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Career Savings Account
I came up with this concept for the career savings account by going through my own do over moment. After 15 years in corporate America, I transitioned out of corporate America and it was not a bad transition or a good transition. It was just a big transition. I went through my own do over moment and all these people started coming up to me in the weeks that followed and thought, “Wow, a transition is always horrible. It’s going to be so difficult.” I realized, I felt fear because in every big story, there’s fear the bigger, the story, the bigger of a dragon, but I didn’t feel as incapable as everybody thought I’d felt. I started to realize I’d been investing in my career in some unknown, but deliberate ways for the last few years. I started to study the other careers of other people and realize that in every do over, and if you want to be able to navigate it, there’s four things you need.
I came up with this career savings account, and it’s relationships, plus skills, plus character, times hustle. That’s what a career savings account is. The challenges most of us are taught to spend 18 years getting ready for college. Then we graduate and the next thing we get ready for is death and retirement. There’s this 40-year gap where we don’t lean into our careers. We just accept the job as just a job. There’s really not even a good industry to support it. Let’s say you’re a 32-year old developer right now, and you have this career crisis. Who do you even call? If you have a financial crisis, you know who to call, you call your financial person. If you have a health issue, you know where to call, but if you have a career crisis, what do you do? What phone number do you pick up? Where do you go online?
I started to learn that people that had great careers, people that went on big adventures, people that chased dreams, they had all four of those. You need all four because if you only have three of them and you’re missing the last one, the whole thing falls apart. The simple definition of relationships to me is the people you lock arms with during an adventure. If you want to figure out who your friends are, go through a negative unexpected career moment, go through a bump. What you learn is the people you thought would show up, the people you thought would run to the situation, disappear. The people you didn’t even know knew you existed, show up out of nowhere to stand with you and lock arms and say, “We’re going to do this.”
Skills to me are the bridge between amateur and expert. Skills are how you get from being an amateur and how you actually turn into an expert. They’re the things that you learn that are tangible that matter to your career skills are the hammer that helps you break through a ceiling. Character at the simplest level is who you are. It’s who you are. It’s such a funny little rear differentiation because characters, while people say things like, “There’s something about her, I just can’t put my finger on, but I think she’s the right person for the job, or get me Tim. There’s something about what he brings to this team that’s different,” and it’s character they’re describing. They just don’t have the words for it. The challenge with character as an investment is it’s a slow build. Character is one of those things that takes a while to build up, but can be drained instantly. We’ve all seen politicians, celebrities, musicians that had a character investment drain instantly with one thing that happened, we live in that kind of culture right now, but character takes time. It’s important to your long-term career.
If we want to look at hustle, hustle’s been a word that’s been denigrated on the internet. It sounds like an Axe body spray flavor right now. Everybody’s always hustling. It’s kind of annoying at this point, but hustle, the simple definition is doing the important things others don’t to enjoy the results others won’t. Hustle is an act of focus, not frenzy. It’s not about working harder and faster and crazier and becoming a workaholic. No, it’s about learning to focus. Hustle is a scalpel. It helps you eliminate things you’re not supposed to be doing and focus on the things that matter the most.
We need all four of those parts and they all help each other. You need hustle to be tempered by your relationships. We all have friends that hustle and hustle and hustle, and they roll over people. We need relationships to balance that out. We need character to play off of our skills and it all works together in concert. What’s fun about a career savings account is no one has a bankrupt career savings account. The ideas aren’t that revolutionary. Nobody watches this video will tweet me @JonAcuff, “You said the word skills, never heard of that. You mentioned relationships, blew my mind.”
Investing in Your Security
Here’s the security that a career savings account provides you with. Number one, you will never have a job where they hope you have less skills. You will never have a job where they say, “You’re just too well connected in this industry. We wish you had less relationships. We wish you were less connected. We wish you had less character.” Unless you’re in the mob, like unless you’re watching this right now and you’re like, “I’m in the mob,” character’s probably not going to be an issue for you, but you’ll always have jobs that those four things are going to matter on. The thing that’s great about a career savings account is no matter where your career goes, you’re going to need all four of those because technology changes. By the time we finish this video, by the time you get off this video, your youngest, coolest friend’s going to say, “Are you not on that new social media platform, double upside down red rhino? Everybody is. It’s like Facebook times Snapchat underscore Twitter. You’re so old. You’re don’t have a profile. Are you getting enough calcium for your bones?”
Our world is changing quickly, but those four things are things that no matter what you do in your next job or the job 10 years from now, you’re going to need hustle. You’re going to need skills. You’re going to need relationships and you’re going to need character. The security that it provides is that when you go through a bump moment and you will, you have relationships you can rely on. When you get stuck at a job, you have skills that can help you get unstuck, when you get opportunities you never saw coming. You’ll have the hustle to work on that opportunity and grow it. When you jump, when you move to that new city, when you try that new thing, when you get brave, you’ll have the character that’ll propel you.