POSITIONING YOURSELF FOR SUCCESS

Today I’m attending the first full day of classes at Stanford University. I’m attending the Stanford Professional Publishing Course (I won the American Magazine Publishers Diversity Fellowship). My day began with a presentation by futurist Paul Saffo, a Stanford engineering professor. Saffo’s presentation, Publishing in a Post-Information Age, was packed with interesting (and amusing) bits about the future of publishing, technology, business, media, information and consumer behavior.

One of my favorite insights was “Pay attention to the failures. If there are a lot of failures in an industry or market, keep an eye on it. Someone’s bound to figure it out.”

Professor Saffo also provided some great insight into the Silicon Valley success machine–”Silicon Valley has a successful record of failing forward.”

Finally, Saffo offered 6 rules for successful forecasting that I think will work for any entrepreneur or career-minded professionals.

POSITIONING YOURSELF FOR SUCCESS

Embrace things that don’t fit - Don’t shy away from elements that don’t seem to fit into your current way of working; embrace them and their potential to transform and improve your model.

Look back - History is important, not simply because it repeats, but because it informs us on all of the things that worked and didn’t, and why.

Inversion - Don’t be afraid to turn your current way of working on its head, you might find that simply reallocating your resources and attention to the same players in a different way, may dramatically impact your success.

Change is never linear - Change comes in waves (new technology hits the market every 18 months). Change moves in a sort of S-curve and it competes with our linear expectations of how change works. What that means to me is that we don’t have to worry about every change we make being a successful one; we just have to keep changing and stay on top of changes so that by the time the S-curve reaches the plateau, you’ve already begun a new change. This is probably the scariest thing because it sounds like constantly blowing up and re-building the machine. But, I choose to look at it different way: Constant change means an infinite number of opportunities to get it right.

Cherish failure (Especially everybody else’s) - Don’t be afraid to pick up where someone else fell down. Just because it didn’t work for them, doesn’t mean you can’t fix their fatal flaw and succeed (special emphasis on “fix their fatal flaw”).

Look for the indicators - This is what Careersthatdontsuck.com is all about. We ferret out the indicators for you and serve them up as opportunity alerts.