By now you’ve figured out your values and strengths. You really did your research and have identified a career path, a destination, a goal. Now it’s time to make a plan for how to get there.
But stop! Check out this video first about goals and the journey! [when Dr. Srikumar refers to ‘universe’, I interpret that to mean ‘God’]
“Goals are important but they are only important because they set direction. Once the direction has been set forget about the goal, don’t even think about that. Instead pour all of your emotional energy into ‘what do I have to do to achieve my goal’.”
When you enjoy the journey and are detached from the outcome, the more likely you are to reach your goal. Why? Because in your journey you WILL hit obstacles (and if you don’t your goals weren’t high enough!). Your mindset when hitting these obstacles is critical. Will you take them as a learning experiences and find a better way, or will you see them as failures toward achieving your goal and just quit? If you have the correct mindset, you’ll learn during the process and enjoy it. You’ll understand that the obstacles are there to help you grow, not knock you down!
Obviously you’re going to want to keep your end goal in mind when setting your strategy. But also think of what process you’d enjoy while getting there. You have to enjoy the process or it’ll be tough to ever get to your destination. Think about it – you’re trying to get to the top of Pike’s Peak in Colorado. Everyone tells you that hiking is the best way to get to the top. But you hate hiking and have a bad knee. Are you really going to enjoy getting to the top by hiking? And once you get there, will all of the torture be worth it? Probably not! On the other hand, what if there was another way… a scenic train ride that better suits your style. Maybe that’s a better way for you – by relaxing and enjoying the views. Not only will you enjoy the process of reaching the top more, but you’ll be a lot happier once you get there!
Here are some ideas to help you get started
Go back to some of the people you talked – ask them how they got into the field and if they have any suggestions for you!
Examine as many job descriptions as you can and identify your gaps. Do you need extra training or experience?
Let your manager know what your career goals are. He/she should be more than happy to work on a plan with you!
Volunteer to work on projects related to that field. Let’s say your a software engineer and want to get into user experience. Talk to that team, the manager of that team or a lead. Let them know your intent and find out if there are any projects that they need help with!
Take training courses, get certifications.
Go back to school!
Take part-time courses through a university.
Consider internships. Internships are not just those in college, but you can consider them for career moves especially if the move is a big change.
Consider how you’ll want to present yourself. How will you present transferable skills, your new experiences and education?
Attend workshops, seminars and industry conferences.
How do you figure out what you want to do next in your career? For some it’s obvious and for others the decision can seem utterly daunting, so much that it freezes them in their path. If you are considering a career change and you’ve found yourself here, congratulations! You’re already taking steps to figure out what you want to do next!
Before you consider any options, it’s extraordinarily important to understand your values and unique strengths. Aligning your career path to your values can quite literally make or break your decision. So if you haven’t already done so, check out my advise on how to understand your values and strengths here.
Now that you know your values and strengths, you can begin identifying your destination. The destination is your end goal, where you want to be. Without a goal it’s hard to know what steps to take to get there. Here are the steps I took to identify my goal:
Write down values and strengths. Know them inside and out, by memory so that there’s no need to constantly reference. You just know them.
Throw all pre-conceived notions of what you can do out the window. This is not the time to filter and especially not the time to limit what you think you can do!
Consider all possibilities. Think of it as a brainstorming activity. While brainstorming, everything is on the table. If you need help getting started, check out this article and consider their recommended questions!
Write down your initial reaction to some of these ideas. Before giving any thought, what do you think? The purpose of this exercise is to try to tap into your sub-conscience. Your sub-conscience is an incredibly insightful tool that guides you, so try to figure out what it’s telling you!
Talk to those in field to find out what the role really entails. People will gladly tell you all about what they do, so have fun with it. Try to get as accurate a picture as you can of their role, from the good to the bad. Don’t forget that what might be challenging for one person could be a great fit for you, and what your interviewer loves might be a challenge for you.
Take a close look at your list. See how they match your values. See how they match your values. See how they match your values. Yes, I said it 3 times! Immediately discard any career paths that don’t match your values, but keep 2-3 that appear to be good fits.
Identify ways that your natural strengths could be especially useful in the role.
Sit on some ideas for a while – like weeks or months. Deep dive. Keep in mind that first reaction from step #4. Envision what it you think it’d be like to be in certain roles. Don’t let the obstacles of getting there prevent you from picking a destination!
