Technical skill alone will never be the way to better opportunities.
🛑 This is one of the most common obstacles I’ve helped people through over the years. Our society pushes us to go to school, get a degree, use it to specialize in solving a particular problem, build a career around it, and one day retire in blissful peace.
But, we are seeing now more than ever that that is fundamentally flawed in the grand scheme of things. Today, we live in a world were problems can be identified and solved more quickly, more efficiently than ever. That’s great news, of course, but that also means entire generations of people are left in a dense fog wondering “what do I do now?”
Perhaps they were fired or laid off.
Or maybe their workplace goes out of business.
Or perhaps any other number of life circumstances.
😭 The bottom line is that thousands upon thousands of professionals are now left in a lurch, unable to put the experience and skills they’ve accumulated thus far into a new venture.
“But, I’m triple certified expert when it comes to MERN development. I’ve built dozens of features that’ve led to millions of dollars in revenue!” (MERN is MongoDB, Express, React, and Node.js, for any wondering.)
“I’ve taken X products from idea to launch! My customers are happy customers. I’ve designed and executed highly successful roadmaps.”
Okay, so what? So have 100s or even 1000s of other professionals out there. What makes you so special?
The technical skills that’ve enabled us to achieve such feats are nothing more than the “how.” But, and it may have clicked what I’m getting at, if there’s any truth that proves itself time and time again, it’s that the “how” isn’t what matters in the end.
You can go on about who you are, and what/how you’ve done what you done, but without being able to talk about WHY it matters, you’re really speaking to deaf eyes.
💸 If you want to get more out of your career, you must, must, must refocus your attention towards WHY what you’ve done matters. The impact of your choices speak volumes more than the how and frankly are going to be one of the few things out there you can rely on to set you apart from the 10,000 other people with the “same” skills and achievements you have.
If my point hasn’t been made yet, try this; pretend you’re a home builder:
🛠️ Your technical skills are your tools.
🏡 Your achievements are the house you built.
👨👩👧👦 Your why/impact is that newlywed couple that can now move in and build their family in place to call home.
So remember, don’t stop at who you are and what you’ve done. Advocate for yourself and lay into why it all mattered in the first place.
Leave a Reply