Let's go a little deeper in this video. I have three more points that I want to make. Number 1 on getting a job, and I got an interesting life hack for you on that, on passion for work, and then on what is needed to really, really love your job. Together all of that will give you a bundle of ideas on how to find and love the job you've got. I have a great hack to help you get a job where you're taking the initiative to find something you can really feel great at doing. When you're looking for a job don't just answer job posts on where on indeed or monster or other independent job boards or even internal corporate job boards. But do your own search, take control of it. Don't wait for job opportunities to come to you, go out and seek them yourself, even potentially generate them yourself. How? Well, if there's a company you want to work for or you know what type of job you're seeking, I don't know legal job, accounting jobs, sales job, tech job, consumer service, customer service job, whatever it happens to be, find the most senior person in that company that you are potentially interested in and call them. That's right. Not email them, actually call them. You're going to want to carefully prep your script and it'd be a little scary the first time you did it. Prep your script and what you're going to say, who you are, what you can do for that person's group that you're calling, specifically how you can help them solve a problem that they have or capitalize on an opportunity that they have and why you have the skills, the motivation and the energy needed to do so. Needless to say, it is a very forward approach to job hunting, and you're going to need to display an appropriate level of humility to balance a tremendous confidence it takes to do this in the first place. But you can do it, it's a different way of thinking. It's a way of you trying to take charge of the entire process and not just being a taker of opportunities that might come to you. When you do this, several things happen. First, rather than be the recipient of potential interests from a recruiter or a company, you can be more strategic by focusing on the types of companies you feel could be right for you. Don't just be a price taker or opportunity taker. Second, it sends a signal on initiative, doesn't it? I mean, who doesn't want someone who has the confidence, the initiative, the direction to be part of whatever it is they're creating. Third, while the recruiters will reach out to you via LinkedIn, adding this pathway to finding a great job not only has the potential to increase your options, but it also will help make you feel empowered. It turns out that after your initiative does lead to a job offer, you're going to gain an added benefit of having found a company where they value people who go out of their way, who value people that go for what they want. This is very consistent with how super boss leaders treat people on their teams. I call that in Course 3, unleashing the creativity of the people around you. Walking into a job where you already count for more than just another hire is a big plus. As we'll see soon enough, it can lead to happiness at work by having a greater opportunity to make an impact on the job. Second, the question of passion. How often have you heard the advice that you should just follow your passion? When you're in your early 20s, even when you're in your 30s, how could you possibly know what will fulfill you as a career? What life experiences have you had at that point to show you the way, some people have it, many don't, most don't. It's usually not that passion leads to the choice of work. It's actually that the work you do leads to passion or it doesn't. It's by doing something that you really can know if it's for you. That means it makes sense to try to maximize your experiences as quickly as you can, so you can amass all those data points upon which to assess what you want to do. Then you need to recognize that no matter what you do, most people should expect three to five different careers or at least tours of duty, if you will, in their life of work. That requires open-mindedness, it requires flexibility in thinking, networking skills to be sure, and a strategic point of view. Meaning some career tracks become less interesting because of you. Other times, some career tracks don't work out because changes have happened, circumstances have changed and it's not the same as when you started. I mean, this can happen the same way that industry shifts happen. Not every type of job has constant career opportunities over time. In fact, probably few do. As I elaborated on in the first video in this module, just like value can migrate from your company, so too could value migrate away from your career. Being alert to this and proactive to make sure you're not the proverbial last one to get out is very important. Today it's not unusual for people to be working a main job and a side hustle. The side hustle can be fun. It can make you more money. It can make a difference for other people. It can serve as a hedge for changes in your main job and of course, it could be a learning opportunity independent of your main job. Have a great example, the Jikaria sisters. I have a podcast where I interviewed these three young women the Jikaria sisters, each really talented. One is actually one of my former students in MBA. Another one was in law school, another one was an engineer so pretty mainstream professional careers but they had a side gig. Their side gig was because they had grown up dancing, especially doing South Asian dancing Bollywood and things like this. They started doing it for fun and starting recording these Tiktok videos and next thing you know, they're going viral and they become brand ambassadors for different companies. That becomes their side hustle. It seems like an attractive way to lower the risk associated with your main job, gives you more autonomy, gives you more power in the process. You become less dependent on your main employer because you've got another options that's real, that's even proven, which is greatly empowering even if you never leave your main job and if it takes off, it could be an even bigger opportunity for you. I'm a big fan of side hustle, side gigs especially when you're young when you got a lot of time and you want to use that. Better to develop deep capabilities in something of value that the market is willing to pay for financially or by giving you a chance to make the difference you want. Think about capabilities that are leverageable. Uniqueness doesn't hurt either and the other criteria for the value of a core competence. Mastery in this way will bring passion which gets me to the third point, why people really love their work. Path-breaking research by the psychologists Edward Deci, along with Richard Ryan and popularized by Dan Pink in his book Drive and actually Cal Newport is written about this in various ways including in his Study Hacks Blog. It boils down the question we all want to know, what do we need to do to love our work? It turns out there are four key elements. Number 1, autonomy, what does that mean? Freedom to call the shots. Do not be told what to do all the time just set your own hours even to choose the projects you want to work on. How do companies create autonomy for people? You might be able to use some of your work-time to work on private projects. That's the 10 percent rule that Google did. You can decide when and how much vacation time you actually get, that's a big thing in tech. Netflix was one of the first major companies to start that. My daughter, Erica, when she started a new job in tech that was one of the benefits. Doesn't mean you could always take vacation because you're not going to keep your job very long, but you have the freedom to decide if you need an extra day here and an extra day there, as long as your performance is at a high level, which is all that counts. The option to work from home or dress how you want to dress for work at home or if you have to go into the office or want to go in the office, the more freedom, the more flexibility you have, the more autonomy you have. I have to say doing what I do for a living, I got a lot of autonomy as a professor and it's one of the things that's made me absolutely love my job for a very long time. Not just autonomy but mastery, which means being really good at something that is useful and that other people care about and especially that you care about something that you want to keep getting better at. This is someone who seeks to improve at whatever they do not because someone tells them to do it, or because they're being rewarded for it, but because they intrinsically want to get better, that's what mastery is all about. Three is impact. What you do makes a difference in the world in some way. When the work you do in any way at all actually makes a difference for others, helps other people, that degree of impact makes people love their jobs even more. Others care about what you're doing because it's positive for them or for society. This has a lot to do with meaning and purpose, a theme we're going to return to in Module 4 of this course as well. Then finally, in addition to autonomy, mastery, and impact there is connection and that's having a job where you care about the people you work with or your customers or both, or anyone that you interact with and that they actually care about you. My final point on how to get a job you love is to evaluate it along these four dimensions of autonomy, mastery, impact, and connection. You don't need all of them all the time but in general, more is better. Each of us is different and may value one over the other, that's fine. We have different thresholds or minimal levels that we need or we want for each of these. Keep that in mind too. The next application exercise gives you a chance to apply this to yourself.
