“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. Good advice in a stable world. I can’t remember such a time – the past decades have been all about technological and market disruptions and just delivering on one’s job description doesn’t seem to be adequate – innovation is everywhere we look. Shirts have been innovated (Untuckit). Glasses? Yes (Warby Parker). Mattresses? (Casper)…should I go on? With product innovation, there are jobs getting disrupted as well – indeed, whole industries. That’s why creating personal disruptions, or “jolts,” may be the best way to be prepared for the change around you.
Have you had that moment when you stop for a breath and wonder how you got there? There can be a good place, but perhaps not one where you see yourself growing. It could be an OK place – you’re paying the bills, achievements come easily, but you’re in a situation where the people and products you are surrounded by do not excite you anymore. Sometimes only a shock can free you from some circumstances: while you’re paying the bills, that novel you have dreamed about crafting is gathering dust in the bottom drawer, while you’re peddling products you don’t believe in, you may be propping up a relationship that hasn’t been working for a while. Is it going to take another person’s breakout novel to get you to reflect, or will you jolt yourself?
Be warned – a jolt isn’t easy, and not often comfortable. A jolt stops you in your tracks, turns you around, and pushes you in another direction—unnerving though it may be. It catapults you from where you are to some other place. In my book, The Career Catapult, I outlined five steps to design and execute your jolt, before the jolt finds you. It’s about creating a kind of transformation that clarifies, cleanses, and liberates.
Interviewing startup founders, innovators inside large companies and CEOs I found a series of common themes, one of them being the willingness to play out change and build out options. Few cling on through untenable situations – and if they seem to do so, they are in reality learning and growing through alternate routes and projects. The Google 20% is one of the most systematic ways to build out a non-routine set of options and capabilities besides the “day job.” Jolting your career through first understanding yourself deeply, stalking trends to understand where the work is headed, activating your network so you can challenge your own assumptions, design and imagine career options that you test or prototype, and then position yourself for the big jolt into a new career dimension.
We think of jolts as happening to us. They’re a surprise—sometimes a shock. We understand them only in retrospect. But what if you could control the jolt? What if you could cause it to happen, program its content ahead of time, and command it? Couldn’t you then shape the transformation it produces? Couldn’t you ready yourself for a new relationship, lose the weight, finish the novel, free yourself of those silken shackles, and change jobs, careers or lifestyles and head for the life you imagine? You could, and you can.
For the most part, the average career-management guide today reads like a warrior’s manual. It tells you how to draw up your battle plan, deploy your forces, and take that hill. It trains you to go out and engage “the enemy”—the enemy in this case being the job market, the organization you want to work for, or the dream job you want to define for yourself.
Reality is actually a lot more complex, and it makes little sense to be at war with it. Taking the hill is rarely sufficient; the hill is only a stopping point between where you start and where you want to finish. Reality is about the finish, and it is about the journey towards it, day after day, as you grow into the person you want to be and can be.
Creating the disruptions that will take you forward and upward on that advance, therefore, begins with digging deep to understand who you are and who you can be. It requires knowing the context in which you advance—the economic environment and the business trends and the resources that you can draw upon. But, above all, creating the jolt is an act of the imagination and intellect, and it must be challenged and tested against the facts of reality.
So go ahead, jolt yourself!
Roopa Unnikrishnan is the head of strategy at HARMAN International, a Samsung company. She builds on almost two decades of experience in roles where she has seeded and driven change and innovation in several Fortune 500 companies. Roopa’s book, The Career Catapult, brings together her insights and experiences to help professionals think differently about their lives and careers. Roopa details a five-discipline plan for personal success, guiding readers to disrupt the status-quo and make the leap toward true satisfaction in business and life. She has run an independent consulting practice focused on innovation, and has help strategy roles at Pfizer, Citi and Katzenbach Partners NYC.
