{"id":14435,"date":"2022-08-23T08:15:00","date_gmt":"2022-08-23T16:15:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.scotthyoung.com\/blog\/?p=14435"},"modified":"2022-08-26T00:09:21","modified_gmt":"2022-08-26T08:09:21","slug":"find-next-step","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.scotthyoung.com\/blog\/2022\/08\/23\/find-next-step\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Find Your Next Step"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is the second lesson in our week-long series on building a better career. Next week, Cal Newport and I are opening our course Top Performer<\/a> for a new session. Here\u2019s the first<\/a> lesson, in case you missed it.<\/em><\/p>\n

The first two weeks of Top Performer<\/em> focus on how to do good research. This might seem like a funny place to start a career course: shouldn\u2019t we be polishing our resumes or going to networking events?<\/p>\n

We thought the same thing at first. Our earliest sessions of Top Performer skipped over this phase because we assumed most people already knew what they needed to improve.<\/p>\n

Boy, were we wrong.<\/p>\n

It turned out that the most people\u2019s obstacles have nothing to do with how to design a project or practice efficiently. Instead, the most common struggle is not knowing what to get good at!<\/p>\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Struggles we saw came in three different types:<\/p>\n

    \n
  • The first group either had no idea what they should be working on or had the unhelpfully broad \u201ceverything\u201d in their list of skills to master or improve.<\/li>\n
  • The second group had a clear idea of what they wanted to improve\u2014but it wasn\u2019t closely related to career capital. For a skill to be valuable as career capital, it must enhance the value of your work in a way that the people who pay you can see. If a skill doesn\u2019t do that, it isn\u2019t career capital. Unfortunately, many early students focused on projects they found interesting, even when their contribution to career capital was questionable.<\/li>\n
  • The third group had no idea what kind of career they even wanted, so identifying a useful skill to improve was impossible.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

    The Power of Doing Good Research<\/h2>\n
    \nListen to this article<\/small>
    \n