Career Planning In 60 Seconds

If you want to find Joy, do what you love.

I published my first remix of  Bud Caddell’s ‘How To Be Happy In Business‘ 2 years ago, but some recent conversations have inspired a few fresh tweaks.

I’ve tried to distill it into a very simple tool for reviewing your current career situation and ensuring you’re on the right path to a happy and fulfilled life – hence why I call it ‘Career Planning in 60 Seconds’.

If you’ve not found the way to your central ‘heart’ yet, now’s the time to start thinking about where you want to go in your career, and in your life.

“Choose a job you love, and
you will never have to work
a day in your life.” ~ Confucius

Critically, it’s up to you to choose your path; only you can define what ‘Joy’ means for you, so don’t wait for someone else to tell you what to do.

The easiest way to start finding the way to your ‘heart’ is to write lists of all the things that fit in the three yellow (outer) circles of the diagram, based on your own unique preferences and circumstances:

‘What You Care About’ refers to the things that you love doing, that you care about, and that matter to you in the longer term:

• Your passions, e.g. music, design, photography.
• Your beliefs, e.g. environmental sustainability, education for all, societal equality.
• Your ‘soul food’, e.g. spending time with your family, community activities, teaching students.

‘What You’re Good At’ refers to your actual skills and abilities. It’s important to be honest with yourself here, and take a broad perspective:

• Identify the things that you are good at – even things you may take for granted (e.g. helping others understand complexity)
• Things that you are good at, but don’t necessarily want to do every day (e.g. a deep mastery of spreadsheets and coding)
• Avoid things you wish you were good at, but where you haven’t achieved greatness yet (e.g. true fluency in a foreign language)

‘What Pays Well’ refers to the things that keep you alive. Don’t confuse this with ‘soul food’ – this is all about feeding mouths and paying the rent:

• Most people need money to live, so regardless of whether you like that fact, take some time to work out what your desired lifestyle costs, and then add on some extra for savings and special occasions.
• However, if you genuinely believe you can be self-sufficient and survive without money, and that lifestyle appeals to you, add it to your list.
• Try to think laterally about how you might achieve your lifestyle goals too, especially in light of the things you listed for the previous two circles; could a change of city, country or lifestyle help you to make things in the other two circles more viable?

The trick is to find a job, career or vocation that links at least one thing on each of your three individual lists.

As the orange sections highlight, any form of compromise will leave you feeling incomplete, and it’s only when you can link all three yellow circles that will you find your true Joy.

However, it’s unlikely that you’ll find your way to the central heart straight away, so use these orange sections to guide your path, based on how you’d like to live your life in the meantime.

It’s also important to stress that the path to Joy will be different for everyone, and that the path is rarely clear or straightforward.

However, unless you start proactively making things happen yourself, it’s very unlikely that you’ll reach your heart by accident.

So start planning your path now, and give yourself the best possible chance of living a Joy-filled life.

Mobile Sharing

This great chart shows the fascinating contrast in the platforms people use to share content across different mobile devices.

The key question is whether this is reflective of the functionality of those devices, or of the people that use them.

From eMarketer

Bud Caddell’s Digital Strategy

Great deck from the ever-inspiring Bud Caddell, with plenty of food for thought.

Well worth 20 minutes of your time for a more in-depth read.

Google Databoard

Google have recently launched Databoard, a stunning tool that lets you find all sorts of stats and data about the online world.

Alongside offering a simple way to search for specific stats, the tool also allows you to create simple yet elegant infographics that combine a variety of data points, just by clicking a few buttons:

This video below explains more, but you can try the tool out for yourself here.

Why is Better than What

I’m a bit late to this great talk from Simon Sinek, but it really resonated with me, so I thought I’d share it here for anyone else who might have missed it (it’s also worth watching a second time if you’ve seen it before!).

Simon’s overall premise is that people buy into compelling reasons more easily than they buy into specific functions.

His argument is very well put, and the logic is very difficult to dispute, but for some reason, marketers around the world still struggle to grasp the implications.

Brands that understand why people should care are far more likely to succeed than those who just push the what.

If you want to know more, check out Simon’s Start With Why website.

Data Don’t Tell Stories

Data may not lie, but people’s selective interpretation of data can significantly change the stories they tell with data’s support.

Take this piece of analysis from the IDC, “the premier global provider of market intelligence, advisory services, and events for the information technology, telecommunications and consumer technology markets”:

Despite beating Wall Street expectations in terms of shipment volumes, Apple’s share in the worldwide smartphone operating system market posted a year-over-year decline during the second quarter of 2013 (2Q13). Meanwhile, Android and Windows Phone both managed slight increases during the same period. “The iOS decline in the second quarter aligns with the cyclicality of iPhone,” says Ramon Llamas, Research Manager with IDC’s Mobile Phone team. [from here]

Now, let’s look at the actual data:

[data source]

Of course, what the IDC notes is true – Apple’s share has declined by 340bp over the past 12 months – but the important part of the story they’ve chosen not to highlight is that Apple’s shipments still increased by 20% during the same period.

