Thanks to a post on Emergic, I discovered the blog of Eric Sink. In a recent entry, Eric propounds his thoughts on what makes a successful career (and human being). According to his Career Calculus theory:

C = G + LT

C stands for “Cluefulness” – defined as an overall measure of your capabilities, expertise, wisdom and knowledge in the field. It is the measure of how valuable you are to an employer. It is the measure of how successful your career is. When you graph your career, C is on the vertical axis.

G is for Gifting – defined as the amount of natural cluefulness you were given “at the factory”. For each individual, G is a constant, but it definitely varies from person to person.

L is for Learning – defined as the rate at which you gain (or lose) cluefulness over time.

T stands for Time – on the horizontal axis of your career graph.

As you can see above, your career success is determined by three variables, only one of which you can control: Learning

While the original feature is written for software developers, the ideas it encompasses, hold true for all of us :

Focusing on the first derivative can be very difficult to do, as our natural inclination is to focus on C itself… We convince ourselves that the real problem is that people don’t seem to know how clueful we are. Over time, we come to believe that the important thing is not our actual cluefulness but rather the degree to which others perceive us as clueful…

The key to a great career is to focus on L, the first derivative of the equation. L is the rate at which your cluefulness is changing over time. The actual value of C at any given moment is usually a distraction. Only one question matters: With each day that goes by, are you getting more clueful, or less clueful? Or are you just stuck?

When you make L into a positive number, you have a great career happening. It no longer matters what G was. You are getting more clueful every day, and that means your opportunities are going to get better in the future.

Eric has given us an excellent tool that makes an important concept simple to grasp :

A great career is not likely to happen if L merely spikes above zero once in a while. We need “constant learning”.

We want learning to be a process, not an event. Making your first derivative constantly positive is not just about formal training. It is a posture which you bring to your job each day. It is a posture of teachability, a constant willingness to learn.

What opportunities do you have for learning on a typical day ? For how many of those days can you make L a positive number?

There is also due mention given to learning from mistakes :

Our value of L is heavily determined by the way we handle (those) mistakes.

We all screw something up from time to time, but we don’t always learn from the experience. Why not? Quite often, the reason we don’t learn from a mistake is because we’re too busy trying to hide it.

People with a positive L are more likely to immediately investigate to see if one of their checkins caused the problem. A posture of teachability means that you are quick to recognize your own mistakes and can confidently process them.

Give this article a good read.

And, in the words of Eric himself, “As long as you’re going to develop a voracious appetite for knowledge, may I suggest that you not necessarily limit your scope”.