Through the process, one career choice will eventually rise to the top. It’ll sound so interesting to you. You’ll get excited just thinking about what it’d be like to be in that role.
Its about the journey, not the goal https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Op8jSxpxA3A
Understand yourself to maximize your value and fulfillment!
When you know who you are, it is much clearer to understand how you can stand out and maximize your potential. This is a critical first step in figuring out what things you should and shouldn’t be doing. Without knowing yourself, the temptation to compare or copy what others are doing can be extremely detrimental. By understanding your own unique self you’ll gain confidence in what areas to focus so that you can be successful. This is your own personal selling proposition and its the critical foundation for all important future decisions!
But where do you start? Start with understanding your values.
You beliefs become your thoughts, your thoughts become your words, yours words become your actions, your actions become your habits, your habits become your values, your values become your destiny. -Mahatma Gandhi
Your values should dictate your actions, actions will then dictate emotions and then these influence your thoughts. Actions, emotions and thoughts are all related and they are guided by your own personal values. Think of values as the lighthouse guiding you. As long as your actions align with your values, emotions and thoughts will fall into place. This will give you vigor, you’ll feel alive and excited about the work you’re doing, which ultimately will lead to success!
Subconsciously, you probably know your values. Writing them down and knowing for sure what they are is another story. It can be challenging! I found this online test to be really useful and accurate. It costs $20 and takes about 50 minutes, and it’s a fantastic investment to make on yourself. Values Profile Test
Once you’ve figured out your values, its time to understand your strengths. This is best done in a variety of ways. Take a close look at significant experiences, both good and bad. These significant experiences can shed light on what you are really good at and what you aren’t. You can also take personality and strength tests, ask others what they think, read performance reviews you’ve been given. Take it all together and a picture of your own strengths will become more clear.
Are you still a little unclear? Here’s a book I’ve taken a myriad of strength based tests, and this is the one I’ve found the most useful. I’ve take it three times over the course of ten years and my results were identical!
Aim to have a clear and concise list of your strengths (5-10 is ideal). Then really think about the single strength that speaks to you most. Its likely this strength will also align nicely with your value system. Take this one strength and focus on it the most! This one strength will help you maximize your full potential.
My values and strengths
I have to be honest – I didn’t start this journey by understanding my own value system. Intuitively I understood them but they were always hard to verbalize; I’m sure you can relate. Knowing your values is hard, and it took me years of life experiences to figure out. I took and thought through the results to understand myself.
VALUES Wisdom – Understanding, intelligence, good judgement, intuition, personal growth, innovation, approach to work is logical, efficient, and well thought out Realistic – Productiveness and usefulness, achieving an efficient return on investment of time, money and effort. Practical, reasonable, and think actions through before acting Empathy – Understanding the needs and sufferings of others Aesthetics – Creative, unusual way of thinking, and want the environment that they surround themselves with to be reflective of that. Things need to be aesthetically pleasing. Love – Patience, kindness, trust, forgiveness, compassion Integrity – Honesty, truthfulness, reliability, justice, sincerity
If you want to invest in yourself, start with understanding your values. It has helped me immensely in deciding the best career path to take; product management! Product Managers must be innovative, logical and think things through (Wisdom). They need to be aware of the ROI for all of their team’s efforts (Realistic). Their number one job is to understand their customers (Empathy). They also must have a keen product sense of what makes certain products stand out (Aesthetics, Wisdom and Empathy). While managing teams they must be able to earn trust (Integrity) and be kind and thoughtful to the needs of their teams (Love). With this in mind, some of the core traits that make good product managers are also a part of my core value system, therefore it should be a good fit.
STRENGTHS and NATURAL ABILITIES
Contrary to values, I’ve been keenly aware of my own strengths for a long time. Early in my career I had a fantastic manager who helped his whole team by having them take several strength and abilities tests. We went offsite to better understand these which you’ve probably done too. At first I thought the results were interesting, but years later I took one of those test again. To my surprise the results were identical! Not only that, but I was asked to take the test yet again even more years later and the results were the same the third time! So, I’m a big believer in this test and the power of focusing on your strengths while minimizing your weaknesses. Here is that book. They’ll even provide a personalized action plan. Get it!!!
