Celebrate or lose

For the next 5 minutes, let’s elevate your career.

In today’s newsletter:

• Celebrate or lose

• Put yourself on mute

• 2 big things today

• 2 ways to get out of slumps

• Jensen Huang as career coach

ON YOUR CAREER

Celebrate or lose

Celebration strengthens memory of our achievements. This means we can more easily recall our capability when we experience setbacks. Celebration helps us be resilient. It also bonds team members. And celebration makes life sweeter.

When we’re busy, it’s easy to defer celebration. We fall into the ‘tyranny of when’: when the team clears this backlog of admin we’ll have lunch to celebrate the project (which was completed 5 weeks ago!) There’s always more work. More projects. Don’t lose opportunities to celebrate.

COMMUNICATION

Hit mute

Steve Covey said, ‘Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply.’ Sometimes we don’t even wait to reply. We start talking over people.

People collaborate more with us if they feel heard. An angry customer or frustrated colleague may need several minutes to explain their problem. We may feel compelled to interrupt. It’s better that we don’t. Hit mute. This is easy if it’s a telephone call. Even if we are meeting someone face-to-face, we can metaphorically hit mute.

PRODUCTIVITY

2 big things today

Our calendars can get hijacked. Meetings appear that we didn’t expect and tasks take longer. To protect our productivity, it’s worth commencing each workday with 2 big things we want to accomplish. Choose 2 things that matter. Complete these and the day is a victory no matter what.

1 MINUTE TO HAPPINESS

2 ways to get out of slumps

Nearly all of us will experience a slump in our work and career. A well-planned project could fail, the economy turn down, or we make a significant mistake. We don’t want the slump to extend.

The first way to break out of a slump is by many small, consistent actions. Hitting our process goals everyday. This is doable. And we get the compounding benefit of persistence.

A second way applies massive effort for a shorter time: doubling our sales calls; coding for twelve hours per day instead of eight; working on Sundays. It’s like putting on a jetpack.

Both ways work.

GET SMARTER

Jensen Huang as career coach

Jensen Huang (1963 — )was born in Taiwan and migrated to the United States as a child. After high school, he worked as a dishwasher and waiter at a Denny’s restaurant in Portland. Huang later said, ‘Start your first job in the restaurant business. It teaches you humility, it teaches you hard work, it teaches you hospitality.’ He completed a Masters of Electrical Engineering at Stanford and was a microprocessor designer at AMD. Aged thirty, in a Denny’s in Silicon Valley, Huang co-founded Nvidia with Curtis Priem and Chris Malachowsky. Their booth now has a plaque to celebrate the meeting.

Huang said, ‘building Nvidia turned out to have been a million times harder’ than they expected with multiple setbacks. Thirty years of persistence paid off. Nvidia has a market cap in excess of $3 trillion and is the dominant chip provider for artificial intelligence. And Huang’s personal wealth exceeds $100 billion. Some of his career wisdom: