Category: Personal Reflections

The title alone will severely limit the interested audience, as the 11 Plus is a concept that even at its ‘height’ was restricted to England and Wales.

The premise was that children in their last year of primary education (aged 11 – 12) took a test to narrow down their options for their secondary education. The better they did on the 11+ the more choices they had. I wish I had ‘failed’ mine way back in 1978, going to an all boys school absolutely sucked.

A friend of mine’s daughter had recently gone through the process, and like me he was amazed at the questions being asked. This was not a straightforward maths/english/reasoning test, this was a test of character that put to shame my interview techniques as a Senior Manager in charge of adult security consultants. Should I be unfortunate enough to ever be the manager of people again, I will be using these questions:

Why should you get priority over other children for a place in this school? – How would YOU answer that question, or what answer would you be looking for?! Say the wrong thing and you’ll come across as arrogant, insecure, indecisive, desperate, disinterested or a combination of several of these.

List 3 things you are good at or like doing. – Generally speaking, people like doing the things they’re good at and dislike things they aren’t. Sadly most people don’t KNOW they’re bad at something, so a question like this can help weed out the humble from the potentially deluded.

What is the most exciting thing that has ever happened to you? – Personally I would dismiss anyone saying anything about work. Passion for your chosen career is one thing, but someone without other interests is to me rather suspect.

Is there anything that I haven’t asked you about that you would like to tell me? – This one’s a doozy! Do I say no and let the person think there’s nothing more to me, do I say something and perhaps come across as trying too hard or do I ramble on because I’m nervous and end up boring the hell out the interviewer?

The above were good, but the next one was to me astounding;

Is life fair?

Bear in mind this is being asked of an ELEVEN year old, but now think about the answer you would give. No it’s not fair is whiney, yes it is fair is delusional, which leaves the only real answer; life is neither fair nor unfair, it just is. It is surprising just how many people cannot accept this.

Life is what YOU make of it, so any answer outside of that speaks volumes to the person you’re interviewing. If they consider life unfair then they are clearly not taking full responsibility for their own actions, anyone who thinks life is fair has likely never been truly tested and makes the following quote rather appropriate;

“I’ve never met a strong person with an easy past.”

Experience is one thing, you can read that on a person’s LinkedIn page, character is something else and rarely glimpsed during the interview process. Perhaps by asking questions we would ask our own children we can change that.

Unless by some ridiculous twist of fate you’re Novak Djokovic, Lionel Messi, or Steven Hawking (and their like) reading this, you are not the best at anything. Perhaps like me, even if you had spent your entire life practicing one thing you still would not have been the best.

Nor do you have to be.

World-class talent is exceptionally rare, but we humans have the unfortunate habit of holding ourselves up for comparison to these unique few. How could we possibly come up anything other than short?

A single skill or talent (see Choice: Love What You Do, Or Love Doing What You’re Good At?), properly developed, can take you far …IF you’re very good. But it’s the combination of your skills and talents that will enable you to excel at a far greater array of your life choices.

No-one, I mean NO-ONE can be you better than you can.

The challenge is; Who ARE you? What are your skills, your talents, your likes, dislikes, even aspirations? A disturbingly large portion of us spend our whole lives without answers to these questions, and we die never having achieved a fraction of our potential. Not someone else’s opinion of our potential, but our own sense of happiness and self-worth. Our feeling of achievement for a life that made a positive difference. At least to someone.

We have all come across people we simply can’t believe haven’t been fired yet, and we have all met people we are amazed are not doing significantly better. In my mind they have both committed the same ‘crime’; they have failed to understand themselves. These examples came from different angles, but the results are the same; neither is doing what they should or could be doing with their lives.

While I absolutely believe you must leave this life with regrets (A Life Without Regrets is a Life Without Mistakes) doing a poor job or never doing a great job should not be among them. Others can help – and usually love to do so – but only you can choose the right path.

There is a good chance I can beat Djokovic at darts (and perhaps several other non-athletic endeavours), and I likely know a lot more about payments security than Hawking. We all make our OWN choices in life, I am where I am because of mine, so why should I ever compare myself to them? Or to anyone else for that matter.