So what are my strengths? See below. I’ve also included a “natural abilities” list that is a combination of several other tests that gave me even more insight.
The one strength that intrigued me the most was individualization. Most of my other strengths do a great job of explaining why I’ve had so much success in various product development and cross-functional leadership roles. Certainly this strength of individualization played a part, but it’s the one strength that I always seem to think about and notice. Somehow I’m able to put myself in another person’s shoes easily. I can understand them and anticipate what they want or need. It seems like a unique strength to have and therefore I decided to focus on that the most and make it my “selling point”. Taking action to understand another’s view falls nicely in line with my value of empathy, so I believe this is a really strong strength to use as a differentiator.
Wrapping things up, if you can figure out what you values are, what you natural strengths and abilities are, you’ll truly understand yourself! You won’t compare yourself to others as that will be unproductive. They have their own strengths and you have yours. So what are your own personal values? Do you live by them on a daily basis? And what are your strengths? Do you currently work towards maximizing them? If you’re finding success in life you are! I’d love to hear from you below!
Before we begin today’s pitch, please let me give you some background. I’ve been a competitive cyclist for about 15 years. Racing takes a higher level of commitment, so I haven’t raced all of those years, but I have been around it for long enough to really understand the customer base. I train with my race team, travel with them and have spent countless hours talking about all-things riding. When I first started, there was no such thing as interactive apps, training guides… cell phones were hardly a thing, ha ha! In those days if you wanted to get fast and train correctly, you had to read and figure it all out yourself. And so I read “The Cyclists Training Bible” over and over. I wanted to figure out how to apply the principles outlined in the book easily, so I wrote a program. It was awesome, really easy to use and I had a small following of guys who used it and depended on the updates every year. I even reached out to the author of this book (Joe Friel) to see if he was interested in partnering to make it more sale-able, but didn’t have luck with that. Coincidentally Training Peaks came out soon after and had quite a few similarities to my program….hmmmmm J. But my point is, I’ve been thinking about how to apply cycling training principles easily for A LONG TIME! Today we have several companies that automate a lot of the planning and workouts and they are all based on power (you need to have a power meter). I won’t go into the technicalities of training with power, but know that it can take time and proper planning to “peak” for a race that you want to do well in. Let get into it. This is Thor. He a typical customer of Trainer Road. He races and takes it seriously. He uses TR all winter and loves the workouts. He follows them pretty closely as this is easy to do in the winter. He lives in an area that gets a lot of snow and where it gets dark in the evenings quickly, and so to help in these long winter months, he uses TR to tell him what he needs to do. It works and every spring he comes out strong! But after that the weather starts getting better he starts riding outside. TR doesn’t work outside, so initially he tries to follow a pseudo plan. But it doesn’t take long before he’s just “riding” and not really “training”. He’s noticed that after the spring, his fitness never improves and he wishes he could follow a program like TR only in the summer. He needs help in the summer too! I suspected Thor’s story was pretty common… at least it is in my circle of cyclists. So I put out a survey. I asked 850 cyclists who are part of a facebook group in the Boise area to complete a survey. 31 responded and the results were exactly what I suspected. But as I internalized the results more, I realized that we have a huge business opportunity in the area of outdoor training. 75% of competitive cyclist use a power based training system in the WINTER ONLY! But really interesting is that 30% said they wished they had a training tool for riding outside, and this is where the majority of their riding occurs. Here are some more stats extracted from that survey. You really start getting a sense of the user pain-points and business opportunity here. 50% are disengaged from their training apps for a majority of the year! They cancel subscriptions, etc, but interestingly, they are willing to pay a decent amount for the ability to train outside… I asked! Here’s a quick estimate of the business opportunities we have. If I worked for trainer road, I’d be able to run some SQL code to dig into the numbers more accurately, but this is what I can do for now. Please note this is for US only! Europe is probably 2-3 times the size. 70,000 competitive cyclists is the number registered with USA cycling. I figure that not all of these cyclist train and some might not race. But there’s also a portion of competitive cyclists that don’t register with USA cycling, so these two groups probably cancel each other out. The numbers “feel right” considering