15 Professional Habits You Should Develop by Your Mid-20s

There are these three great websites/blogs that I love. They are ridiculously cool, visual, colourful and distracting. And a bit trashy. Perfect. They are WhoWhatWear, Domaine and Byrdie.

Over on Domaine at the moment is this article; 15 Professional Habits You Should Develop by Your Mid-20s and it's really a bit well, some of the advice is good, solid. And some is a bit presumptuous.  Go have a read, I'll wait here. When you come back you can read my take on the professional habits you should develop by your mid-20s:

1.  Do the work. Especially the boring stuff. maybe it's filing, maybe it's vacuuming, maybe it's general admin. Do the work or no one will give you the opportunity to do better stuff.
2. Do more than is expected. Show some initiative. In your 20s you want to develop a good reputation and have people who will speak highly of you as your career progresses. People who do more than expected will always have people who advocate for them.
3. Don't watch the clock and get to work on time. Stay until the work is done or come in early. When you are learning it always take longer to do the work.
4. Dress appropriately for the job. Short skirts, trashy shoes (think porn star), too much makeup and cheap hair extensions only work if you are a porn star. Or a Kardashian. Better to err on the side of conservative in your mid-20s unless you are in a very creative job.
5. There is no point spending lots of time on your LinkedIn profile unless you have some experience to write about. Generally in your mid-20s you don't have that much experience. It would be better to focus on other stuff. 
6. Focus on developing the skills you will need throughout your career. Presentation skills, good business writing skills, whatever the key things are in your field that will mean you are a success in the future. Not sure what these are? Ask.
7. Work hard and play hard but don't play so hard you can't make it to work the next day. I have had some great nights out with work collegues but I always fronted up the next day. 
8. Know when to shut your mouth. The problem with your mid-20s is that you think you know everything. You don't and when you talk a lot with confidence about things you really really don't know much about to people who really do understand you just come across as arrogant and immature.
9. Learn how to manage your workload. Bright young things always want to take on more but overcommitting and under delivering is not a good look. Doing a really good job on a couple of key things is better than doing an ordinary job of lots of things.
10. Manage your social media accounts. I wrote about it here
11. Demonstrate you want to learn. That you are willing to listen and act on feedback.
12. Maintain or develop life balance. Have outside interests. Play sport, maintain friendships and have hobbies outside your professional interests.
13.  Stick it out. Some jobs are hard and some in the end are soul destroying but having roles with some longevity on your resume will hold you in good stead
14. Emulate those in the workplace who are respected. What are they doing that you could try? Would they mentor you?
15. Don't take it too seriously. Your 20s are about having fun, while establishing your career.

What would you add?

Organisational Life

Man it's been a crazy start to the year. You too? I remember when you could ease back into work during January. It was pretty quiet and you could maybe organise your filing cabinet and sort out your inbox. Those. days. are. gone.     

Completely.

Lots of stuff has been going on at this start of this year. Work has been nuts and sometimes corporate life is shit, not so great, hard, shit. Sometimes I forget that the reasons that large listed companies exist is to make money. For shareholders. Not for employees. The problem with this is employees are the company. Companies don't exist without people working for them, creating value and bringing in the dollars. It's a balance and sometimes the balance goes a bit too far in the money making direction and too far away from the looking after employees direction. Sometimes there are good reasons, well sometimes.

Sometimes I have to be reminded of the good stuff and this happened last week. I attended a meeting where the leaders were passionate about getting the business profitable. I sat beside a leader at dinner where she told me about her successes with her team and I admired a leader who had the courage to sit with the tension of a difficult problem, listen to everyone's views and debates until we got to an outcome. These are the little things, no big things, that make organisational life great.

Last night Arran and I attended "hot" yoga, otherwise known as bikram yoga but without the license. I call it stupid hot yoga. Anyone who has done bikram yoga for 90 minutes in a room heated to 40 degrees knows it's not for the faint hearted. The heat puts the body under stress and makes yoga poses which you might have some chance of doing under normal temperatures really really hard. The biggest battle is with your mind. I find I have a running voice trying to calm me down so I don't get overwhelmed and completely panicked. Last night we only did a 60 minutes class which was okish but the best part was finishing and the great instructor. She was friendly and funny, intuitive and connected. She noticed I was actually in pain at one point and had some tips at the end for dealing with it.

I guess I'm trying to draw out some parallels between big organisations and stupid hot yoga. Big organisations can sometimes put you under stress and achieving things can be hard. It can be easy to get overwhelmed too. The trick is to make connections and notice the good stuff because this is usually the things that keep you going. I was reminded of this last week.

Nostalgia or something else?

source: wikipedia

 I have been wondering for a while now about the affect of doing work that doesn't produce anything tangible. By that I mean, our work is increasingly becoming more about knowledge and communication rather than manufacturing or making goods. In many countries in the developed world, unions fought long and hard to get good wages for their members, but at what cost? Manual and unskilled labour is moving to lower cost countries in Asia, South America and some parts of Europe. Developed countries are losing these jobs and the livelihoods of many families? We all know this.

But have you noticed the resurgence in cooking and home renovation and knitting and crochet and craft and sewing and growing your own food? Is this just a trend? Is it that we are worried we are going to forgot how to do some of these things? It feels very nostalgic and I wonder if something else going on. I think for many the world has become so frenetic and confusing that this is a way to slow things down and turn off.

But I also think there is something inherent in human nature that drives us to produce tangible items. Things that give you pleasure when it's finished. I spend most of my day sitting at a desk typing emails and documents and other parts of my time having conversations with people or attending meetings. When I come home I usually haven't produced more than some emails and documents. I know these things have importance but sometimes I feel like I haven't achieved much. Is that because I can't see what I've been working on? I think in part yes. I was speaking to an employee who was retiring after 38 years working for the company. He was looking forward to renovating a recently purchased house. I felt a bit jealous and yearned to be able to do some manual work and improve something.

About 3 months after moving to Singapore I woke up on Saturday morning with a yearning to cook. Previous to this we had been (and still enjoy) the meals our helper cooks or we go out and try the many options here. But this Saturday I just felt like I had to create. Out came the cookbooks and after spending $300+ at the local supermarket, cook I did. It felt great.

Even though blogging is writing it feels tangible and it creates social connections and I feel like I'm producing something. Photography is a bit like that too. Frustrating as it can be at times, when you produce a beautiful shot it's worthwhile.

What do you think about this? Is the resurgence in knitting and slow food just about holding onto something from the past, or does it satisfy a deep need to produce tangible results and something we can be proud of?