For the next 5 minutes, let’s elevate your career.
In today’s email:
Reverse mentoring
No uptalk
Be expensive
Skip FOMO
Kara Swisher’s career wisdom
ON YOUR CAREER
Reverse mentoring
Reverse mentoring is when a junior or less experienced colleague mentors a more senior or experienced colleague. This flips the traditional mentoring relationship.
Junior colleagues often know more about AI, social media, or evolving workplace trends. Be bold and share if you’re a junior team member. If you’re senior, enlist the wisdom of junior colleagues.
Reverse mentoring deepens networks across organizations. It breaks unhelpful hierarchies and siloes. Is there anyone in your organization with whom you would like a reverse mentoring relationship? How would you initiate this? Or is it already happening?
A real mentor is someone who’s really confident, doesn’t feel threatened by helping people, and thinks it’s additive to their career to do so.
COMMUNICATION
No uptalk
Uptalk is when we inadvertently turn a statement into a question by having rising inflexion at the end of a sentence. Listeners perceive uptalkers as unsure of what they’re saying. This makes us less persuasive.
If we feel nervous in a significant meeting, we can choose to slow our verbal pace and be neutral in how we pronounce the final words of a sentence. This eliminates uptalk.
Uptalk has always been available, just below the surface, because there are circumstances in which speakers not thought to be uptalkers use uptalking characteristics.
PRODUCTIVITY
Be expensive
The next 10 years will go fast.
Be expensive with your time. Don’t fritter it on the unimportant. Prioritizing your time places high value on what you want to achieve and experience in life.
Have a schedule, know what you need to do, and prioritize your time based on what is worth your time.
1 MINUTE TO LESS STRESS
Skip FOMO
Our brains are skewed towards avoiding losses rather than receiving rewards. FOMO - the Fear Of Missing Out - afflicts nearly all of us at some point in time.
FOMO could be about a job title, a holiday destination, or a possession. FOMO can make us envious. And stressed.
Urgency should be applied to what’s truly valuable to us. It doesn’t matter what the herd currently wants. Skip FOMO.
The greatest wealth is to live content with little.
CAREER WISDOM
Kara Swisher
I first heard of Kara Swisher on Pivot, the podcast she hosts with Scott Galloway. Swisher is a journalist, entrepreneur, and tech industry insider. The media mogul Barry Diller said of her, ‘People are afraid of her, and they trust her… That’s not an everyday combination.’ Swisher’s 2024 memoir, Burn Book, a Tech Love Story chronicles tech’s most powerful players.
Swisher was born in Long Island, New York in 1962. She completed degrees in journalism at Georgetown and Columbia universities. Swisher has written on technology at The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and New York Times. She co-founded Recode, an influential tech news site known for its deep analysis and major industry conferences. Some of Swisher’s career wisdom:
You’ve got to tune out your self-doubts and understand that it’s okay to fail. It’s like that Thomas Edison quote, ‘I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.’
Live life so you don’t have regrets. My dad died when he was 34, and I saw early on how ephemeral life can be. So I always try to do what I think is the right thing to do—I don’t try to screw people—and I live without apology.
You have to know your value, of what you are and who you are. And I think people don’t, and you have to honestly assess it. And that’s really hard.