various stats I’ve seen and even number of employees at TR per linkedin. The first opportunity is to stop the bleeding with customers cancelling subscriptions. Not only does this hurt us financially, but it shows we’re doing nothing for our customers during this time. The second is acquiring new customers. Considering the survey, I’m estimating the opportunity for TR at $3,2M in the US only… if we can nail it! 30% is from customers of zwift, sufferfest and then just “other”. The potential is there to possibly double revenue, but in an actual business setting with TR we’d do a deep dive into this number. This is too large of a problem that the industry doesn’t know about it, at least that’s what I think. I think solutions are in the making, and if they aren’t, great! A fun thing about the cycling industry is that things don’t change as quickly as other tech, so it’s a little easier to predict into the future (example disk road brakes). But here’s a look at the competition we know of right now. Training Peaks and Today’s Plan has the ability to sync with a Garmin or Wahoo device. Here, take a look at my Wahoo. I have it set to follow a workout – check out how ’90’s this looks! The interface is extremely rudimentary, but it can be done. Users of Zwift, TR and Sufferfest are out of luck for the summer. But there is talk about how to bring these tools outside. See the link. This dude actually puts a PC in his backpack to make Zwift work outside! Clearly customers are thinking about it. Check out the comments… some say “brilliant idea”. As for Stages… I tested Stages for 2 months. It’s a good app, but extremely complicated. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone not willing to invest serious time into figuring it out. My Chemistry professor friend loves it, but he’s the only one I know that uses it religiously. So here’s a fantastic, modern solution for Thor’s problem. We take the current TR app and tweak it (significantly) so that it can be used outside. Very importantly – we start off by offering an Android and IOS cell phone for less than $300. Only one of the 31 cyclists I surveyed were willing to use their own personal cell phone as a head unit, so it’s important to offer a dedicated cycling phone/head unit. The second critical change is the feature to navigate forward, backward between intervals. Imagine you have 5 intervals to complete, 5 minutes each. TR’s program has you starting at 10 minutes in. But it’ll take you 20 minutes to get to a good location to do these intervals. TR outside must be able to accommodate for this (something we’re not concerned with inside). And so Thor uses this training system for an entire season. It works! He loves it as he is able to get faster in the summer by following TR’s planned workouts! It’s one of those kinds of things where he wonders what he ever did before TR outside. He’s completely engaged to the app as he sees it during every ride. He even finds himself spending more time in the app when he’s not riding, analyzing his power numbers. There’s literally nothing not to like about it, and it makes training a lot of fun… he is hooked to TR! He even finds himself less concerned about Strava segments and more concerned about hitting his prescribed power numbers. Thor knows that these Strava segments haven’t done much good for his training, so he’s thankful to have a different goal to work towards. Thanks you TR Outside! Let’s talk about the strategy for developing this and getting it into our customer’s hands. We’re going to take an agile approach so that we get customer feedback early on. We don’t want to wait for every single function to be perfected before releasing as we may not even know if these features are what customers really want! The first step is to release an MVP. We could limit availability and advertise primarily to testers and our beta group. It would be a supplement to user’s current head unit. We have to get the training and interval functionality right as this is the most important differentiator of this whole initiative. I’d like to talk to the dev team to understand if it makes sense to go ahead and put GPS data in the MVP (especially for testing), but right now I’m not sure. After that we’d make this more official and take care of all of the “satisfiers”. We’d be able to replace user’s head units and have a very powerful tool for training. You can argue that the interval functionality makes this version a delighter, but we don’t want to stop there. We want to completely drop the competition. That’s where we take advantage of all the functionality of a cell phone and start adding in features that cyclists can only dream of right now. Like usable maps! Imagine if you could download a race course on your TR app and see exactly where you are on the course… how many climbs are left, etc. Brilliant!!! Let’s take a look at the main players in the industry and where we see them going compared to TR Outside. Obviously it’s hard to predict exactly what our competition will do, but we know enough about them to make reasonable guesses right now. Starting with Zwift… they have nailed the indoor training market with their interactive app. We don’t see this translating into real-world outdoor use, so we think their feature set gradually gets better, but doesn’t change the overall effectiveness of year-round training. Training Peaks