General approach to evaluating and building a professional career

John Felipe Branch, • entrepreneurship
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As someone who has tried and is performing various activities, I still need a general approach to evaluating and building my professional career. I ended up with a very inspirational essay “Managing oneself” written by Peter Drucker.

Some key learnings: understand yourself, build on your strengths, plan to stretch and achieve, work in a team, consider your collaborators strengths and accept their own ways, communicate.

  1. Understand how you learn: by listening? by reading? speaking? writing? Leverage your best learning method. 🔉 📗 🗣 📝
  2. Strengths produce results. Build performance on your strengths, and not on your weaknesses. Analyse your strengths, a challenging matter indeed, to get to know them you have to do an own assessment over time. Write down your decisions - actions and evaluate the results. 💪📊
  3. Accept the feeling of not knowing where you belong, natural at the beginning of any career. Some questions to help you find that sweet spot, ask yourself: what are my strengths, how do I perform, and what are my values?
  4. Plan your path, create plans in an 18-month framework, with several goals to achieve, some to stretch but keep within reach (if they are unreasonable and unattainable, they will only lead to burnout).
  5. Understand the importance of relationships with others: accept that other people are as much individuals as you are, know their strengths, their performance modes, everyone has the right to work their own ways, know the values of your collaborators. 🤝
  6. Communication, knowing what other people do, how they do their work, where is their focus of contribution and what are the results expected, this helps to avoid much friction and conflicts. 👥
  7. Trust, as understanding each other rather than liking each other.
  8. Continuous improvement: as Drucker says, "Go to work on acquiring the skills and knowledge you need to fully realize your strengths."
  9. Develop a parallel interest: consider building a second career or interest as a safeguard against potential setbacks in your primary field.

Remember, success is self-defined. Build your own version of success, not just to impress others. Act on your knowledge!