Following is the full transcript of best-selling author and futurist Jacob Morgan’s TEDx Talk: How to Future Proof Your Career at TEDxAcademy conference. This event occurred on September 30, 2017.
Jacob Morgan – Futurist
I was cheated, lied to, betrayed. All of this happened within just 6 months of being in a relationship. Naturally, I did what any rational person would do. And I decided it was time to end the relationship. So I waited until the right moment. I planned, and finally I handed in my resignation letter.
Now I’m not special. There are millions of people around the world every single day, who feel this way, about the managers and the organizations that they work for. In fact, right now if you were to look up the word employee in the dictionary, you’d find that synonyms for “employee” include: cog, servant and slave. If you look up the word “manager” in the dictionary, you find that synonyms include: slave driver, boss, and my favorite one, the zookeeper. But it gets better if you look up the word “work” in the dictionary. Synonyms include: daily grind, drudgery and struggle.
So if you put these three things together, we are all cogs working for a zookeeper as we go about our daily drudgery. Wow? Work sucks! And this is literally how we have built our organizations over the last 50, 100 and 150 years, on top of these outdated ways of thinking about work. And it’s no wonder that so many people around the world don’t like their jobs or their careers. It’s literally ingrained in all our cultures. It’s in our society. It’s how we even talk about work.
Now I was never a good student. In fact, for the majority of my life, I was a rather terrible student.
My first job out of college, the one when I felt so lied and betrayed to, during the interview process I was told that I would be meeting with executives and entrepreneurs traveling across the country, and doing all sorts of meaningful and impactful work. A couple of months into my job, I’m stuck doing data entry, cold calling, PowerPoint presentations combined that with a 3-hour daily commute in bumper-to-bumper Los Angeles traffic. That was my life and I’ll never forget this.
One day, the CEO comes out of his beautiful corner office and he says “Jacob, come over here! I have something really important for you.” I got excited. I thought this is it. This is a moment, something amazing is going to happen, and started running over to him. I said “Yes, what is it?” And he puts his hand into his pocket, he takes out his wallet and from his wallet, he gives me a crisp clean TEN DOLLAR BILL, slaps it right in my hand and says, “I’m late for a meeting. I need you go to Starbucks and get me a cup of coffee and get something for yourself as well.”
“What are you out of your damn mind? This is why you worked so hard in school is to get you a cup of coffee, to get your own stupid cup of coffee.” It’s what I thought on the inside.
On the outside, I said, “Of course, I would love to get you that cup of coffee. Of course, that’s a dream of getting you coffee.”
That was one of the last full-time jobs that I had worked for anybody else and that was around 10 years ago. And looking back, I suppose I should be very thankful to that executive and to that cup of coffee, because it taught me a very important lesson: There is no such thing as job security! In fact, the only security that can exist is the one that you create for yourself.
Today’s world that we live in: work is life and life is work. The two things are blending. They’re becoming one, and it’s why I find it so fascinating sometimes when I have conversations with people, and I say how are you and I’ll say, well my personal life is going great but my work life is terrible.
But consider that, you spend almost as much time on planet earth working as you do living. And if the work side of your life isn’t going well, chances are your life in general is not going well. So over the last 10 years I discovered 3 strategies that allowed me to shape my work, and as a result, to create a better personal life for myself.
Become a perpetual learner
First is, you cannot rely on educational institutions or on companies to teach you everything you need to know about personal or professional development. You have to become a perpetual learner. You must learn how to learn. This is perhaps, the most important skill that you can possess and it’s taking control over what that looks like.
My family is from the Republic of Georgia. Now usually when I say Georgia, people think of hey y’all, I’m from the south kind of Georgia in the United States, but I’m talking about the halo of Mother Russia kind of Georgia. It’s a very different part of the world. In fact, my last name, my original last name isn’t even Morgan. It’s mommy Steffi Lee. I try saying that three times fast. My family came from the Republic of Georgia in the 80s as refugees. They went from the Republic of Georgia to Italy to Australia to finally ending up in the United States.
Now as refugees when they came to America, they knew nothing and they had nothing. My dad learned how to speak English by watching a popular talk show: the Johnny Carson show with a English to Russian translation dictionary so that he could understand the words that Johnny Carson was saying, right. That is the ultimate perpetual learner. And this is before the days of Google. This is before we had access to all of these amazing tools and resources at our disposal.
