This post originally appeared as a 8-14 weekend issue of the Daily Job Hunt email. Sign up for kick-butt career hype in your inbox each morning.
Mindset for Success
Choose Action. You don’t always have control over everything that happens to you, but you can always choose you attitude. If you choose to focus on what you do have control over, no matter the circumstances, you will always find a way forward. Choose action over passivity.
Tell Your Story, Not Your Status. “I ran a Tough Mudder and endured an ice pool for 20 minutes. I’ll bring that same resilience to sales.” Telling a short story from your life that reveals your character is way more compelling than sharing your status, like “SDR, 2 yrs” (3 min video).
Links worth checking out
- 7 Things You Don’t Need to Land a Job (1 min)
- Hiring Companies in 8 Tech Hubs + remote (website)
- Be Impossible To Ignore (8 min video)
Quote of the Week
“Don’t be on your deathbed someday, having squandered your one chance at life, full of regret because you pursued little distractions instead of big dreams.”
― Derek Sivers
Googling > Schooling
Junior Engineer: “When will I finally outgrow the stage where I have to Google things all the time?”
Senior Engineer: “Never.”
It’s a running joke among programmers, coders, and software engineers, that all we do is just google how to do stuff.
The joke here, of course, is that it implies that we don’t actually know anything.
And so all the world’s largest billion and trillion dollar companies, the Amazon’s and Netflixes of the world, the global banking system, all kinds of government entities, everything is all precariously kept afloat by these people that ostensibly don’t know anything.
It’s funny, because it’s both true, and not true.
What’s true is that even the most senior software engineers have to google how to do stuff every day.
What’s not true is that these engineers therefore don’t know anything and suck at their craft. Software engineers are some of the highest paid employees of all time, after all, precisely because they’re so effective.
This reveals an important truth:
Knowing how to find an answer is more valuable that knowing a lot of answers.
And here’s the kicker: this applies to every employee, not just software engineers.
Every company wants to hire the person that knows how to find answers and get themselves unstuck, no matter the situation. Because such an employee is quite literally unstoppable.
So, what challenge have you faced in the past, that you didn’t know how to solve? How did you get yourself unstuck?
Make sure you tell that story on your job hunt!
Chances are, it’ll get you hired.
Corné
and the DJH team
