation of new employees, contractors, or freelancers often goes far beyond a cover letter and a handful of slick bullet points. In the modern era, it’s often easy for a Human Relations person to get a good idea of the value of the person the company is hiring from a few timely Google searches. Does the person have a large network of connections on LinkedIn? Is the person an active and positive participant in Internet communities based around their profession? Is the person’s reputation positive enough that others link to what he or she says?

Along those same lines, when individuals look to form new startups or new divisions in a particular field, the first place they’ll go to look for strong candidates is within that very community.

To put it simply, the Internet has contributed greatly to the power of the community in terms of opening doors for people. It facilitates the growth of communities of professional peers—and makes them more
powerful and more deserving of loyalty—at the same time corporate destabilization is reducing the loyalty workers once felt for their organizations.

Another advantage of the growth of peer-based communities is that the gatekeeper for entry into such communities isn’t knowing someone powerful or having a particular degree from a particular university. Instead, entry into and respect within such communities comes much more from what you can offer to the community to make everyone better. Instead of being differentiated by who you know or what university you attended, peers are often differentiated by your contributions to the community.

So what can you contribute?

In an era where overwhelming amounts of information are available at everyone’s fingertips, there is substantial value in being able to sift through that information, extract what’s valuable, and synthesize it into something meaningful and new. Such synthesis is something that everyone finds valuable—it’s the reason that certain blogs and message boards can become incredibly popular and influential. It often doesn’t require expertise, just enough ability to synthesize an abundance of information into something compelling.

Thus, the first thing you can do to contribute to a community is to never stop learning and growing. Strive to constantly take on new challenges, absorb new information, try new things, and learn from your failures
and your successes. It is only through this filter of real-world learning and experience that you can begin to provide valuable answers and help to others.

Obviously, such growth is not only valuable to your peers, it’s also valuable to your potential clients and employers. When you share your knowledge and skills within your community, your reputation as someone who provides genuine value grows along with the positive social connections you’ve made. That’s the backbone of the new career.

Of course, the desire must be there to actually dig in and learn more about the field in which you’re involved. That’s where passion comes in.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel once said, “Nothing great in the world has ever been accomplished without passion.”
¹
Passion is something that can’t be taught or earned or bought. It’s something that comes from within. It’s the activity or enterprise that fills us with an endless desire to learn more, to try more, to experience more.

As information becomes more and more accessible and peer communities become more and more powerful, passion becomes a central part in who excels and who does not. It is the passionate person who will write up a detailed helpful response to someone at two in the morning. It is the passionate person who is constantly trying new things and looking for ways to improve
what’s already know. It is the passionate person who contributes to the resources of the community. Find what you’re passionate about. Get involved with the community around that passion. See where it takes you.

The third vital factor in determining who will contribute most powerfully to a community and rise to the top of a given field comes in the form of how they practice their skills.

In an article for
Fortune
, Geoffrey Colvin investigated the practice regimens of people who excel in specific fields and found that in almost every circumstance, deliberate practice was behind their success. Deliberate practice refers to practice with lots of repetition and very specific goals that strives to improve your ability in a very specific way. “For example: Simply hitting a bucket of balls is not deliberate practice, which is why most golfers don’t get better. Hitting an eight-iron 300 times with a goal of leaving the ball within 20 feet of the pin 80 percent of the time, continually observing results and making appropriate adjustments, and doing that for hours every day—that’s deliberate practice.”

This phenomenon holds true in almost every field. “In a study of 20-year-old violinists by Ericsson and colleagues, the best group (judged by conservatory teachers) averaged 10,000 hours of deliberate practice over their lives; the next-best averaged 7,500 hours; and the next, 5,000. It’s the same story in surgery, insurance sales, and virtually every sport. More deliberate practice
equals better performance. Tons of it equals great performance.”
²

Malcolm Gladwell, in his book
Outliers
, makes a similar case, arguing that individuals who practice obsessively within their field of interest are often the ones that rise to the top. Gladwell cites a study by K. Ander Ericsson in which students at Berlin’s Academy of Music are grouped according to their skill and then asked how much they practiced. In each distinct discipline, there was a direct correlation between practice time and ability level, with the most gifted students not excelling because of raw talent, but because of thousands of hours of practice beyond what their lower-skilled peers had applied. Gladwell points out a similar phenomena in other fields, including computer programming.
³

The point is not that you need to devote years of your life to mastering your specific craft, but that deliberate practice plays a huge role in setting you apart from the rest of your field. Setting aside time to practice the fundamental skills required in the area you’re passionate about makes it easier to excel in that area—and to share your excellence with others.

The fourth area of valuable contribution to a professional community—and to a career—is in the
development of transferable skills, mentioned earlier in
Chapter 3
, “A Visit from the Black Swan,” as tools to help individuals succeed in an ever more random world. Transferable skills, such as communication skills, information organization, time management, and creativity, are skills that apply effectively to almost any professional field of interest, leading not only to success among one’s peers but to countless professional opportunities. More importantly, these skills are often developed outside of a classroom environment; thus, mere possession of transferable skills often indicates an individual of value. Here are six specific transferable skills you may want to polish for professional success:

1. Leadership
   refers to the ability to inspire and motivate a group of people to work together toward some greater purpose. The best way to learn leadership skills is to learn them in the laboratory of life, and organizations provide the perfect opportunity. Join a community or student organization and take charge of a large project. Later, run for a leadership position within that group.
   
2. Administrative skills
   refers to the ability to prioritize tasks and to appropriately assign tasks to people. Administrative skills are often best learned by taking charge of the planning of a large project, either at work or through an organization that you might be a part of.
   
3. Information management
   refers to the ability to handle a large volume of information in a cohesive fashion. Aside from simply maintaining a detailed address book and calendar and keeping
   ahead of one’s emails, one great way to do this is to volunteer to create a presentation on a specific topic, as it will require you to research that topic (dredging up an abundance of information) and then distill that information down to a manageable size. You can also improve your information management skills by becoming the secretary or treasurer of a large group. Both positions require the careful management of lots of discrete pieces of information.
   
4. Creativity
   refers to your ability to generate solutions without specific guidelines. It’s easy to exercise your creative muscles—get involved in brainstorming sessions and play games that reward open-ended thinking.
   
5. Interpersonal communications
   refers to the ability to easily start or join in a conversation, as well as the ability to present ideas to others. You can practice interpersonal communication skills by actively participating in conversations and meetings (reminding yourself that, if you have an idea in mind but are hesitant to share it, half of the people in the room likely have a similar idea but don’t have the courage to speak up), volunteering for public-speaking opportunities, and taking on documentation projects.
   
6. Personal development
   refers to one’s ability to learn from one’s mistakes, to deal with stress, and to handle challenges. The best way to grow in this area is to simply step up to challenges before you. Relish major projects and tasks instead of
   fearing them. At the same time, keep a journal and reflect honestly in it about how you feel about the situations you’re in, the people around you, and what you can genuinely learn from them.