When your career starts to get frustrating, sometimes it’s best to think small.
It was when Bruce Lee was working on the bent-penis project that he started to wonder about the direction of his career. It was 2011. Lee, an adman who happens to share a Kung Fu master’s name, had opted to go freelance in recent years, which had proven lucrative enough. But the projects were frustrating.
Freelancers rarely own a stake in the work that they do, which can make it harder to build wealth over time.
The gig economy is here, it’s real, and it’s global. According to a report by the Freelancers Union, 34% of American workers can now be classified as freelancers. And while that number is a subject of some debate and includes your Uber driver, it encompasses a growing number of white-collar workers as well—people who offer legal, financial, accounting, or design services on demand.
Use this strategy to find a company that fits your career goals and philanthropic ambition.
Believe it or not, despite all of the negative stereotypes you read about millennials—they lack loyalty and want a trophy just for showing up, just to name a few—there is in fact a silver lining: Millennials want work that gives back to the community.
We’re used to giving “praise sandwiches”—a criticism wedged in between two generic compliments—that give our brains indigestion.
A few years ago, I was working hard on a scrappy document that would eventually blossom into my first-ever book. It was still very early in the project, and I was hungry for guidance. So I was delighted that a colleague, who I’ll call Matt, had agreed to review my efforts and offer some constructive feedback. When he did, it went something like this:
There are some patterns in the ways we react to changing course. Startup founders in mid-pivot make for great case studies.
Nobody likes having to change directions, backtrack, or start over from scratch—especially when they’re working on something big, challenging, or that they’re passionate about. But life is full of situations that make us change course unexpectedly, and our success often depends on how we face them.
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