Strands of Genius: The Rebuilders Podcast, Sufjan Awakes, Reinventing Your Career
plus: our thoughts on rebooting and reinventing
WRITING FROM | Nashville, TN
WORKING ON | Client Presentation, New Project Kick Off, SoSG Design, Column
LOOKING AHEAD
Sept 28 - Oct 23: Nashville, TN
:: WHAT’S NEW & WEEKLY GRATITUDE ::
The “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” [Keats] is in full swing as ‘back-to-school’ September segues into ‘spooky’ October. Pumpkins have appeared [un-smashed], skeletons spotted, and ghouls of all sorts will be on display this month, especially in the USA. Stay safe and sane out there.
Oh, and please feel free to weigh in on where we should live next year. Kidding, but also not. Because usually you (and even we) make these choices based on jobs but when you can work from anywhere, and you want to work from everywhere, how do you make a decision?!
This week, we’re especially thankful for:
Good driving weather, Scooter&T, all mod cons, Lisa, AmazonFresh for free delivery but not for the confusing choice / price architecture, Upload [Amzn Prime], walking around a neighborhood, keeping open minds, having options, a new project, communication tools, 365 Ginger Sparkling Water [why does no other brand make this flavor?], the reverse sear steak, Slack, our ELCs (we’ve decided that’s pronounced elks, btw), and so many people who we adore who have September birthdays!! Happy Birthday Rachel & Aisha & Sophie & Meg & Dorsey & Alex & Ashley & Pam!!
THE SCHOOL OF STOLEN GENIUS PRESENTS
STRATEGY IN AN AGE OF UNCERTAINTY ::
Module this month will be a live webinar on Strategy in an Age of Uncertainty: Wed, 30th September, 9am PST / 12pm EST / 5pm GMT [members only].
:: THE LINKS ::
SUFJAN STEVENS AWAKES
‘Indie darling’ songsmith Sufjan Stevens has carefully avoided mainstream fame by constantly shape shifting. “It’s never a rebellious thing; I’m always just ready to do something new.” His new album chronicles his feelings about his homeland as he has matured during this arc of history but beyond the specifics the article gives a portrait of how a person and their work evolves, intersecting with their time and place and personal progress, creatively and philosophically. “Experience makes fools of us all.” (Guardian)
THE REBUILDERS POD
Faris was deftly interviewed and expertly edited for a new series from the CEO & CSO of TBWA\London, Sara Tate & Anna Vogt, about rebooting his career and life, over and over. He talks about what he thinks he has learned from each stage so far, from career sampling, graduate incubation, advertising, leadership at the biggest agencies in the world, to being a nomad and running our own global micro-business, and how we are adapting to ever shifting present. The Rebuilders: “From businesses to lifestyles to relationships, each week we interview someone who has turned an aspect of their life around. Through their personal stories, we explore the tricks, traits, triggers all of us can apply to remake, rebuild, or reboot something we love.” (SimpleCast)
REINVENTING YOUR CAREER IN THE TIME OF CORONA
“Unexpected events or shocks disrupt our habitual routines, jolt us out of our comfort zones, and lead us to ask big questions about what matters and what is worth doing. It’s no wonder, then, that during the current pandemic, many people are rethinking their careers.” Author and researcher Herminia Ibarra studies career change at London Business School. Here she outlines a few tips for exploring how to reinvent your career while keeping the lights on, including developing “many possible selves” and embracing “liminality” [a favorite concept of ours]. (Harvard Business Review)
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:: WHAT WE’RE THINKING ABOUT: REBOOT, REBUILD, REMIX, REPEAT ::
No one likes change but babies in diapers, as the old saw goes. We are drawn endlessly between the poles of novelty and familiarity, excitement and safety, procreation and survival but evolution appreciates that survival is necessary for procreation, so we tend to favor the familiar. Familiar things are safe, the unknown is scary. (Halloween is about taming the unknown, turning things that go bump in the night into cartoons and candies.)
We’re ‘hardwired to hate uncertainty’ so we double down on the things we know, or believe, and habituate rapidly. Whatever we are doing for a while seems like how things work, and will always be. For nomads like us, each shift in context takes a few days, there is a grinding of gears, a rebuilding of habits and flow. Which side of the couch do you usually sit on? Which side of the bed? Which supermarket is nearby? Where do you buy coffee?
