Capitalise Career Capital
Welcome to #72 of Mindfully, a newsletter where we explore self-growth mindfully. I hope you’re having an awesome day!
Hi friends,
I came across a very interesting idea in the book Happy Sexy Millionaire by Steven Bartlett that I'd like to share with you guys this week. It's called career capital and it is the ability to increase your self-worth wherever you go by building as many important transferrable skills as possible in your younger years.
I'm sure we all consider ourselves to have transferrable skills which we vaguely mention in our CVs and boast about in interviews. But, how many of us genuinely have lots of high-quality transferrable skills? In the book, Steven says:
Career capital is anything that puts you in a better position to make a difference in your future careers - such as skills, connections, qualifications, and resources.
He explains that this is much easier to build in your younger years because this is often the time when we have little to lose. In our 20s, most of us probably have little responsibility and we can make sporadic career shifts. So, it makes sense to use the little reputation and experience we start with as an opportunity to build our career capital as fast as possible.
I particularly enjoyed how Steven broke down the capital into four areas: skills such as coding, connections such as mentors, qualifications such as degrees, and finally resources such as access to things. It's easier to do all of these when we're young.
What's more interesting is career capital is awesome for anyone feeling 'lost' or having doubts about what to do in the future. Building strong transferrable skills will serve us well in any future endeavour. For example, in the book, Steven says:
If you look at many successful people, say, Oprah, Elon Musk, or even Bono, they all started out in life by building a tremendous amount of career capital and reputation for themselves. They then leveraged their career capital to take on philanthropic, humanitarian, and business interests.
Essentially, career capital is like access keys. The more keys we can acquire when we're younger, the more doors we can open later.
Quote:
"You get rewarded by society for giving it what it wants and doesn’t know how to get elsewhere." - Naval Ravikant
Recommendation:
Audiobook 👨🏾💻 - Meditations (Marcus Aurelius)
I've been listening to random chapters of this book now and again. I find that it delivers a good refresher/boost on stoic philosophy. Also, each chapter being 15-30mins long, they're great to listen to in the mornings or in moments I'm entering a slump/rut of sorts.
That’s all for this week - be safe, be happy!
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