Staying Employable in an Automated World: Uncovering Your Unique Creativity
Great! So now that we know we should bring a unique form of creativity to our career, the next most obvious question is: “How exactly do I bring my uniqueness to work, to my startup, to career?” The answer is this; it’s very simple and very hard, but very doable if you want to achieve it. I’ll explain.
The reason it’s very simple to find out what you can uniquely bring to any business, startup, or career is that all of the answers are within you. Seriously. What makes it very hard, is that you will have to be very honest with yourself about what you are really good at naturally, what you enjoy doing, what are you interested in, what you see differently than others around you, and then bring them all together into a package only you can offer. You’ll also need to be honest about what you really aren’t very good at (although you might wish you were) and cross those items off your list.
The second step is the hardest part. If you have already narrowed your talents down to a small list that you can realistically work on. Congrats! That was quick.
If, on the other hand, you have numerous talents and interests that haven’t presented themselves to you in a clear, organized plan. Don’t worry. There is another simple process to tackle this.
Take a sheet of paper and write down all your interests, talents, and what you enjoy doing. Now date the sheet and file it away in a place you can easily find. Don’t review it! Wait a few more days. Take a fresh sheet of paper and write down your interests, talents, and what you enjoy doing. Date it and file it away. It’s not time to compare yet.
I generally recommend doing this 4 to 5 times without reviewing any of the previous pages. After 2 to 3 weeks, you should be done and be ready to do your review. What items popped up the most? Which ones fell off? List them in order of frequency.
Take the top contenders and see how you can convert those talents into meaningful skills to help you pursue what you are interested in and enjoy doing. This will give you an excellent path to start your journey of developing your creativity and uncovering what is unique to you.
Now, I did mention that this was also hard, and I left this for the very end. This can be hard because there will often be numerous interests and talents you want to pursue. It’s simply not possible to develop them all simultaneously. This means you will have to say no to many other talents and interests for at least a while so you can focus on creating a selected set into world-class skills that can help you throughout your career.
To wrap up this very short series of posts, I’ll leave you with these links to continue your journey:
Modern Economies: Gig, Access, Sharing, On-Demand
If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me or the team at Wandering Alpha.
Christopher Sanchez & Co. is your business performance partner. We help clients start companies, reframe problems, and uncover asymmetrical advantages by applying our frameworks and methods to three critical areas: crafting the best questions, isolating the most valuable answers, and constructing narratives that break through the noise.
