Wednesday, May 5, 2010

Maximize Career Discovery - What Were You Doing At Age 14?

Bill Gates and Paul Allen (Age 13) at LakesideHigh, using a teletype to connect to a mainframe.
I call this the Magic Age Question! There seems to be something special about the age of 14 or at least the age range around ages 12 to 14. Many extremely successful people dialed in there life’s work in this age range. What is unique about these people is that they locked on to goal or talent area and didn’t let go. In some cases it was actually much earlier than 14.

At age 12 , Stephen Spielberg decided he wanted to be a movie director. At age 13, he made a war movie, Escape To Nowhere, with paper-mache sets his father helped him make. At 16, he wrote and directed a 140 minute science fiction adventure, called Firelight. It was shown at a local movie theater. At 17 he visited Universal Studios and ducked out of the tour to find a real movie being made. The next day, Spielberg, who looked mature for his age, put on a suit, loaded his dad’s brief case with two candy bars and a sandwich, and marched boldly through the gate into Universal Studios. He found a deserted trailer and wrote “Stephen Spielberg, Director” on the door. He became a regular on the lot, hanging out with directors, producers, writers, and editors as he began to learn the business.

Apple founder, Steve Jobs was frequenting Mountain View are flea markets looking for electronics parts. He attended evening lectures by Hewlett-Packard engineers and even got Bill Hewlett on the phone once requesting parts. He managed to get the parts and a summer job.

Bill Gates got to do real computer programming in eighth grade. By High School he was sneaking out of the house at 3 am so he could get down to the nearby University of Washington and use the computer during the down time between 3 and 6. Gates mom says, “We always wondered why it was so hard for him to get up in the morning?”

My wife Susy and I love to eat at the Chipotle Mexican Grills. Chipotle founder Steve Ells says, “as a kid I liked to be in the kitchen cooking with my mom. I remember watching all the cooking shows—with the Galloping Gourmet, Julia Child—instead of the cartoons.

At age 10, actors Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, already close friends, were holding meetings in the school cafeteria to discuss their latest acting projects.

Mozart had written his first symphony by age 12. At age 5, superstar architect Frank Gehry was already using wood scraps to make intricate models on the living room floor. At 13, Picasso was already enrolled in art school for adults.

The odds are good you are much past the age 14 benchmark. But you may have children or grandchildren approaching that age range. Pay attention. You might very well help then get into the very work they were designed for.

In your case, you might look for ideas and clues that will help you become much more proficient at your current job or make some mid life adjustments. In my case, I saw myself writing and speaking when I was in this age range. I still remember a motivational speaker coming to our church. I asked my dad to set it up so that I could go with a pilot friend and pick him up in Southern California. By age 22, I was able to get a job selling books, audio, and video tapes from the Zig Ziglar organization. The traces and threads were definitely present.  This indicator isn’t infallible but look back at this stage of your life. What were you daydreaming about? What did you love doing?

In How To Find The Work You Love, Laurence Boldt writes, “One of the great keys to discovering the work you love is to ask the simple question: What did I want to give the world when I was young and fresh, innocent and filled with wonder? Some of you will be able to recall right away. Others will first have to peel away the layers of hurt and defense that block your remembrance. You will first have to reintegrate your inner child. When you were a child, you saw things simply. Your world was full of magic, wonder, and promise. The possibilities seemed limitless. You wanted to give you love and live in beauty, joy, and simplicity. You felt you could do or be anything. Perhaps grow ups couldn’t understand this world of yours, a world of endless whys, a world of magic and possibilities, a world that had yet to hear the word compromise. Though perhaps not in so many words, you were told to compromise: compromise your dreams, compromise your ideals, compromise you sense of what’s right for what would help you get along. Give in to the nothingness, the emptiness. Give in to becoming hollow and phony, a shell of a man, a mask of a woman. Hold up your masks, a different one for every scene. Show them what they want to see. But who is this actor? Has she no real life? Has he no story of his own? Where is the integrity and joy in the masquerade life?”

Was that uncomfortable to read? Did it ring a little to true? If so, it’s not too late for you. You can still reconnect to that childlike nature. You can re-set what my friend Alex Reeder calls your "factory settings". You can start from where you are.

Warren Buffet is arguably the most successful investor of all-time. When did he start? Buffet purchased his first stock at age 11 and says, “Everything he did up until then was a complete waste of time.” Probably not. Listen to some of the things Buffet’s biographer, Alice Schroeder writes about him in Snowball: Warren Buffet and The Business of Life:

“By the time Warren entered kindergarten, his hobbies and interests revolved around numbers. Around age 6, he became fascinated by the precision of measuring time in seconds, and desperately wanted a stopwatch… Warren thought about numbers all the time and everywhere, even in church. He liked the sermons, he was bored by the rest of the service; he passed the time by calculating the life span of hymn composers from their birth and death dates in the hymnals.”

Schroeder tells us that his favorite possession was a nickel plated money changer he received as a gift from his Aunt Alice and that he collected soda bottle caps from the wells below ice chests at gas stations, calculating which brands were the most popular. School bored him for the most part but he would play math games in his head.

He started making money at age 6, going door to door selling packs of Wrigley’s chewing gum for two cents profit. He sold Coca-Cola door to door on summer nights where he netted a five cents for every six bottles he sold. He also sold magazine subscriptions to the Saturday Evening Post and Liberty.

At age 7 Warren asked Santa for what was to become his first favorite book on Bonds, Townsend’s Bond Salesmanship. At age 10, Warren’s father took him on a trip to the East Coast and New York City. At that early age, he asked his Dad to take him to see the New York Stock Exchange.

One day at the library he got his hands on a book titled, One Thousand Ways to Make $1,000. It was about this time that he began to get his young mind around the idea of compounding. He started to understand that if he started with a thousand dollars and it grew at ten percent a year:
In five years, $1,000 became more than $1,600.
In ten years, it became almost $2,600.
In twenty five years, it became more than $10,800.

He could picture the numbers compounding as vividly as the way a snowball grew when he rolled it across the lawn.

In 1942, he bought 3 shares of Cities Service Preferred for $114.75.
Warren held down multiple paper routes but he also sold calendars to his newspaper customers. But it didn’t stop there. He asked all his customers for their old magazines as scrap paper for the war effort. Then he would check the labels on the magazines to figure out when the subscriptions were expiring, using a code book he had gotten from Moore-Cottrell, the publishing powerhouse that had hired him as an agent to sell magazines. He had made a card file of subscribers, and before their subscriptions expired, Warren would be knocking at their door, selling them a new magazine.

Here is the magic age…. At age fourteen, Warren had fulfilled the promise laid out in his favorite book, One Thousand Ways to Make $1000... His savings now totaled around a thousand dollars.
Many extreme examples of success like Buffet have similar stories. They follow their passions early and with extreme focus. You can’t turn back the clock. That’s not an option. But you can look back, learn what you can from your childhood and start from where you are.

Get out your notebook and make a list of your childhood interests, achievements, etc..  Does one or two stand out as something that is core to who you still are?  Start writing...

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