But being a perpetual learner also means paying attention to the tangential. Now how many of you had this happen? You’re in conversation with somebody and at some point during the conversation, the other person says “I am so heads down.” In fact, I’m willing to bet that most people in this room have even said “I’m so heads down.” But the problem of saying that you’re so heads down is that you miss everything else that’s happening in the world. It’s no longer good enough to be heads down. You need to be heads up, you need to be heads side to side and you even need to be heads behind you. You need to be aware of how your skills and abilities can be applied, not just to what’s right in front of you but to things that are a little bit on the side. Be a perpetual learner, pay attention to the tangential.
Fake it till you make it
The second thing that I learned is that you have to fake it till you make it. After my first job out of college, My whole goal in life simply became: how can I make a living without having to work for anybody else ever again? And at the time I was finding all sorts of jobs online on websites like Craigslist. I wrote articles for $15 an article. I did whatever I could try to make money. The reality of the situation was that I was a struggling young kid without making much money.
But what I told myself was that I was this young entrepreneur building a life for himself that he truly wanted to live. And I would repeat that phrase over and over every single day all the time even to this day. What you believe in, and what you tell yourself matters, because it will guide your behaviors. It will guide your actions and it will guide how you feel about yourself.
I remember one time I was actually on a stage much like this one and I was behind the stage getting ready to come on. And the music was playing, the lights were beaming, and from behind the stage, the announcer says, “and now please welcome to the stage Jacob Morgan,” and people were clapping and I came out. I looked at everybody and I thought am I naked? Am I wearing any pants? I had this impostor syndrome moment that 70% of people around the world at some point experienced.
To be honest, I don’t know how I made it through my talk but I thought I had given such a terrible performance that my career was over. I thought nobody’s going to want to hire me after this. And so I just wanted to get off stage to not see anybody, to not talk to anybody, to just go home. And as I was getting ready to walk off the stage, these executives were lining up to come speak with me, to shake my hand, to ask me for feedback, to tell me that they enjoyed my talk. It was at that moment that I realized I am wearing pants, and that I do belong.
In my situation, though it wasn’t just the imaginary voices in my head I had that were telling me I was no good. I had real voices from real people telling me I was no good. These are people today we call them online trolls. They would leave angry comments on my website, create fake Twitter accounts about me. They would message my wife, then girlfriend, telling her to break up with me because I was bad for her career. You can imagine how angry they are now that we’re actually married, and for months I would let these people make me feel bad and for months after that I would argue and fight and debate with all of them. And then finally I realized nobody knows who these people are and perhaps more importantly nobody cares.
Whether you are dealing with imaginary voices in your head telling you that you’re no good, or real voices that are telling you you’re no good, you have to remember to be optimistic: You’re a beast. What you tell yourself matters. It will guide your behaviors, your actions and how you feel. And you can think of yourself as the struggling young kid without any money or you can think of yourself as the young entrepreneur wanting to build a life for themselves that they truly want to live. It’s a choice. It’s how you think. Fake it till you make it.
Bring your passion with you
The last thing that I learned is, perhaps, the most controversial, and that is don’t follow your passion. Bring your passion with you. Follow your passion is one of the biggest business platitudes we keep hearing about. We’re always told to follow our passions. But the problem with that is, first, it assumes that passion lives outside of you and that you need to go chase it .Second, it assumes that passion is one static thing, right? Here is your passion; go get it.
But as you grow, as you experience different things, as you become good at different things, your passion is going to change. And lastly most of us can’t even figure out our passion before we choose what to pursue. I was never passionate about the future of work, or employee experience or speaking or doing any of the stuff that I’m doing. But as I got involved with doing these things, I noticed that people would start to share my ideas. That opportunities would start to unlock for me, and then I became passionate about what it is that I am doing.
I learned to focus on the little things that allowed me to see the big picture of what I was trying to create. It reminds me a lot of a story about a man who went to visit a construction site. And on the construction site, he sees 3 people working, and he goes up to the first person and he says: what do you do? And the person says I am laying bricks. And he goes up to the second person and he says, what are you doing? And the person says I’m building a wall, and he goes up to the third person and as he’s walking up to the third person he hears him singing a tune… hmmmmm… he goes over to him and he says, my goodness! What do you do? And the person stops their work, bites their brow, takes off their hat, looks up at the sky and says I’m building a cathedral.
Everyone is passionate about something. Isn’t it better to live your life bringing that passion with you to everything that you do instead of chasing it. In a world where everybody is told to follow their passion, you can instead stand out by bringing yours. If you can be a perpetual learner, if you can fake it till you make it, and if you don’t follow your passion you bring it with you, then you will take more control over your work life and as a result you will build a life for yourself that you truly want to live. And if this struggling a young kid without any money was able to do it, then so can you.
Thank you.
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