My interest here is not whether iOS is going to beat Android though; I’m merely concerned with this skewed representation of an important story.

As  with all propagandata, it’s another case of “torture numbers and they’ll tell you anything.”

Always question what the numbers really say, not what the presenter chooses to highlight.

Dazzling SlideShare Decks

Barry Feldman contacted me a while back to ask about my experiences with SlideShare.

We’ve had well over 1 million views on our We Are Social SlideShare account, and it’s become a cornerstone of our marketing, so he was curious to know if I had any tips on what makes a SlideShare deck ‘dazzle’.

Barry also collected tips from a number of his favourite SlideShare contributors, including the wonderful teams at Slides That Rock and Marketing Profs.

He collated these tips in this insightful post on the SlideShare blog a couple of days ago, but I couldn’t resist turning those tips into a deck of their own.

So here they are, uploaded to SlideShare in a (hopefully) dazzling deck of their own.

And true to the tip that I offered Barry, you can download the complete deck by clicking this link.

Social Brands & The Future of Marketing

“The best brands don’t just predict the future; they define it on their own terms.”

We’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about Social Brands in the We Are Social team, and we’ve been sharing those thoughts through our Social Brands series.

The SlideShare deck above brings all the individual presentations in the series together in one handy place.

The thinking extends well beyond these slides though, and you can find the full story behind each section in the following posts on the We Are Social blog:

Social Brands 1: Social Equity Drives Brand Equity

Social Brands 2: Communities Have More Value Than Platforms

Social Brands 3: From Ads To Added Value

Social Brands 4: Go Mobile Or Stand Still

Social Brands 5: From Big Ideas To Evolving Leitmotifs

Social Brands 6: From Selective Hearing To Active Listening

Social Brands 7: Experiences Are The New Products

Social Brands 8: CSR Evolves To Become Civic Marketing

You can also download the complete presentation deck by clicking here.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this, so feel free to share them in the comments below, or on Twitter via @eskimon.

Social, Digital and Mobile in Asia (2012 Edition)

Asia’s digital landscape continues to evolve at an astonishing rate, and staying up to date with the latest data and trends can be a challenge.

We have good news, though: today, we’re delighted to launch a new edition of our hugely popular #SDMW reports.

In the SlideShare presentation above you’ll find our Asian Overview report, with more than 100 slides of the latest facts and figures from around the region, including select highlights from each of the 24 countries we cover.

We’ll follow this overview with individual country reports over the coming weeks, each one packed with all the local stats and facts you need to understand the Social, Digital and Mobile landscapes and audience behaviours in the world’s most dynamic markets (get them here first!).

To start with, though, here are some highlights from the overview report:

• There are now well over 1 billion internet users around Asia;
• At least 811 million of these people use social media;
• 50% of the world’s social media users are in Asia;
• More than 10 million new people in Asia join Facebook every month;
• Asia is home to more than 3 billion mobile subscriptions.

All of these numbers are significantly higher than those we reported in the previous edition of the #SDMW series that we released back in November 2011:

• The number of internet users in the region has grown by almost 14%;
• Users of the top social network in each country around Asia have increased by more than 8%;
• Mobile subscriptions have seen growth of more than 12%.

It’s not just the growth in user numbers that are impressive, however; netizens in Asia spend almost 2 million years of combined time on the internet every month, watching almost 45 billion online videos.

That’s more than half a trillion videos every year.

We also noted a continued trend of diversity in behaviour around the region.

Despite becoming Facebook’s biggest region just a few weeks ago*, the world’s favourite social network ranks just 4th in Asia by user figures. However, Buddy Media found that Facebook is still the platform of choice for brands around the region, with almost 9 in 10 Asian companies giving it a ‘Like’. They also report that two thirds of Asian companies on social media have a presence on Twitter.

Most companies focus the majority of their social media efforts on marketing, but figures suggest an increasing number of Asian brands are adopting social media for customer service purposes too.

Meanwhile, the mobile opportunity is becoming increasingly important around Asia too, with 4 in 5 companies in the region stating that mobile social is “an important part” of their overall strategy.

Be sure to check out the full deck for many more insights. Meanwhile, if you’re looking for regular updates on Social, Digital and Mobile news around Asia and beyond, be sure to check our Tuesday Tuneup and 5FF blog posts each week. Even better, you can sign up to have them delivered to your email by clicking this link.

You can download the full PDF by clicking here – if you do, please show your support by sharing this post in a tweet.

And for those of you who are stuck behind a firewall and can’t view SlideShare, justsend us an email and we’ll be happy to send you a copy of the report.

[this post originally appeared on our We Are Social blog]

Social, Digital and Mobile in Asia

We’ve been sharing in-depth profiles of the social, digital and mobile landscapes of 24 Asian countries over on the We Are Social Singapore blog over recent weeks.

We’ve still got a few left to publish, but here’s the regional overview to whet your appetite:

Come on over to the We Are Social blog to see detailed stats on China, India, and many more countries as well.