My career was blessed by two simple but fortunate decisions I made in my early teens. The first was to decide very clearly what I did not want to do or become, and avoid these topics like they were the plague. Secondly, I listened carefully to my heart and head at the same time, and heard what they suggested in terms of what I was naturally better at or interested in.
I sensed early on that I was better with numbers than the arts. Next, I observed that I preferred dollar signs to co-sines, so I pursued business rather than engineering studies. I was more comfortable being loud than quiet, and made lots of similarly small trade-offs. What I deliberately did was to make the circle of what I was better at or more interested in smaller and smaller. Warren Buffett calls this “staying within your circle of competence”.
What this means is to decrease the range or breadth of things you find meaningful, whilst at the same time increasing the depth of how you understand and improve the skills related to this body of knowledge and expertise. I mindfully stumbled into things that spoke to me emotionally and intellectually, committed to what I was expected to learn, was privately proud of my self-learning and let these insights wholeheartedly lead me on. By my middle twenties I found my career and in my early thirties I discovered my calling.
What was critical was to always stay within my decreasing circle of competence. And at the same time, to TOTALLY BUY-IN WITH HEART, BODY AND SOUL. Decreasing the scale but increasing the scope of my world was awesome and completely ME. It became easier and easier to enter a state of flow where a sense of self and time disappeared, where high challenge was coupled with high levels of skill. A career becoming a calling that happened organically. Even now I still discover or re-invent new circles of competence which I get totally excited about. I focused almost exclusively on my strengths, but managed my weaknesses where unavoidable.
You can do the same: find, invest in, commit to and be proud of your circles of competence.
Reflection Source: www.Smallercup.org
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