Career Pivots, Networking, and Life Experiments

In this week’s episode, I’m joined once again by my friend Jenny Blake.

Jenny is an author, speaker, and the founder of the site Life After College, which was one of my favorite blogs when I was still a student – Jenny’s advice there really helped me to prepare for my own post-graduation life.

If you’re a long-time listener of this show, you might have heard my initial conversation with Jenny back in episode 24. In that episode, we focused on the importance of adaptability in the modern career landscape; with people only staying at their jobs for just over four years on average, learning how to adapt and pivot is an essential skill.

Jenny believes it’s so essential, in fact, that she wrote a book about it. It’s called and it draws upon Jenny’s own pivoting experience (she’s gone from startup employee, to program manager at Google, to author and professional speaker), as well as lessons gleaned through dozens of interviews with other successful pivoters – including yours truly (yep, I’m in the book!)

Her mission in writing is to ultimately help people answer the question:

“What’s next?”

As someone with quite a few friends who have been out of college for at least a couple of years now, this is something I’m starting to hear more and more frequently. It’s becoming more and more common for students to graduate, start out in an initially exciting career field, and then discover that it isn’t what they expected it to be.

That’s why I think Jenny’s work in is so important; it provides a roadmap for making the move to a field that’s more fulfilling. And if that’s something you wish you could do, I’d recommend giving it a read.

However, I must admit that my conversation with Jenny in this episode isn’t purely focused on pivoting and career moves. We do touch on those subjects, but this is one of those episodes that’s more of a conversation between friends than something ultra-topical. Still, I think you’ll enjoy it!

Things mentioned in this episode:

• , by Jenny Blake
• Building the Skill of Adaptability in Your Career with Jenny Blake (Ep. 24)
• , by Cal Newport
• Kevin Kelly on Techno Literacy, Systems Thinking, Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality
• Listen Money Matters
• , by James Altucher
• Happy Launch Day!! Pivot for the Podcast: James Altucher Interviews Jenny
• Evernote
• Scrivener
• , by Shane Snow
• Extra Pack of Peanuts with Travis Sherry
• Momentum Crew
• How to Land Your Dream Internship (Ep. 129)
• Pivot Toolkit
• Pivot Pilot Resources
• Nomad List
• airbnb
• South By Southwest

Want more cool stuff? You can find all sorts of great tools at my Resources page.

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