will most likely continue to partner with third party hardware solutions like Garmin and Wahoo to implement training workouts outside. Strava is the biggest unknown and honestly they scare me the most. They have by far the largest customer base, they have workouts, they have an app for recording GPS data… really the only thing missing is real-time power based workouts like TR. It would not take them long to develop a solution as good as TR Outside 1.2, and if they did it would be really stiff competition for us. On the flip side, if Strava doesn’t react to the market need for structured outdoor training, TrainerRoad Outside has the chance to blow away the competition, and this should get us as a team very excited! We’ll measure our success through engagement and revenue. Specifically for engagement, we’ll measure Daily Active Users to see how much customers are using our app and well as conversion rate… that is specifically how many are purchasing a dedicated cycling phone. We’ll also measure how much more our workouts are being used and this is easy to measure. If engagement increases, it means we’re on the right track and offering something our customers want. Increased revenue should follow, and we’ll measure Average Revenue per User and really importantly, Customer Lifetime Value. By understanding the project lifetime value, we may see significant gains. Imagine… you are a racer and use trainer road. You decide to stop racing for whatever reason (it happens all of the time). Obviously you’d quit the TR subscription. But if TR offered a year-round solution to training and recording data, you might reconsider and just keep your subscription, even if you aren’t racing. This could be huge!!!! Lastly, we’ll monitor the overall market and try to grow our share. For our GTM plan, we’ll have a different strategy for our MVP vs the first version that can completely replace a head unit. But let’s talk about our first unit that will be able to replace head units. Internal discussion is needed before deciding on HW options to offer, but I’m throwing our an iphone7 and Galazy s7. These are older generation phones, but get us to the price point we need. We could also go with a phone offered in 2019, but it couldn’t be a flagship phone. The mount we’d offer with it is from Quad-Lock. Users could purchase directly from TR or fro Amazon 3PSellers. Obviously this scenario means a team to manage HW, and this is new for TR. The MVP would allow us to experiment with how to manage HW internally as well, before going full-on live. Promotionally, we’d follow what we normally do… talk about it on our podcast, website and all social media. We’d also try to get this in the hands of product reviewers and bloggers.
In your brain there are 4 glass jars that hold 4 chemicals
that control how you feel. By understanding what these chemicals are and how
they are released, you can gain an enormous understanding behind human
psychology.
Dopamine – one of the best short-term feelings you can get.
Feeling of results, accomplishing a goal. It’s released when something really
good happens. It doesn’t last forever, so one seeks to get it more and more.
Can be very addictive. Feeling of euphoria. When you accomplish a huge goal you’ve
set for yourself, your brain will release a high level of dopamine. Sometimes
it can be so high that you can’t sleep! Dopamine causes you to feel amp’ed.
Released from achievement.
Illicit drugs, alcohol also release dopamine, but it is
artificial. These substances do cause your brain to release a huge amount of
dopamine, and this is why they can be habit forming. They crack the jar that
holds the dopamine. If abused too long, it can be hard to crack this jar
natural ways, and this is why addiction can be so difficult to overcome.
Oxytocin – the warm fuzzy hormone. Love, trust, bond. It’s
released when you hug someone, have sex, hold someone’s hand. It’s even
released when you pet your dog, snuggle up to your cat. Oxytocin gives you that
warm feel good sensation. When a football player scores a touchdown and chest
bump their teammates, give high fives… not only is dopamine released from
scoring that touchdown, but oxytocin is also released from the interaction with
teammates.
Serotonin – makes you feel calm and relaxed, helps regulate
your general mood. The best way to control serotonin is to be in your happy
place, whatever that is. Being in nature, living in a comfortable home, being with
friends and loved ones. Also released when you feel important. Important to
focus on the importance you have rather than the importance others give you.
Endorphins – Released when you do a lot of exercise. Brief
euphoria that masks physical pain. Laughing, crying, eating spicy foods
stimulates endorphins. Varying your exercise routine can help release them.
Your brain wants all of these chemicals. They connect
neurons in your brain to help you function optimally. Your brain learns to get
more of these. Each happy chemical has a specific job to do. Why we’re always
looking for ways to turn on our happy chemicals. It’s why when we find
something that works for us, we repeat it. A habit then forms (30-45 days
through repetition). But unfortunately, once you’ve found a great formula, the jars
will begin releasing slightly less and less of these chemicals, and this is why
it’s important to change, form new healthy habits.
