Five steps to pep up your career

Many a times in our careers, we feel like a mule tied to a cornucopia of salary and benefits. The purposelessness kills us each day. We feel that whoever coined the phrase 'Comfort Zone' must be awarded the Oscars for sarcasm. But, this is rarely an epiphany and your bosses or company must come last in the line of blame. Given the decent IQ that we must all have to be here, we smell it even as it envelops us slowly and ultimately suffocates. Its just that we are not clear of what we can do to lift ourselves out of the morass. Here are my five tips to find your mojo back, whatever stage of career you are in.

1.      Stop the anti-work: Toughest of the five but probably the most important. We accumulate meaningless work that keeps us busy but adds little value for the hours we spend on it. This can be called 'anti-work' as it zaps our energy and resources. And it steals our time. Corporate world is full of this and all of us can instantly recognize it. Anti-work paralyses our natural abilities and we need to quickly identify it and eliminate it ruthlessly. Contrary to our fears, most leaders of today very well understand that if a work doesn’t add value to a person, it can rarely add value to an organization. So, speak up and have that discussion with your boss if you need her help.

2.      Start: Start being active in a professional community outside of your immediate company . Taking a leaf from Sam Ramji, the founder CEO of Cloud Foundry, we can say that we used to be just a part of a company, but in the new world, we should keep another identity as a part of a global project or a community (e.g Open Source or CloudNative or IoT IEEE ). Contributing an idea or a solution or even actively participating in forums (taking due care of IPRs and confidentiality agreements with your current organization, of course) puts your intellect on steroids or injects much needed dopamine for that matter.

3.      See: See the world. Talk to at least one person a week outside of your domain and discuss their work or read a book a month about an industry you are unfamiliar with. You will be stunned by the similarities of the challenges and also you will find the innovations that are happening there can be very much applied here. Suddenly you will hear yourself saying ‘Damn!! what I thought very difficult was a solved problem years ago!’ (techies would know: DevOps was a solved problem in manufacturing decades back. 'aha' moment came much later) . That’s the power of panoramic vision and it cures the career induced tunnel vision syndrome.

4.      Try: There was no time in history after Thomas Alva Edison, so much is being invented by individuals at home. 2000 – 2010 was a period that revolutionized people learning at home. In the current decade, people are trying to make things work hands-on in their living rooms - AI, Machine learning, robotics, IoT... You name it, it’s out there to try free or essentially free or almost free. If you are not doing some exciting cutting edge projects in your own living room, burning very little money at that, you are missing out on a revolution. An Arduino kit costed me less than a restaurant meal, to give an idea.

5. Do: Entrepreneurship does not necessarily mean incorporating your own company or being a CEO. During an extensive debate in Harvard on the topic, Professor Tarun Khanna defines entrepreneurship as simple as 'doing something new'. Simple but profound. Whether you are a technologist or a bureaucrat, it doesn't matter. Just fill that void that everybody is hopping around wasting time and resources. Always make sure there you spend at least one fifth of your work time in a new - your own - initiative that fills a void. Encourage your team to do the same. The cumulative effect is magical. In hindsight, that's the secret of Google's success. Why cant it be yours?

Wishing you the best of luck...