There are usually things we want to change about ourselves, but study after study shows that people are extremely resistant to behavioral change. New Year’s Resolutions can happen every year— but they don’t often last. It’s seemingly easier to change the context of your entire life than to use willpower alone to radically change your own behavior within the same context. Most of us would rather be unhappy in a predictable way than face the unknown. But when big changes are forced upon us, as difficult as they are, they are a gift. No one likes change, but now it is inevitable, so you only have to decide what to do with it.
Careers used to be very linear, especially the kind inhabited by university graduates. A profession once alighted upon had a clear trajectory, during which you accrue the necessary qualifications, experience, network and so on, in pursuit of greater authority, commensurate renumeration, accolades, respect, perks, pensions and so on. In order to progress we tend to focus as soon as possible. The only way is up, as Yazz once sang, and the ladder metaphor suggests you fix your eyes on the prize and keep climbing, don’t look down! But, if you don’t look down you might forget to send the elevator down for others when you get to the top…and what if you want to go sideways? Ladders are terrible for that.
Remnants of these linear careers still exist, in jobs and in culture, but things have been changing for a while. The digital thing meant that suddenly lots of people at the top of their game found the foundations had shifted beneath them. Jobs that didn’t exist while we were studying suddenly became all the rage during our careers. How does education prepare you for jobs that don’t exist yet?
Titles and disciplines fractured and merged, getting rebranded or repositioned as the needs of corporations shifted along the fault lines in the economy the internet had exposed. And so it goes, and keeps going. Many, many things about business and people don’t change much but many, many people are employed in entirely new ways, jobs in traditional sectors seem increasingly scarce, and we are going through another set of changes that will radically impact how we think about jobs, and offices, and businesses, and so on.
What to do? If only it were that simple. Someone reached out on Twitter this morning asking for tips for a recent graduate [and former professional dancer] looking to break into advertising by getting a graduate placement job in an agency. All major agency holding companies have hiring freezes in place, and probably will for a while - that linear approach simply isn’t going to work for the time being. The book Range encourages ‘career sampling’, especially when one is younger and has less dependencies. Increasingly, we all will have to take our livelihoods and development into our own hands, regardless of whether or not we have a job at the moment.
“Forget about moving in a straight line.”—Herminia Ibarr
Consider these 9 unconventional strategies for reinventing your career, but equally consider your options as broadly as possible. If a job in a big agency isn’t possible this year, what else might you do? Where? The more specific our career goals, the more restrictive our vision of our own future, the more we close our eyes to adjacent opportunities.
Some lucky few are born embracing change, some learn to love it, but we all have change thrust upon us. Change, like Winter, is always coming. Reinvention is a muscle, the more you do it the easier it gets. Well, maybe not easier exactly, but less scary. You made a change, and things turned out OK. So you can make another. You learn from both, remix them together and open up a new path for yourself. Then the world changes on you once again, and you reboot, rebuild, remix, repeat.
“I’m actually feeling really good right now because we’re in a moment of crisis and have an incredible opportunity.
Business as usual was not sustainable.
Now’s the moment to get rid of our former consciousness and work on something better. It’s like a rebirth.
We need a total born-again experience as a world and society.” - Sufjan Stevens
:: AND NOW… REBUILDERS POD ::
If we can ever be of help to you, even outside of a formal engagement, please don’t hesitate to let us know.
rockON,
faris & rosie & ashley | your friends over at geniussteals.co
@faris is always tweeting
@rosieyakob hangs out on instagram
@ashley also writes for deaf, tattooed & employed
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It's called Genius Steals because we believe ideas are new combinations and that nothing can come from nothing. But copying is lazy. We believe the best way to innovate is to look at the best of that which came before and combine those elements into new solutions.
Co-Founders Faris & Rosie are award-winning strategists and creative directors, writers, consultants and public speakers who have been living on the road/runway since March 2013, working with companies all over the world. Our Director of Operations is nomadic like us, our accounting team is based out of Washington, our company is registered in Tennessee, and our collaborators are all over the world. Being nomadic allows us to go wherever clients need us to be, and to be inspired by the world in between.
Hit reply and let’s talk about how we might be able to work together :)