The 4 Questions Part IV: How Does One Foster a Path of Growth and Kindness?

Learnings and advice to plan a successful, fulfilling career over the next few decades

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Editor’s note: This piece is part of a weekly Voice series by Rishad Tobaccowala, the author of Restoring the Soul of Business: Staying Human in the Age of Data.

There are four questions that most companies and individuals seek answers to:

  1. Change Management: How does one navigate change?
  2. The Future: How will the future be?
  3. Modern Leadership: How to lead today?
  4. Purposeful Growth: How does one grow/remain relevant?

This is the last of the series and perspectives on how to keep growing as a person.

Most growth comes from the 3 L’s: loss, love, learning

Loss is central to the human experience in three ways. We often lose in our attempts to succeed. We lose pitches, clients, jobs and opportunities.

But these losses are not the big ones. The next biggest losses are the losses we will face of loved ones and friends either because relationships end or death comes. Our final loss is that of our lives.

How we live amidst this loss defines a large part of life. A big part of what makes life worth living despite the guarantee of loss is the hope of love and joy of learning—love of people, work, art, culture. Love may not compute but computers do not love.

And learning is particularly joyous. Learning in its first form is building knowledge. With great knowledge and practice, we build skills and craftsmanship.

To grow, use time as a competitive advantage

Leverage these learnings to plan your career over decades:

Early years: Find the least sucky job or opportunity you can, ideally in an industry that is growing. Be realistic that most jobs are miserable a third of the time so do not quit or make moves with a short-term horizon. Compete with yourself to become better every day, rather than compete with others.

Compete with yourself to become better every day, rather than compete with others.

Middle years: Who you work for is more important than the company you work with. It’s key to find something you love doing and fit well with. Lastly, invest in building a personal brand.

Late years: Unlearn, re-invent and transform because in a changing world what brought you to success will probably not keep you there. Plan an elegant exit since every career has a midnight hour and the smart people leave at five to twelve. Start to build a portfolio career that expands from a job to one that includes a passion, consulting, advising and giving back since you are likely to work for decades after you “stop working.”

Combine roots and wings

To succeed as an individual or as a firm, one must have roots and wings. Roots provide stability, a place to stand, a passed-long tradition and a sense of history. But roots alone—which are important to ensure one does not get blown away by the winds of change—might anchor one too much to the past and to a status quo that may no longer be relevant.

Thus, the importance of wings. The ability to raise oneself and see above the horizon, to look down with new perspectives and to ensure that the roots that feed us do not wither by failing to adapt to a new world.

In rapidly changing and chaotic times, an agile mindset can be critical to success. While there are many personal trainers to help sculpt our bodies into somewhat supple forms, there is a scarcity in those who can show us how to exercise our minds to be as flexible as they need to be. The ability to change one’s mindset and see, feel and think differently about an issue is often the key differentiator between those who succeed and those who do not.

To grow, learn to repair

Growth is not continuous and often there are many setbacks, detours, shocks and surprises. There are many ways to repair oneself including time and friends.

In addition to these simple and free herbs exist to assuage and heal:

  1. Poetry: Poems restores us to what is deepest in ourselves. Poetry finds the perfect words in the perfect order. The best poetry is about persevering and resurrecting and restoring oneself through the ups and downs of life while never losing our internal melody.
  2. Water: Flowing water—whether it be rainfall, a stream or the tides of a ocean—has a certain timelessness to its biological rhythms and the human internal compass draws us to water as a place of rest, rejuvenation and repair.
  3. Gardens: One prescription for the pressures and challenges we face is to take a walk in a garden. Every individual is creative, and we have a garden within ourselves that we need to tend to so that we can heal, self-repair and always bloom.

Mind the gap

Today in the Instagram age so many of us try to be pixel perfect. But life is not pixel perfect.

In fact, most of life is “minding the gap:”

  • The gap between who we are and what we want to be.
  • The gap in communication between any two people.
  • The gap between what we say/project externally and what we believe/live with internally.

The most content people tend to be those who have narrowed this gap or being aware of it find ways to accept that life is incomplete, imperfect, often incomprehensible. So, what to do?

Bestselling author George Saunders said, “err in the direction of kindness.” Today in the world we have much rage. So, best be kind—kind to others and to yourself.