Brian Fetherstonhaugh (@BrianOgilvy) is the CEO of digital marketing agency OgilvyOne Worldwide and author of The Long View: Career Strategies to Start Strong, Reach High, and Go Far.
The Cheat Sheet:
- Career math: calculations to help you appreciate the length of the career journey ahead and the strategies necessary to make it to the finish line.
- What percentage of your personal wealth do you think you’ll accumulate after your 40th birthday? (The answer will probably surprise you.)
- Career fuel: what are you building today that you can carry for 40+ years?
- Career inventory: taking stock of the deep, longer term, transportable skills you’ve built over time.
- Do you succumb to temporal discounting — choosing the present known over the future possible?
- And so much more…
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It doesn’t matter how old you are: when you’re seeking employment for the first time or making a transition from one career to another, planning ahead is a challenge when you don’t even know where to begin. Unfamiliar territory is treacherous without guidance.
In his book The Long View: Career Strategies to Start Strong, Reach High, and Go Far, today’s guest Brian Fetherstonhaugh helps us strategize our options in the tempestuous job market of today with practical exercises and seasoned advice. Enjoy the show!
More About This Show
Every year, college graduates emerge — fresh with degrees and optimism — onto the job scene. Many have spent upwards of 15,000 hours learning about their intended career, but next to zero in preparation of actually securing employment.
Similarly, people who have been working in one field — perhaps for decades — decide they want to make a change and take on the challenges of a new career. They may have the will, but how do they find the way?
Brian Fetherstonhaugh, CEO of digital marketing agency OgilvyOne Worldwide and author of The Long View: Career Strategies to Start Strong, Reach High, and Go Far, has advice for hopeful job seekers on both sides of the spectrum.
“There are…exercises that are really foundational to plotting out a career path and then coming back to it,” says Brian. “It’s not once and done; you really need to build it like a muscle set that you can use over the course of your long career.”
To chart any course, it’s important to get an idea of how far ahead the destination lies. Brian begins with some quick career math: take the number 62 and deduct your current age. The result is the number of years you have until early retirement. If you’re younger, you should be preparing to run a marathon. Older? A sprinting strategy will likely serve you better.
“I don’t expect anybody to have a 40-year plan. That’s crazy!” says Brian. “But when you appreciate that the whole journey is out there — that’s a really long trip — you do start to make different decisions along the way, and you do better prepare yourself for the long ride ahead.”
It’s all about managing the pace of the journey and being prepared for the long haul without letting the twists and turns knock you off the road.
Listen to this episode of The Art of Charm in its entirety to learn more about the age most of us really accumulate the majority of our wealth, how we can gauge true mastery and become the go-to people in our chosen careers, why our network is a quality — not a volume — game, ways to identify the three different kinds of career fuel that get us ahead in the race and how to stock up early, the true value of developing persuasion and transportable skills in comparison to single-career hard skills, how we become talent magnets when we excel, what the eBay factor is, why top leaders are fantastic at giving and asking for help (and how Brian — a CEO for 30 years — puts this into weekly practice), how seeking out meaningful (and uncomfortable) experiences acts as an inoculation against the unexpected, how a network acts as an ecosystem, surefire ways to build equity with your boss, and lots more.
THANKS, BRIAN FETHERSTONHAUGH!
Resources from this episode:
- The Long View: Career Strategies to Start Strong, Reach High, and Go Far by Brian Fetherstonhaugh
- OgilvyOne Worldwide
- Brian Fetherstonhaugh at Twitter
- Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell
- AoC Episode 517: Adam Grant | Originals Move the World
You’ll also like:
- The Art of Charm Challenge (click here or text 38470 in the US)
- The Art of Charm Bootcamps
- Best of The Art of Charm Podcast
- The Art of Charm Toolbox
- The Art of Charm Toolbox for Women
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