No, I have no-where near their money or their fame, but if I was to measure my life by those standards I have a lot more issues to address first. I am very good at what I do, but equally important, I know when I’m out of my depth. Like most people, I will never know EVERYTHING I’m good at, but I am self-aware enough to know when I should keep something going, or let it go entirely.

I have no problem being fired for being too opinionated, I would very much object to being fired for incompetence, but they are both very much my responsibility.

With self-awareness comes true personal accountability, only then can the regrets you have be the kind you want.

[If you liked this article, please share! Want more like it, subscribe!]

The following phrase occurred to me after conversations I had with two ex-colleagues. Both of whom also now happen to be very good friends;

“You don’t know what you don’t know, so how can you ever be sure you know enough?”

Both find themselves in a similar position; both have progressed in their careers at their respective organisations, and both have very recently received a significant bump in responsibility and work-load. Neither has EVER received the recognition they deserve, but both have dramatically improved things for their departments after taking over. They also replaced people on much higher salaries.

It’s very easy for me to rail on the senior management at those organisations about how they must show appreciation for their star performers. In both monetary terms, and the respect they have earned. But the fact remains that neither of these talented guys know their true worth.

Yes, their senior management are idiots, they probably always have been, but if my friends had been paying attention they would be in a better position to negotiate. If they had been laying the right groundwork over the course of their careers, no promotion would have been offered without the corresponding upward review of their compensation packages.

And the thing is, I know exactly how they feel. After 12+ at my last ‘corporate gig’ it was not until the last few years that I started to get it right. It took a further year after my departure for me to finally know my worth. The true value of my skill-set.

I also know exactly why it took this long; fear.

When I started a new career in my 30’s, I could not have known less about my chosen field of cybersecurity. My first two weeks as a Firewall Administrator consisted of my learning what a firewall was and faking my way to a couple of credentials. Over the next 5 years I worked my up to managing the department, which was then all taken away during a company merger. For the next 7 years I worked my way up from a brand new consultant to Director of 28 consultants across 14 time zones.

Yes, my compensation increased, but I very much doubt it was in-line with my market value. Why? Because I always doubted that I had learned enough in my career to have proven my value, to be worth more than my management were offering. Also, having spent so long at one place, my blind loyalty got in the way. I assumed I would be taken care of if gave it my all.

I could have gone on for years this same way, luckily the final decision was made for me. When I look back, I can see years of wasted time and misplaced loyalty, but if I’m really honest with myself, it was my own fear and laziness that really held me back. All I had to do was look around, have some conversations, and above all; stop being such a wuss.

I know it’s not as simple as I’m making out to be, we all have responsibilities (family, mortgage and so on…) but in the end, YOU are the one that sets your value, and if you’re not getting your due, YOU are the only one to blame. I had no choice in working this out, I was “laid-off”, but one of the most amazing upsides of a bad situation is that I’ll never be afraid again.

I know my worth, do you know yours?

[If you liked this article, please share! Want more like it, subscribe!]

[This article is based loosely on the Dunning-Kruger Effect.]

Have you ever been part of a meeting where someone whom you suspect has no idea what they are talking about, is actually the one controlling the meeting’s outcome? Or the opposite; been part of a meeting where you KNOW someone in the room is an expert on the relevant subject, yet remains quiet? Now combine the two; the expert stays quiet while the idiot rambles on.

I’m sure at some point I’ve been both, and if I’m honest, mostly the idiot.

One of the many aspects of human nature is our susceptibility to bow to confidence. Con artists and organised religions alike (but I repeat myself) have preyed on this for millennia. Politicians, emperors, dictators, cult leaders, you name it, all have the ability to make us believe utter nonsense. We are invariably less influenced by what is said, than how it’s said, and by whom.

“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
– Voltaire

The opposite aspect of this is that even if you are an expert on something, if you aren’t confident in your presentation, your knowledge and skill may be of little impact. Potentially, even if you did speak up, your hesitant manner would negate your audience’s trust in your message. That’s if they were even listening in the first place.

Yet another aspect of human nature is that we really don’t care about other people’s opinions. We are either pleased when people agree with us, or we’ll debate, argue, even fight with those who don’t. Our tolerance for alternative opinions, was well as our ability to adjust our own, only gets worse as we get older. We spend our lives surrounding ourselves with things that make us comfortable, all of which do nothing but reinforce our established beliefs.

I have long been a proponent of self-reflection. The ability to take an objective-as-possible look at yourself, maybe even from another’s perspective, is critical in being able to adapt to whatever the world throws at you. From my experience, there is a direct correlation between the ability to self-reflect and the ability to accept responsibility for both your life, and your actions.

Blaming others is a form of blind-faith, it suggests an infallibility that can never exist. Both experts and idiots are affected equally on this point, both negatively.

The lines between confidence and arrogance, faith and stubbornness, mentorship and patronisation are all blurry, and entirely dependent on the recipient’s perception, not the deliverer’s intent.  Self reflection / observation is the only way you can adapt to the person(s) opposite you, and without that adaptation your own needs will not be met. At least not in full.

While being aware of your tendencies does not equate to an ability to make immediate adjustments (as I know very well), we all have to start somewhere. Whether you’re an expert or an idiot, everything you do is in some way contextualised by those around you. It’s up to you to maximise your impact in a beneficial way.

In your personal life, do as you wish, but at work you are beholden to someone; employer, stockholders, customers, or just your immediate team. Neither the humble expert nor the confident idiot are any good to anyone.

Including yourself.

[If you liked this article, please share! Want more like it, subscribe!]

No-one would call me gregarious, outgoing, or perhaps even friendly, but I will have every conversation offered to me. To NOT have that conversation suggests many things, almost all of which are negative; I think the person is dull / stupid / annoying, that I know more than they do, or that I do WANT to know what they know and so on. These things are judgmental, arrogant, and ignorant respectively. Of all things that it’s bad to be, ignorant is to me the worst.

I’m certainly not saying that by having the conversations that I’m suddenly a saint, but as some use faith to stop thinking for themselves, I use conversation to keep some of my more negative tendencies at bay. We all have negative thoughts, we all think bad things, but it’s knowing that we aren’t a bad person because we don’t act on those aberrant thoughts that ensures we remain good citizens.

But all of that is from a personal development perspective, in its somewhat lighter form, conversation can make or break your career development too.

It’s very easy to assume that you make your own way in life, that anything good you have is through your own hard work. Basically you created your life out of a vacuum. This is simply not the case.

Here we are in 2014, and anyone who in has a smartphone has access to information that we can never in a million years (quite literally) read, let alone absorb and retain. We must all categorise what we see every day into one of 3 buckets:

1. Read, absorb, and assimilate for ongoing use;

2. Skim, file away for reference; or

3. Ignore

95% of what we read is in bucket 3, 3% is in bucket 2, and only 2% is how we each use to make a career for ourselves. It is my belief that even that 2% does not truly give us full benefit until the context means something else to others as well.

You’ve probably heard the sayings; “Those that know, do. Those that understand, teach.” and “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” [Aristotle and Einstein respectively], so by definition, nothing you say or think can really make any difference until shared.

Everyone you meet is the perfect sounding board in some fashion, but it requires you to take your own ego completely out of the equation. In the end, I don’t think anyone can ever care as much about someone else’s opinion as they do their own, so surely it makes sense to listen more than talk?

I am in no way saying that you should always forego your own needs / ideas / opinions in favour of everyone else’s, but it’s only really in conversation that we can obtain either the validation we all look for, or something else to think about.

Let’s face it, none of us is perfect, and once you hit your 40’s your opinions on almost everything are pretty much set. If we can, even from time to time, shut the hell up, who knows what we’ll learn.

All that said, talking to me about sports is a great way to get yourself ignored.

[If you liked this article, please share! Want more like it, subscribe!]