How to Get Ahead -- Part 1 of 5
Build a career system that helps you find focus
We are now starting a new book, How to Get Ahead: A Proven 6-Step System to Unleash Your Personal Brand and Build a World-Class Network So Opportunities Come to You.
Wow, that subtitle is quite a mouthful! But let me tell you something. The author of this book, Zak Slayback, is someone I have really grown to admire since we first met about 6 years or so ago. He is smart and doesn’t waste time.
I mean — the guy was so smart he was able to attend an Ivy League university — but after being there for about two years decided not to waste much more time. He dropped out. And he applied some of the principles he is offering to us, to his own life — and worked consistently at getting ahead.
In his previous role with Praxis and is current role as a venture capitalist with the 1517 Fund, Zak has been in the mix of many high-level entrepreneurs, including people like Peter Thiel and Michael Gibson. He is also grounded in so many other ways. He’s the perfect person for us to take career advice from and I’m so honored he joined the Fearless Journeys community as a Featured Innovator.
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Now to the book. By this point, you should have read the Introduction and Chapter 1. This will get you roughly about 47 pages into the book. You’ll notice the design of this book makes it easy to read. I find myself flying through each page pretty quick. But the other unique thing about this book — it provides moments to pause, reflect, write, and strategize. Each chapter ends with Action Items because this book was designed with the intention to be APPLIED!
From the action items in Chapter 1 alone, I wrote four pages of notes and reflections in my personal habit journal to apply some of the reflective goal-setting exercises Zak asks us to do as we are reading. This is really a must! And it made me really go after it right away. A perfect way to begin a new year.
Zak also tells us up front he thinks most books on careers, networking and “personal branding” SUCK. The advice tends to come from two types of people: “box checkers” and “hacks.” The box-checkers tell you the “right” credentials and how to land the “right” internships. The hacks teach great tricks and shortcuts for doing a few specific tasks in your career. While hacks can sometimes be entertaining, Zak says “they rarely provide a system for succeeding in your career.”
Ahh! A system. Once again the wisdom that we read about in Atomic Habits by James Clear seems to perk its head up again. Remember Clear’s consistent advice: don’t focus on goals, focus on systems instead. Zak is focused on systems. Zak can be trusted to lead us.
“You don’t need somebody telling you to check these boxes or take these classes and rewrite your resume to land your dream career opportunities,” says Zak. “You need a career system that helps you find your focus at work, that lets you learn from masters, and that brings opportunities to you.”
Here’s the honest truth:
Most hires happen based on referrals
Most sales close from relationships
Most amazing opportunities happen because somebody thought of you.
Zak’s advice: You don’t want to know everybody. You want to know the right people.
“A personal brand is a tool. It’s a tool that brings opportunities to you by signaling what you’re good at and why people should work with you.”
This book teaches how to build a personal brand based on your professional goals. Zak is going to help us do the following:
Find your focus and set professional goals to build toward.
Learn how to approach experts and land mentors your admire.
Demolish barriers to your productivity.
Craft, position, and unleash a personal brand that you’re proud of online and in the real world.
Land a world-class network of people who can vouch for you and help you get ahead.
Know exactly which opportunities to ignore and which to purse.
The system comes down to: FOCUS-LEARN-EXECUTE-SIGNAL-CONNECT-CLOSE and “like any machine, your Opportunity Machine works so long as you set it up and do regular maintenance.”
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Chapter 1 is intended to give us FOCUS.
Zak tells us that most goal-setting exercises make two mistakes:
They aren’t helpful at setting meaningful goals.
They don’t provide an actionable path toward the achievement of these goals.
Meaningful goals should not only motivate you but should be a reflection of your deeper desires of what you do and do not want. Goals are useless if you can’t develop a path to achieving them.
Zak also tells us that “When pressed to set goals, most people focus on what they’re expected to want. This is called mimetic desire.” In other words, “you wanted it because other people wanted it, and they want it because other people want it. Everybody imitates everybody else.”
To take this point further: “Everybody does what everybody expects everyone else to do. Instead, identify what you do and do not want out of your career and move toward that.”
Zak says that effective goal setting should do two things:
Force you to think about the “why” behind your goals (Hello, Simon Sinek!)
Build a clear path to help you get there.
And to help us get there, Zak gives us a path through Ambition Mapping, which uses sentence completion exercises to help you get a better idea of what your specific goals should be. In addition, he introduces Backward Induction which is the process of thinking backward in time and a common tool in philosophical analysis.
The first step is to determine what you do NOT want — what he terms “Via Negativa.” And this is where I pulled out my journal to finish some of the sentence completion exercises that Zak wants us to complete. They include completing these sentences:
I feel miserable when I…
I dread…
I’m good at but don’t really enjoy…
I can’t imagine doing … for the rest of my life.
I don’t understand why anybody would…
One thing that doesn’t appeal to me at all is…
Zak also says that after filling these sentences out to write whatever comes to your mind as soon as you finish the stem and that you should write them with the intention that nobody should see them. This is about being honest with YOURSELF. If you think someone else might read them, you probably won’t be as honest because you’ll be thinking about what you think other people will think.
The next step is to determine what you DO want — what he terms “Via Positiva.” And here are the sentence stems to complete for this next activity:
I feel the time pass quickly when I…
I feel most fulfilled when I…
I look up to people who…
One of the things I’ve been interested in for a long time is…
I don’t want to miss out on…
Even if it challenging, I enjoy…
Finally, Zak tells us to refine our career goals with optimism by also providing a timeline and making sure it is achievable.
In conclusion, your specific goals should be measurable, ambitious, reasonable and time-bound. This creates a memorable acronym: SMART.
Ambitous and reasonable are not in conflict. Zak says that “ambitious goals happen on a faster timeline than you likely think they can. Or they have larger payoffs.” And, “reasonable goals are actually achievable based on where you are now.”
Set high expectations for yourself but make sure they are achievable! To do this, start with the end goal and work backward to create the most reasonable timeline. In this process of backward induction, “you go from actions you have to take in a few week, months, or years to actions you have to take in a few days, hours, or even minutes.”
So you go back to your SMART goals you’ve put together from the previous Ambition Mapping exercise. Then, go through these steps and fill them in accordingly:
In order to [insert goal here], first I must…
In order to [insert answer to previous question here], first I must…
Repeat this process until you get to an action you can take RIGHT NOW.
Each of these answers will become your Ambition Map Milestones.
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And that brings us to the end of Chapter 1. There are some real actionable steps you can take from this chapter that will be applicable to your life and career RIGHT NOW. Please take the time to do it as you finish each section of this chapter. It will be the foundation from which we’ll build over the next month.
By this time next week, you should complete Chapter 2 and 3 which are focused on how to best “Learn” and “Execute.” This will be about 49 pages of reading, getting us through page 97! You are on your way to building a career system. Go get it.