Change your mind like a boss

Good Morning. For the next 5 minutes, your career is the most important thing.

In today’s email:

• Change your mind like a boss

• The power of three

• Pivoting for fun and profit

• Work as sanctuary

• Charlie Munger as career coach

ON YOUR CAREER

Change your mind like a boss

Changing our mind can be difficult. Persuading others to change their mind is even more difficult. We evolved to avoid losses. And changing our mind can lock in perceived losses of time, money, and credibility. Instead, we may stumble into irrational escalation - increasing our commitment to a losing idea. Ego is the enemy.

A willingness to change our mind when we see disconfirming evidence helps future proof our career. It demonstrates humility. It demonstrates to colleagues that we have a growth mindset and are open to embracing more useful ideas. Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel winning psychologist, said, ‘No one enjoys being wrong, but I do enjoy having been wrong because that means that, now, I am not as wrong as I was before.’

Kahneman encouraged us to not tie our ideas to our identity. Better to be identified as a flexible thinker than to be imprisoned by our ideas.

COMMUNICATION

The power of three

For fifteen years, I owned a recruitment company and coached candidates on how to be persuasive at interview. A formula that worked was candidates expressing their value to employers in three points. For example:

• Achieved or exceeded my sales budget in the past seven quarters

• Implemented a new CRM on time and on budget

• Trained and mentored two junior colleagues who are now high performers

Three points seems to be punchy, interesting, and memorable.

When we deliver a speech, the basic successful structure is 1. Beginning, 2. Middle, 3. End. This storytelling arc is familiar and engaging. When we write an article or essay, three main arguments furthers our case. And a sequence of three adjectives in a sentence is pleasing to hear and read.

PRODUCTIVITY

Pivoting for fun and profit

Companies have product pivots to create extraordinary value:

Individuals have career pivots to create extraordinary value:

Each of us can pivot multiple times in our careers. My pivots include money manager to recruiter to executive coach. Each change built on existing skills and experience. It also required fast learning which was energizing.

There may be multiple opportunities for you to pivot in your current organization. You may transfer to sales, HR, or logistics. You could study and switch professions. A close friend of mine left banking to become a school teacher. Our motivation and productivity can soar when we pivot to fresh opportunities and projects.

1 MINUTE TO LOWER STRESS

Work as sanctuary

Ideally, we are in jobs where we often get to use our skills and abilities. This is emotionally rewarding. It can induce a state of flow where we don’t notice time passing. Worries outside work fade. Work can be a sanctuary if we permit ourselves to focus and be absorbed.

GET SMARTER

Charlie Munger

Charlie Munger died in 2023, thirty-four days short of his hundredth birthday. He served in the US Army in WW2 where he learned future investment lessons from playing cards: ‘What you have to learn is to fold early when the odds are against you, or if you have a big edge, back it heavily because you don't get a big edge often.’ After completing a Harvard law degree, Munger founded a law firm. He pivoted from law to full-time investing where he became famous as Vice Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway. Warren Buffett lauded him as ‘the architect’ of this investment giant. Munger also became renowned for his direct wisdom: