Five Fundamental Steps to Thrive Professionally in the New Productivity Era

The game has changed, are you ready to play?

So much productivity and career advice misses the mark.

It’s the reason there are piles of nauseating airport self-help books with shiny aphorisms and keywords that distract from the real objective:

Becoming an impossible to ignore, value creating professional with ever increasing abundance and choice in your respective field.

This goes for employees and entrepreneurs. This involves many types of work. Whether you’re a data analyst or a sales rep, technically you are in the same game.

I am a full time professional and published author, and I’ve primarily honed my capabilities in a rapid growth, 9 figure, fortune 500 medical device firm doing operational strategy and optimization. Further, I sold in a startup company early career closing deals as large as 20k doing a specialized, technical sales. In a pure business sense, I grew the top line and bottom lines of the companies I serve/have served. I’ve built my professional brand and impact on two core competencies which I love sharing with professionals like you:

Deep work and productivity.

The thing is, you can’t transform your career with short catchy Tweets and sugary tips and hacks. This short form thinking in my eyes is tragic, because it short circuits a better strategy for professional success.

Going to battle with this flavor of short sighted, misleading, and underserving style of narrative is one of the reasons I wake up in the morning to write and why I love to riff on productivity thinking. You can really go deep with this stuff and its game changing and worth it to spend the time.

As a professional with battle scars and years in the trenches I’m here to tell you that you have to do the real work. The good work. The work that will give your career the blood pumping pulse it desires.

That’s why I want to inject my thought process into the productivity space based on what has produced results for me.

If you are early career, I think this approach is especially useful, but all ambitious professionals can tap into this approach to work.

Here they are.

First, redefine the type of professional you are

So you’re an ambitious hard-working professional. Chances are, you’ve been labeled or self-identified as a knowledge worker.

This term came from management consultant Peter Drucker back in the 60’s. He was an amazing and influential thought leader. But this term…it’s time to retire it and revitalize the modern professional persona.

I advise you to take this first step with me and relabel yourself as a technical-creative professional. You don’t need to broadcast this to the world. Think of it as an inner reframe which will help you re-orient yourself to a new type of professional strategy, a transformational one.

The words and terminology we choose create meaning and interpretation of our reality. This definition sets the stage to look differently at your professional trajectory.

I believe it will allow you to better see and conceptualize the opportunity available to you in your career, when you start digging in.

I will expand on this further in a moment.

Second, reflect on and understand value

If you were to sum up a multitude of success outcomes in a wide variety of ambitious careers, there would be a single common denominator among them.

Value.

Whether it’s a concrete goal like a sales quota, or a feeling of momentum or progress, it makes no difference.

On the surface it sounds like an easy concept to understand. Not something worth thinking too hard about. In this way, the idea of value is deceptive.

Value as an idea permeates the entire world of work. Everyone talks about it. A way to think of business is games of value creation and delivery, and the value is not just money either. This is very important to internalize.

Something as simple as a smile from a hotel desk agent can bring value to the guest, heightening the experience for the guest, and the value of the hotel.

In the technical-creative career path, value delivery and magnitude can become much more sophisticated and interesting. The other day for instance, I saw my book is now selling globally in multiple countries, delivering value across the world to aspiring professionals I’ll never meet.

Spend more time than you think you need to understanding what exactly value is, how to create value, and how value plays out in real life.

I promise you, this is a very powerful thought experiment which will bring you clarity to how your professional worth really gets generated, measured, and consumed in your field.

To help get you started with this line of thinking ask yourself, what do you value?

Ask yourself next, what does your employer or your client value?

Expanding beyond career…how about your family members? What do they value?

Once you feel you are tuned into to the value concept, move on to step three.

Third, implement the technical-creative professional strategy

You’ll soon realize after step two that value creation is how you amplify yourself professionally. You’ll realize value creation is in the DNA of all those you admire. The top of their game entrepreneurs and peers who have surpassed you in income, title, or prestige. Value is overflowing in their work and their thinking.

