A group discusses why career progress comes from constantly applying for jobs and building skills, not waiting for one big break. Scott Adams' CEO advises treating job hunting as a regular habit. Staying persistent and flexible helps you move faster when opportunities appear.
Chapters
Back in Chattanooga doing my back in Chattanooga let's go to Publix and get the essentials run.
Having a conversation the other day about flexibility and being able to walk through doors that are open for you and also the ability to try and open a lot of doors.
Talking with someone who said, "Wow, this all seems to really be working out for you.
I can't wait for the doors to open for me also. That's going to be fantastic." Thinking, yeah, these doors have opened, but we've been turning doorknobs.
We've been knocking on doors. We've been banging on doors for almost a year now.
The person that I was talking to is like he was just waiting for life to send him an email saying, "Here's your big shot. All you have to do is reply yes to this email." And I've never felt like life works that way.
This person wasn't literally thinking that life was going to send them an email, but it's still like, it's a type of that thinking that just like one day it's gonna happen.
And one day it is gonna happen if you've continually been banging on doors for several months or years.
That made me think of Scott Adams' book How to Fail at Everything, or Pretty Much Everything, and Still Win Big.
Went down the wrong place.
And in it he tells a story of that he sat next to a guy on an airplane that had become the CEO of a pretty good-sized business, and he gave Scott some career advice.
Can't believe there's no one in the alcohol aisle.
What he told Scott was that basically he should always be applying for jobs because there are a few skills and a few good systems that you put yourself into when you are pretty regularly applying for jobs.
Through this guy's system, he had eventually risen to become the CEO of a pretty good-sized company by following this system.
And he also, in a really volatile market, had either been getting promoted, changing jobs for a better gig, or had even, you know, or just been able to switch jobs really easily if his current one wasn't working out.
And so if that was the case, he was already in the job market, he was already looking, he already had new jobs that he could take advantage of. So he was either upgrading or at least, you know, kind of standing pat.
So the takeaway is, if you feel like you're stuck, if you feel like you want something to change, you got to make sure that you're knocking on doors.
Like, no one's gonna send you that email. It's, it's so unlikely.
And I hope that doesn't frustrate you, but It is.
It's so unlikely that a life-changing email, life-changing phone call is just gonna happen. Because it might happen, and there's an exponentially higher chance of it actually happening when you're doing the work of showing up, of making connections, of knocking on doors, and continuing to do that over months, over years, over decades.
And that will really, really help.
That's it for tonight. As you can see, I'm a little— a little overloaded.
Thanks for watching.
I'll see you tomorrow.
Bye.
Keep knocking on doors.
Not like if you're in their own apartment complex.
