1.) Find Purpose
Defining your purpose prioritizes why you exist above what you do. As Simon Sinek defines it, purpose is “why you get out of bed.” Knowing your purpose ensures that what you do stays in perspective of who you are. Finally, if you are passionate about something to the point where you’d do it for free, you're headed in the right direction.
2.) Know yourself
Knowing yourself ensures that you maintain your health in the context of your work and your environment. Understanding your emotions, triggers, and staying present in the moment is key. Of course, that is easier said than done. We all have moments where our emotions get the better of us. However, we can recognize those moments and work to understand them and ourselves in them.
3.) Build Community
While each person is unique, we are all distictly human. Human Psychology is the basis for understanding others relationships to you and to each other. Spend time building a sense of community. Get to know your coworkers and invest in their well-being. That will ensure that conflicts remain external to the team.
4.) Systemic Duality
Humans are becoming increasingly interconnected. On one hand, the facts are staggering: there are 4.3 billion people worldwide, corporations exist in multiple countries with populations in the millions. On the other hand, how we relate to each other is still human. It is personal. We are social creatures and rely on personal relationships for work. As Jim Collins puts it,, “It is not one OR the other; it's one AND the other.” Another way to think about this is through the research of Yuval Noah Harari. Humans work in both hierarchical AND networked environments.
5.) Work for Satisfaction
Aristotle once said, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” This principle relates to purpose and duality of work. If you habitually work for satisfaction, then your work quality will demand a high market rate. In other words, social status follows work satisfaction, not the other way around.
6.) Show Your Worth
Let’s talk about currency for a second. And let’s distinguish between money and currency. I’m speaking of political, social, and performance based currency. All three determine your worth and ability to ascend in any organization. Political currency is the relationship capitol you build with peers and coworkers. Carla Harris defines it as “the currency that is generated by the investments that you make in the people in your environment.” Social currency refers to all the certifications, awards, and credentials you bring to the table. It’s the institutional investments you've made that yield better information and influence. And of course, performance based currency is earned in your sustained ability to perform; to do what people ask of you and a little more. It is sustained performance and reliability in your work.
7.) Know Your Environment
This principle is all about giving context to the work you do. We are all products of our environments and our beliefs. Stephen Covey speaks about “seeking to understand” as one of his 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. It is the idea that there is always learning and greater levels of context to everything we do. Spend time in that.
8.) Change is the Only Constant
Cosmically speaking, we are tiny. Incredibly tiny. We are on a small blue rock rotating around a much larger fire rock propelling through space and time. That might be a scary thought for some of you. You can’t control where you are going or what's gonna happen next. On the other hand, it’s OK. We’re all in this together. Anticipate that tomorrow will be profoundly different than today. Celebrate the change. It'll only happen once.
9.) Fail and learn and fail and learn
I love seeing the posts that celebrate failure. Not that failure is something to shoot for, but that it is a part of learning. We fail and we learn. Rinse and repeat. Find a good rhythm for failure and find the rhythm for learning from your failures. That is how you grow.