Value is what fundamentally distinguishes you, differentiates you, attracts customers, opportunities, and commands more income.

But value creation today increasingly requires the activation of the technical-creative strategy. This is the mechanism to get your own value creation in motion.

What exactly is this technical-creative strategy?

The technical and the creative are the two core paradigms you work to orchestrate together. It is the sum of your actions, your productivity. It’s the manner in which you cultivate the raw material of value, manufacture the value, package the value, and distribute the value.

The technical portion is the knowledge and skills in your specific domain. The technical horizons of work can be daunting and discouraging to professionals, more so than ever. No one’s going to argue that the world is getting way more complicated and this complexity bleeds into careers.

This is why deep focus is necessary to climb the rocky crags of technical competency in the face of a business climate that lies to you and promises fast and easy results.

This is why with this strategy, you will initially work hard and also feel you are going against the grain of what many others are doing. Over time you build muscles and it gets easier and more manageable.

Technical cycles of systems and technology are accelerating. Many sectors are being disrupted more routinely bringing forth a disrupted and discouraged worker. You go to war with this climate with your honed focus and you acquire the technical chops regardless. Every eager and willing professional is trying to keep up in this challenging technical landscape so they can learn and understand. What they are really chasing is certainty and competence. It’s a strange type of intellectual race that is happening in the techno-social business landscape today.

In the old economy, productivity looked something like number of units output for a factory line. In the new, digitally infused economy, the objective is efficient acquisition and integration of information combined with creative techniques on top of rapidly iterating socio-technical networks.

Once you get the technical parts of your work nailed down, you integrate your technical know how with creative characteristics. This is the efforts you take to synthesize, blend, harmonize, invent, repurpose the technical into more enticing value propositions.

This can be a more effective and informed communication style, a process or service innovation, code, data, content, products, the manner in which you persuade, negotiate, or influence. Steering your business or a business towards more revenue or lower cost. Its your value proposition in motion. Because you are injecting new, creative energy into your technical know how, your value proposition becomes explosive.

This is how you become an expert who attracts abundance.

Then, you are well equipped to take the next step.

Fourth, earn your career capital

Career Capital is a concept from the Cal Newport book “So Good They Can’t ignore you.”

It’s the leverage you get professionally, over time, with deliberate practice. I like to think of it as the poker chips you cash in periodically to get the things you want out of your career, typically more time, more freedom, more income, more influence, or some unique combination specific to you. More value gets you more poker chips.

Cal warns that many professionals try to cash in too early and in some cases mess up their career. So exercise a bit of patience. That said, the more you lean into this, the faster it goes.

The key to getting career capital is putting effort and energy into the technical-creative professional strategy I outlined using Deep Work and productivity practices to fuel it.

Career Capital is not just a nice sounding idea to toss in the airport book bin. It’s a real objective with very real benefits.

For me there’s been three celebratory moments of career capital cash in: An hourly + commission pay structure which exposed me to variable income potential, 100% income growth, location independent work arrangement, unlimited time off. More to come, I believe.

As nice as these Career Capital victories are, they are relatively small change for what is possible. Fortunes can be made, society can be changed and improved, with an upward spiral of career capital. Others can easily ratchet up the technical-creative strategies further and far surpass these perks I’ve earned. I sincerely believe there is a monumental upside to how much Career Capital you can cash in on.

Filter your professional actions, decisions, and habits through the Career Capital filter and begin to see what good things can happen for you.

Five, wash, rinse, repeat

As a guitarist and music lover in my spare time practice is in my DNA. For those who haven’t toiled with an instrument for hours miss out on the beauty and power that comes from repetition.

Once you embrace the technical-creative career strategy, you repeat it to amplify it’s effects. Your career gets better and more interesting in the process.

Over time in this cyclical manner, you diversify your value proposition and rack up war stories, milestones, and your professional brand starts to have a shine to it.

You continue to amass more Career Capital. When you cash in on it, your life gets more prosperous and fruitful, inside and outside of work.

This is the game. Start playing it.