前情回顾:
参加了zero work讲座,aka,Goose的职场建议.
是两位学长小哥讲的,真诚且温柔,对身心都有极大的帮助.
末了宣传了学校concept组织的另一个讲座,Larry Smith教授的What’s your problem讲座.
这名字有一点点出戏(no offence),也想体验人的气息,顺手报了名.
教授12年的ted talk.
Larry Smith: Why you will fail to have a great career
这个讲座是给career指导,或者像是人生指导的定位.
老教授人狠话直白,比起学长的鸡汤就像是烈酒.
不愧姜还是老的辣,张口三句我就默默打开atom记博客.
老教授很诚实:
你将来的老板是想让员工像狗一样的工作,不要抱有幻想.
那么你自己想做些什么的.
如果把自己定位成“a set of skills”来推销自己,那是错误的.要更加注重,发觉自己的潜能,那就得把自己定位成problem solver.
不要浪费你的才能!教授再三强调.
回想起17年数学系开学典礼的时候,有位教授也说过类似的话.
At the end of the day, everything comes down to problem solving, and math is a great way to train your problem solving skills.
接老教授,
What do you want to do when you grow up?
You should think yourself as a person, and a occupation.
Then what kinds of problem you want to solve? This should be your first career question, instead of a package of skills.
Then what’s the next step?
If you thinks as an enterprise, or, a kickass employee.
You don’t just solve problem.
We just add one word, one lousy simple small word.
What important problem do you want to solve？
And no waffling about it.
And, don’t use your age as an excuse! Start to be seriously ambitious with respect to your talent and what you can achieve.
When you are the person in your company that solves important problems, the stress of your job falls immediately. What happens to the person?
They promote faster, they get paid better, and they have mobility.
There’s a risk new adventure always failing.
You’re solving important problems, the risk diminishes. Why? Important problems, don’t need customer discovery.
Customers are bitchy and complaining about important problems. So when you do important problem, half of the risk disappear, there is no risk can you sell it, there’s a single risk: can you make it work.
这段教授好猛啊.
Where do you find important problems? Everywhere!
You want to know what important people are concern about. Read what important people are reading.
For example, The Globe and Mail. Another one is Bloomberg Businessweek*.
These won’t give you the depth of the knowledge but an opening.
The third one is The Economist from the United kingdom.
然后教授讲到了每个graduate student all knows one important problem, that limit the science or all kinds.
研究论文呢(笑).
All graduate students are research degree, and the most horrifying tasks to undertake is literature review.
Literature review is horrifying boring job, as you read and there’s new article being published every single day. That’s most of the professors and graduate students achieve with, there’s an important problem.
教授举例,比如亚马逊figure out their problem is not just selling books online but selling everything online.
Another example, an average student studies financial management at this university knows about.
What do you take the finance number of a company and understand its circumstance.
There’s a title called Catalyst.
Make faster to analysis financial data: They input public data, they build standard financial models for 5 thousand different public trade company and they sell it to financial professional so they don’t have to do it themselves.
Create productivity improvement, for important activities.
讲座到此结束了,在Q&A里教授讲了个有事.
Most students find their problem on their coop jobs.
Because they ended up, they were alerted, paid attention as they move to their graduating degree with more aggressive coop jobs, they actually identify their problem in one case because they were being asked to help solves important problem which was being poorly addressed in an existing fashion. So one of the greatest advantages in that case, they had an intimate understand of the problem because they were right in the thick of it.
They had a customer copping with important problem, they were doing some of the work paid by the employer, it was very logical for them thinking, like why don’t we fix it ourselves and they went to their coop employer, and the employer said yes. 8 months later they started, they were cash positive. 18 months later they can pay themselves professional salaries and still have net cash from their adventure.
So the point is the real first step is once you identify your problem interests you, then what you do is to understand it.
You will look for mistakes other people had made with respect to previous attempt solving the problem.
在讲bad problem will cost you 5 years of your life, it won’t success and it won’t just go away之后,last few words is about independence and courage.(意外)
You should always say to yourself, is this logical?
Some of you, identity problem interests you, it is important, this is what you should do. You think you have brainpower to try to understand it but you are, afraid.
It takes patient to exercise strategy, and you need courage.
I can’t say anything about how you find courage, except to say you need it. I invited you to find it, in some quiet time think about what it is you really want to accomplish, over the next half century.
Achieve your potential is a lifetime endeavour.
教授还打趣说自己活不了再50年,所以比起他你们要更加concern哦.
离开了滑铁卢,滑铁卢抽象的永远在身边…
说实话,对现在的我还很遥远,但教授的话在意想不到的位置狠狠地安慰到了我.
并不是创业家的思维,而是……更单纯的……
最后附教授所属的problem lab网址以及学校书单: