Rethinking Failure - It's not the End, but a Starting Point in Your Career
We are told that the best careers are linear. Think again.
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Doing a career reset, whether due to external influence or internal reorientation, still gets demonised quite heavily.
Friends might say: "Oh, not another reinvention."
Parents might say: "We are really starting to worry, at your age we were on a clear trajectory and knew where we were going."
Even some recruiters or hiring managers might say: "This is a wobbly candidate, they either change their mind all the time or got fired in their last jobs. In any ways, not a stable hire."
In short, we are somehow made to feel as if we are a failure if we don't pick a lane and stick to it.
We are here to tell you today: "Don't believe any of it."
We believe that a CV with twists and turns speaks of somebody who is alive. Somebody who awake and aware of their lives and motivations and takes the freedom to choose. Somebody who is willing to walk away from a job or company that longer suits them. Somebody strong and fearless. And that's the kind of somebody we would hire.
Now, we are not advertising to bounce about aimlessly, you do need a plan. The trick is to remain open to the variety of paths that might lead you to your destination, keep your narrative straight when you tell someone about your choices and remain clear in your articulation of transferrable skillsets.
It's all a bit abstract? Let's do a bit of storytime then shall we?
One of our recent guests on the HIGHER! Career Podcast was Duarte Garrido, Head of Social Media for Coca-Cola HBC. Let us tell you: he's had a wild career journey. Trained chef, blue collar work, multiple rounds of university and unpaid internships, global nomad, corporate social media mastermind. Along this ride, there were plenty starting and stopping points that others might call failure. What made it work for Duarte was his ability to not only network, but connect to people along the way. That and a most wonderful quality of his: realising how many transferrable skills you can pick up as you cruise along. To quote: "What I learned about team work and collaboration in my time as a blue collar worker has taught me more than any business school ever could."
If you want to learn more about how Duarte turned apparent failure into opportunity, have a listen to his episode on the HIGHER! Career Podcast here.
Arnaud Henneville-Wedholm had it all. A viable software alternative to rival Facebook, venture capital, angel investors and 6 years of skin in the tech start-up game. His product never launched. Failure right? In another episode on our show, Arnaud told us about something quite magical. He told us about how he turned this apparent failure into a new business that is turning all the heads. Arnaud decided to write and launch a book called "How Hard Can It Be?", doing something that we love to do on our show: dispelling the myth that creating and successfully launching an investment backed start-up is an easy way to make money. The big kicker is that this book was backed by some of the same investors that he had "let down" with the start-up. Failure people, is a matter of perspective.
Should you be keen to hear his full story and learn how you too can change the way that you feel by looking at the world with fresh eyes, click here.
The take-away for us is this:
Know where you want to be, but remain open to the path you take to get there. Life has a way of presenting us with forked roads, twists and turns. Being able to explore them because you know that all of them lead into the right direction is one of life's great pleasures.
Let's go get it,
Nikki and Tom