What My First Year of Career Taught Me
I started my career in marketing in my 3rd year of uni life. I still remember the day I got my first offer as a full time employee& signed the contract as digital marketer and handled a client from local company. That was one of the best moment in my life even-though the money wasn’t that much. My first full time job wasn’t that “full-time” because in fact I mostly worked remotely because I had some classes to attend.
Well, let’s moving forward to the my real first year of being “full-time” employee. Long story short, I got an offer from this company around 1 month after my graduation. It was my dream company, it was really a blessing to able to join the top program in this company. Yeah, everything seemed perfect that time, it felt like too good to be true until reality slapped me in right in my face. However, I always grateful for the journey I had in my past. Below are some learning take-aways from my real-time-first job!
Resilience
“Resilience is your ability to withstand adversity and bounce back and grow despite life’s downturns,” says Amit Sood, MD, the executive director of the Global Center for Resiliency and Well-Being, creator of the Resilient Option program, and former professor of medicine at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.
To be part of high-expected management trainee program really taught me to be strong & have resilience. I was assigned to handle an island called Madura in the first 8th month of career, it’s a rural area. That time I had to deal with life & work. On working, it was new things for me, to be a sales person and manage big amount of budget & need to delivered billions revenue and in life, I need to deal with the culture and the transportation there and need to live alone by myself, no friends & no family. Well, how resilience taught me? I can survived until my assignment ended and forced my self to do many things I never done before. Well, that wasn't an easy journey, I cried, got sick many times. I fell and bounced back again for many times.
Resilience itself isnot a trampoline, where you’re down one moment and up the next. It’s more like climbing a mountain without a trail map. But eventually you reach the top and look back at how far you’ve come. If I relook the past, I’d like to hug myself and say, “see? nothing’s impossible”.
Leadership Skill
“You can be a boss, but not a leader” — unknown
Everyone can be a boss, but not everyone able to be a leader. For me, leadership is a lifetime learning. It’s never ending process to improve. I began a leader since I was in junior high school, led my class-mate and this habit continued until my uni life. However, with those experiences, I still shocked when I have to lead my Madura team. All of them way older than me, some of them even in my dad age.
From them, I learned how to be better leader. I learned how to develop people and how to communicate with way older people with the different education background. It was “fun” and challenging. I cried couple of times inside my car when I cannot manage my emotion well. But over the time, I found the rhythm, I found my own style. How to run the business while manage & develop the people. The key learning is on communication!
Focus on The Things Within Our Control
I used to be that person who always over-think of everything and over-worried most of time. From my first year of career taught me that there’s so much in life that we can’t control. As a sales person, we might have a perfect sales plan, but there’s so much outside our plan could happens. What we can do is only do the plan and adjust the plan when the situation outside our plan happens. Not only applying it in the business, I also learn to apply it in my daily life. It’s hard, but worth it :)
Don’t Assume, Clarify!
Assumption can leads us to wrong way. Less assume, clarify! If we have business assumption, we always can clarify with the data. In the working process, we always can clarify our assumption to stakeholders. Be more pro-active, never afraid to ask questions, there’s no stupid questions. My biggest lesson learned when I worked overnight for an analysis and turned out the data I used was wrong, it just because I was too shy to ask and assumed the data I used was the correct one.
Don’t Take Everything Too Personally
I learned it in a hard way on how manage my feelings & emotions. I still learn up until now on how not mix up personal feeling with professional. At the end of the day, we work in the same organisation to run business, everyone just doing their job. Never take it too personally just because your boss or your co-worker do something that is not aligned with your expectation.
Gather Feedbacks!
Always ask feedback from everyone and accept it with an open heart. However, keep it mind that only you know you better, so need to filter out which feedback that beneficial and which one is not. It’s important to gather feedbacks, since it can helps us to see what we can’t see. It helps us to improve and grow. I personally love to ask feedback. I suggest to use this framework I got from my former boss whenever we have feedback session. Let’s divide the into three buckets; Start Doing, Continue Doing & Stop Doing. Clarify each of feedback with the real evidence to help you understand the feedbacks better.
It’s Just A Job, Yourself comes First!
At the end of the day, it’s just a job. For me personally, working is a self-fulfilment activity but never put your identity towards your job. Because once that identity is taken away from you, you will feel into pieces. In my first job, all I have done is only working and fell sick sometimes. I had no hobby, never did the exercise, even I spent weekend in cafe with my laptop. Until I realised, it won’t be sustainable if I did it this way. Life needs the balance. It resonates with one of story from The 7 Habits Book,
“This fable is the story of a poor farmer who one day discovers in the nest of his pet gooose a glittering golden egg. At first, he thinks it must be some kind of trick. But as he starts to throw the egg aside, he has second thoughts and takes it in to be appraised instead. The egg is pure gold!. The farmer can’t believe his good fortune. He becomes even more incredulous the following day when the experience is repeated. Day after day, he awakens to rush to the nest and find another golden egg. He becomes fabulously wealthy, it all seems too good to be true. But with his increasing wealth comes greed and impatience. Unable to wait day after day for the golden eggs, the farmer decides he will kill the goose and get them all at once. But when he opens the goose, he finds it empty. There are no golden eggs — -and — -now there is no way to get any more. The farmer has destroy the goose that produced them”
The goose is us, we often force ourselves to over-worked, then we fall sick and cannot work at all. So better to take care of ourselves to maintain our productivity.
Thanks for reading!
