_“It’s time to define a new era. Our faith has been shaken. We’ve lost confidence in our leaders and in our institutions. Our beliefs have been tested. We’ve discredited the notion that the Internet would change everything (and the stock market would buy us an exit strategy from the grind.) Our expectations have been dashed. We’ve abandoned the idea that work should be a 24-hour-a-day rush and that career should be a wild adventure. Yet we are still holding on.”


FastCompany, January 2003


If I hadn’t added the date to the above FastCompany quote you might have assumed that it was current. I had that reaction when I found it in my files last month. I wondered then if we were still defining a new era. Certainly our shaken faith and lost confidence hasn’t recovered nor has our lost IPO/stock option exit strategy. Work is still 24/7 for those that have it while many occupy their time in a 24/7 job search.  

Recently, careers viewed as wild adventures such as real estate and Wall Street have paled in retrospect. 
However, the Internet and the digital age have changed a lot of everything. The Huffington Post listed the 12 things that became obsolete that included telephone calls, classified ads, CDs, landline phones, encyclopedias, hand-written letters, phone calls, yellow pages and address books, wires, dial-up, film cameras and film, catalogs, and fax machines.  I would add that road maps, checkbooks, print books and broadcast television are soon to follow.


What is this new era? Though some may take issue, I would define it by loss of things once considered givens (stable employment and financial security), diminished expectations for the realization of career goals (declining job openings and the commoditization of us all), and a wrenching acceleration of economic, demographic and technological change.


So how exactly do we hold on?  Here are my suggestions:


Being Different
Apple’s corporate slogan a few years ago was “think different.” All bright, ambitious professionals I know in Silicon Valley have that one down cold as a survival skill. The challenge now is to “be different.”  Geoffrey Moore, author of Dealing with Darwin, commented that we are all commodities now and we need to differientiate to stand out and compete.

More professionals are chasing fewer business opportunities and job openings than there are offered and open. Personal branding is not just putting a cool marketing spin on your Linkedin profile and in your resume.

The core of differentiating oneself is to know and articulate our uniqueness. What is it that makes you different, special, and completely unique regardless of your position, level or expertise? We all have our own style and approach and way of being.  Further, matching up your uniqueness to the specific company where you would be the perfect fit is a far more effective effort than tossing resumes at job postings along with the multitude of others doing the same.

You really have no choice but to better market, brand and differentiate yourself in this marketplace.

Speaking Universally
Being able to effectively communicate across borders, cultures and generations is a career advantage, not just a lip-service acknowledgement to your high school French teacher or a helpful travel tool.  Making the effort to understand and be understood requires only an willingness and intention to melt barriers to connection and conversation. If we live in a social networking world then being able to speak to the heart and mind of the listener online and off is requisite. I can’t speak Sanskrit, but I do say “Namaste” and I understand the meaning.

The under age 30 generational cohort, Gen X, has entered the workforce. There are now 4 generations in the workplace: Boomers, Gen Y, Gen X and a few Silent Generation cohort members nearing retirement. Being able to understand the mindset and communicate across multiple generations is a core requirement to manage teams and groups for business success.  Adding in distributed and off-shore teams to this mix builds an obvious case for developing a fluency in speaking universally.


Coming up to speed with cultures and generations is ideally though hands on experience, but a good book to read is the seminal work by Strauss and Howe called, “Generations”.
 
Living Easily
Living easily not about work-life balance (good luck with that one), living simply, going green or scaling back financially. We have all worked too hard to want to scale back our lifestyles though many who have been downsized face that prospect. Ironically, we buy $5 magazines that guide us on simple living, or how replace decent vinyl flooring to go green with bamboo. Living easily is not what we do, though it may result in different actions and life choices, but, rather, how we approach our work and careers.

Living easily is about letting go of the tightly held reins of our lives, chilling our more and cutting some slack for ourselves and others.  It seems normal that we invest a lot of mental, emotional and psychic energy into our work and work relationships. Over time that builds a low level tension in us that is ultimately draining and exhausting. Externally, we are encouraged and rewarded to be invested in outcomes, bottom-lines, and deadlines but we don’t have own them internally.

Striving to reach goals is a process that can be invigorating, but being attached and deeply invested in the outcome is life-killing.  Serial entrepreneurs are frequent models of living easily as they love more the challenge of striving rather than the outcome. It is a programmed belief system to believe we can’t allow ourselves to live more easily.

Regardless of the expectations of others, we do not internally have to be at the affect of those expectations. 

Need-driven Journey
The founder and owner of the outdoor clothing retailer, Patagonia, said that the real question to ask now is not “what do I want?” but rather “what do I need?” This is not an argument for living simply or green, but, rather, to ask what is it that you truly need in your life? If the answer is what you have right now, well then, that’s wonderful. But if you would look and see a need, even the demand, from within you for some other direction than the path you are on now, then consider taking it.

In a consumption-driven society, we are programmed to believe that our wants somehow have preference in terms of desirability to needs. We tend to equate needs to basic on a physical level such as food, rest, shelter and most of us have that one down. On another level, a psychological level, needs or drivers are far more complex. Our needs are our deepest passions and emotional drivers. They are the stuff that all the marketing folks tap into to make us think that we want things. But those things we want never satiate our internal needs. Continually wanting, we have mostly tuned out our needs.

It is no wonder that best sellers over the decades have always been books on how to follow our passion, realize our bliss, and fulfill our dreams. These books touch our deepest core needs to be who we are and express that in the world like no Super Bowl commercial can.


As our careers mature, we lose touch with that core knowledge. We become stale, burnt out, or driven by only our wants. There is nothing like a huge recession to bring us up short, stop us in our collective tracks, and bring us back to revisit once again our core drivers, passions and needs.

Perhaps then our choice would be to take the road we need, not want, this time.

These are a few thoughts on how to make it through the next decade. But who knows? We can plan, strategize and make good resolutions only to have history descend on us all. Perhaps keeping a clear focus on what we most value and being as true and authentic to ourselves and others as we possibly can is good enough to hold on….and enjoy the ride.