Ben Hamer - The Kickass Career: How to succeed in the future of work, now

THE

HOW TO SUCCEED

KICKASS

IN THE FUTURE OF WORK,

CAREER

NOW

DR BEN HAMER

This is an IndieMosh book

brought to you by MoshPit Publishing
an imprint of Moshers Business Support Pty Ltd

PO Box 4363
Penrith NSW 2750

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Copyright 2021 Dr Ben Hamer

All rights reserved

Licence Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If youre reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favourite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the author and publisher.

Disclaimer

Although the author has made every effort to ensure that the information in this book was correct at press time, the author and publisher do not assume and hereby disclaim any liability to any party for any loss, damage, or disruption caused by errors or omissions, whether such errors or omissions result from negligence, accident, or any other cause.

A friend of mine quit a job as a lawyer to start an apprenticeship as a carpenter. Another, a doctor, handed in their resignation after only a few years. And a family member left teaching in their mid-forties to be one of those people who work in events management with a dramatic headset and an attitude to match. People changing jobs isnt new. But these examples all have one thing in common. They all started out in what were traditionally considered to be jobs for life. Wed normally expect that when someone becomes a lawyer, a doctor or a teacher, then theyre in it for the long haul. But while they all set out on one track, they ended up going down a completely different path. And this is the new normal we find ourselves in. According to the Foundation for Young Australians, were going to have at least 17 different jobs across five completely separate careers.

The world of work is changing and the journey from school to work to retirement is no longer a straight line. Its a giant squiggly one. A big part of this is due to technology, which is shaking things up in a big way. And while adapting to emerging technology isnt anything new, the difference now is the speed.

Change is happening at the fastest rate in history.

In the single second it took you to read that sentence, an algorithm executed 1,000 stock trades, while Visa processed more than 1,700 transactions. Right now, 76,000 Google searches are returning tens of billions of results. Over 6,000 tweets have been tweeted and 2.9 million emails are being sent, not all of them by humans. All in a single second.

This is the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Somewhere between 25 and 40% of jobs will be automated by 2030 and according to former IBM CEO Ginni Rometty, artificial intelligence (AI) will change 100% of jobs within the next five years. These changes are already having a sizeable impact on the jobs youll do, the careers youll have, and the skills you need. But its not all about the robots. For example, this thing called COVID-19 came along and within the space of a few weeks, there was the biggest spike in unemployment since the Great Depression as well as the worlds largest work-from-home experiment.

While were well prepared for the past, were ridiculously underprepared for the future. We might be living through the fastest rate of change in history, but its also the slowest rate of change youll experience for the rest of your life. Like Nevada counting a US Presidential Election slow. Stuff is only going to get more complex and move quicker. The issue is that our views on education, careers and even retirement are buried deep in the past. Career advice is outdated and overwhelmingly flawed.

The new world of work requires a different mindset and approach. One where you let go of what you think you knew about work. One where you reimagine your career so that you can keep up, stay relevant and kick ass. And to start with, you need to move on from traditional self-help.

A lot of people turn to self-help when it comes to dealing with a terrible boss, an unfulfilling job, or a career change. The thing is, traditional self-help evangelists have created a billion-dollar industry that is more about making money than helping others. Dont get me wrong, theres absolutely a place for self-help. But there are three main issues that limits how useful it can be, particularly when it comes to your career.

1. Self-help throws the shame you feel back in your face. Some people turn to self-help to fix themselves. But they tend to fall short because they hold this fundamental view that whatever they do, including self-help, supports their feelings of inferiority and not being good enough. Because all the positive self-help stuff fixates on what you dont have. It focuses on what you think your shortcomings and failures are, and then throws them back at you. For example, you might go to a conference to see some guy in a cheap suit tell you how to get rich quick because you want to make more money, but it just makes you feel inadequate by reinforcing that you dont make enough money in the first place. Or maybe you write positive affirmations on the wall (#livelaughlove) or recite a mantra in front of the mirror telling yourself how successful you are. But all it does is remind you that you arent successful. Ironically, fixating on all the positives just focuses on a life that is better than the one you have. It reminds you of what you arent, what you lack, and what youve failed to do. Because if you were successful, you wouldnt need to stand in front of the mirror and tell yourself.

2. Self-help is just another form of avoidance. Everyone has problems. But traditional self-help tends to deal with the surface-level issue, which is why it can be another form of avoidance. For example, maybe you dont like dealing with conflict in the office and so you watch a YouTube video about how to have a difficult conversation. All of a sudden, watching the video feels more important than actually having the conversation and so it doesnt result in any real improvement. This is where traditional self-help can ignore values-based questions like why you avoid conflict in the first place. It can be a shallow way of trying to feel good in the short term without solving the important stuff for the long term.

3. Self-help is a drug. Self-help creates the perception of change, which results in a temporary high. It creates a feeling of accomplishment or improvement, which makes you feel good for a short period of time but without addressing the deeper cause of the problem, that feeling eventually disappears and makes you want to go back for more. The irony is, if you actually helped yourself, as the name self-help would suggest, then you wouldnt need to rely on it. But people get hooked.

When you try and apply traditional self-help to your work and career, you can find yourself chasing temporary highs without setting yourself up for long term success. Thats where this book comes in, providing you with a fresh perspective on career advice for the new world of work.