Don’t bring your whole self to work

PLUS: Exercise where you could get hurt

October 01, 2024

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

In today’s email:

  • Antifragility is better than resilience

  • Don’t bring your whole self to work

  • Liberate your calendar

  • Exercise where you could get hurt

  • Melanie Perkins as career coach

ON YOUR CAREER

Antifragility is better than resilience

Dr Nassim Taleb, professor of risk engineering at NYU and former hedge fund manager, coined the term ‘antifragility’. Taleb wrote in the prologue of his book Antifragile: ‘Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder… The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.’

Antifragility involves having systems and practices that help us bounce forward from setbacks in our career. It doesn’t reject displaying vulnerability at work. Antifragility means we can thrive when things get tough by having:

  • A strong focus on adding value to customers and colleagues

  • Performed pre-mortems on how things could go wrong so we are not shocked

  • A boldness in seizing opportunities

  • Adequate exercise, nutrition, and sleep to deal with stress

  • A willingness to seek ideas and emotional support from our network

  • Perspective and a sense of humour

COMMUNICATION

Don’t bring your whole self to work

Many people have argued we should bring our whole selves to work. This is mostly well-intentioned and overlaps with the concept of authenticity. But it’s often unwise advice. Our whole selves include a shadow side: bad moods, negative self-talk, and lazy opinions. This is human. And it might be self-handicapping to our careers unless we limit how much of this shadow side we display to colleagues and customers. Nobody wants a team filled with people saying whatever they want, whenever they want, with little empathy for their audience. We want to work with predictable people: friendly and competent. Self-control is a strong predictor of career success. Self-control is a foundation of antifragility. We do our best work when we bring what Abraham Lincoln called ‘the better angels of our nature.’

Be yourself. Be true to yourself. Bring your whole self to work. In the age of authenticity, this is common advice. But evidence shows that when we express ourselves in the wrong way or at the wrong time, it can backfire.

— Dr Adam Grant, Organizational Psychologist and Professor at Wharton
PRODUCTIVITY

Liberate your calendar

If you have some autonomy over your weekly calendar, it’s worth scheduling blocks of time initially free of tasks. This time can be used for important and urgent tasks that emerge. If the time is unneeded, it can be allocated to other important long-term projects. Liberating your calendar with these blocks brings productivity and calmness.

There is never enough time to do everything, but there is always enough time to do the most important thing.

— Brian Tracy 
1 MINUTE TO LOWER STRESS

Exercise where you could get hurt

We don’t dwell on our work problems when we are performing exercise that requires intense focus. Especially when failure to focus could result in us getting hurt. Ice-skating, cross country running, swimming in the surf, martial arts, lifting free weights, and mountain biking are a sample of such activities. We are in the moment and alive.

GET SMARTER

Melanie Perkins as career coach

Melanie Perkins is the CEO and Co-Founder of Canva, which provides digital design tools. She is worth over USD 5 billion and leads a unicorn that is profitable. Perkins dropped out of the University of Western Australia as an undergrad to continue her serial entrepreneurialism. A sample of her career wisdom:

There are more than seven billion people on this planet, which means there are a lot of really great people out there. Focus on finding the nice ones, and don’t worry about those that aren’t.

One thing that has kept me going is the belief that if I work really hard, I can usually succeed at whatever I put my mind into — maybe not the first try, but by the hundredth (or more) tries I’ll nail it.

I know that there’s no secret formula and no such thing as an overnight success - just a lot of hard work and overcoming challenges one by one.