Mindshift is designed to help boost your career and life in today’s fast-paced learning environment. Whatever your age or stage, Mindshift teaches you essentials such as how to get the most out of online learning and MOOCs, how to seek out and work with mentors, the secrets to avoiding career ruts (and catastrophes) and general ruts in life, and insights such as the value of selective ignorance over general competence. We’ll provide practical insights from science about how to learn and change effectively even in maturity, and we’ll build on what you already know to take your life’s learning in fantastic new directions. This course is designed to show you how to look at what you’re learning, and your place in what’s unfolding in the society around you, so you can be what you want to be, given the real world constraints that life puts on us all. You’ll see that by using certain mental tools and insights, you can learn and do more—far more—than you might have ever dreamed!
This course can be taken independent of, concurrent with, or subsequent to, its companion course, Learning How to Learn. (Mindshift is more career focused, and Learning How to Learn is more learning focused.)
From the lesson
Learning and Careers
This week, we’ll be talking about how your own career can develop and change through your life. Your own internal feelings about what you want to do can play a critical role in your long-term happiness. But society and culture can also have a dramatic effect on your career choices and decisions—as can your parents, family, and friends. We’ll talk about second-skilling yourself, and developing a talent stack of average talents that can combine into a formidable asset. We’ll also talk about various tactics and techniques to help you survive career changes and upheavals. Welcome and enjoy!
Ramón y Cajal Distinguished Scholar of Global Digital Learning, McMaster University Professor of Engineering, Industrial & Systems Engineering, Oakland University
Dr. Terrence Sejnowski
Francis Crick Professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies Computational Neurobiology Laboratory
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Most people think about their career development as taking the form of
a sort of a T.
So you have your arms out, and the T going down.
In other words, you have one heavy-duty skill, that's the downward part of the T,
and you complement it by taking some superficial knowledge of other things.
That's the initial approach I took to my career.
I learned Russian, and also learned a smattering of other skills,
like how to type, how to drive [SOUND] a truck.
The challenge of course, is that I found myself without too many opportunities.
But there's another way to think about careers.
That's the pi approach,
which is promoted by Patrick Tay, an elected member of Singapore's Parliament.
Notice that this career approach has sort of two legs,
gives you more balance, right?
And you have one main skill, say accounting, but you also
want to supplement that with knowledge in another area, say counselling.
The second area may be directly related or it may be quite different from the first.
If time and money are tight,
you should try to build your second skill out of what you're already familiar with.
When I went to look at second skilling myself,
I took a clue from what I'd witnessed in the military.
Having at least some technical competence in your skills toolkit
often means you have more opportunities.
So that was a big push for
me towards getting a second set of skills in engineering.
Even though I didn't think I had any passion or talent for engineering.
To my surprise, when I began getting better at my engineering studies,
I began to realize I liked engineering and I found something more.
My previous background as a linguist actually
enhanced my studies of engineering and my ability as engineer.
I'd learned about chunking and interleaving and deliberate practice.
In other words, I'd learned how to learn.
I thought more creatively about my engineering studies
because of my passion for language.
There are many examples of people becoming successful at their passion
only because they stopped focusing directly and solely on that passion,
and instead began incorporating real world considerations.
For example, writer Scott Turow initially had trouble making it as an author.
So he took a step sideways instead to attend law school.
The real world expertise he acquired as
a lawyer gave his fiction extraordinary power.
His books have since sold more than 30 million copies around the world.
As you know, my hero in science is the father of modern neuroscience,
Santiago Ramon y Cajal.
Cajal's father was a doctor who pushed his son hard towards becoming a doctor,
but Cajal himself wanted to be an artist.
Here it was, Spain in the 1860s, and
the arguments between a parent and child were the same as they are today.
Cajal's father pointed out that it was almost impossible to make a living
as an artist but Cajal resisted strongly.
Until, that is, Cajal finally realized that the real world is important.
In fact, he was going nowhere fast.
Finally, he began turning his attention towards working to become a doctor.
It was very difficult for him.
He flunked some major examinations, but he kept trying.
However, he never forgot his passion for art.
In fact, he brought that artistic passion into his study of medicine
which ultimately played an important role in helping Cajal win the Nobel Prize.
So remember, you can bring a second skill into your work because of your passion,
or simply because it enhances or complements your first skill.
You may have to spend some parts of your life focusing on one thing in order to get
deep skilling in that area, but you don't have to give up on your passion.
In fact, your passion can greatly enhance your creative ability in your other skill.
In the end, it's never a good idea to just blindly follow your passion.
In fact, look at the real world and work to both follow and broaden your passions.