New Grads: First Change Yourselves, THEN Change the World
I have a fitness room in my basement with an elliptical, rowing machine, yoga mat and various framed images on the walls to inspire me when I’m inclined to slack off (including the obligatory movie poster from the original Rocky). My favorite image displays a quote attributed to famed Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy: “Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”
I love this quote and not just because it comes from a man who looks like Dumbledore’s surly brother Aberforth from Deathly Hallows Part II. It points to a piece of essential wisdom that all aspirational world changers—whether new graduates or even my fellow Gen Xers looking to make a change mid-career--should cling to: the only way to bring about great change in the outside world is to begin with doing the interior work necessary to change yourself. No short-cuts allowed.
For an example of how exactly to do this, let me remind you of another profound thinker from the 20th century: Mr. Miyagi.
Wax On, Wax Off
While Cobra Kai has been at the top of the streaming charts for most of the past year, anyone from my generation will tell you it is no match for the original Karate Kid released in 1984. The premise, as you recall, was that a scrawny new kid in town named Daniel Russo asks an unassuming handyman named Mr. Miyagi to help him defend himself against the town bullies by teaching him karate and ultimately compete against them in a karate tournament.
Daniel shows up for the first day of training expecting to learn advanced moves from the Yoda-like karate master. Instead, Mr. Miyagi assigns him to three days of menial labor requiring very specific physical movements, beginning with waxing his fleet of classic cars (“wax on, wax off”), sanding his gorgeous wooden deck (“sand floor”) and applying two coats of paint to his seemingly never-ending fence (“up, down”). (How a handyman could afford all these luxuries in the first place is one of the unexplained mysteries of the movie.)
After three days of this demanding labor, Daniel—exhausted and perhaps suspecting a ruse to evade California’s strict child labor laws—snaps and demands that Mr. Miyagi start teaching him real karate. Mr. Miyagi then reveals to him how each of the chores he had assigned was designed to create particular muscle memories and to teach movements essential to the martial art of karate.
When Daniel succeeds in fending off an attack from his sensei using those movements, he begins to realize the hidden value of his manual labor and eventually applies the lessons he learned to win the tournament AND the girl. (Of course, the snazzy convertible Mr. Miyagi gives him in exchange for his labor probably didn’t hurt in the latter regard!)
Skill Crafting
As timeless as it might be, what does Karate Kid have to do with changing the world?
Good question, and one a client asked me during a coaching session not long ago. My client was talking about a particular project he had been assigned and wondered aloud whether it was a dead-end assignment because it didn’t seem directly connected with the career path he had planned.
In response, I applauded him for asking that question in the first place because intentionality is the key first step to crafting your ultimate dream job and career. In the near term, however, I shared the “wax on, wax off” story from Karate Kid as a way of asking whether there were skills he could be gaining on this particular project that might set him up for future success even if his career went in an entirely different direction.
Dream jobs, like karate champions, are crafted one skill at a time.
Should I Stay or Should I Go?
This concept of skill crafting is critically important today. The days of landing the perfect job after graduation and retiring from that same employer with a gold watch are long over, just like the days of your favorite professional athlete retiring from the same team who drafted them. (Sorry, Peyton—we should have kept you and traded the rights to Andrew Luck instead!)
In 2019, the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics conducted a study showing that individuals born in the latter years of the Baby Boom (1957-1964) held an average of 12.3 jobs from age 18 to age 52, with nearly half of these jobs being held from ages 18 to 24. The study concluded that many of those jobs were of extremely short duration, with 70 percent of jobs landed in your early 20s ending in less than a year and 93 percent ending in fewer than five years. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/nlsoy.pdf
Lest you think that it’s only the perpetually dissatisfied “Me Generation” skewing the statistics, Gallup’s State of the American Workplace conducted in 2017 shows that other generations are packing their bags as well. According to Gallup, more than half of employees (51%) said they were actively looking for a new job or watching for openings, and 35% of workers reported changing jobs within the prior three years. A study conducted in early March 2021 showed over a third of Millennials (34%) were planning to move on to greener pastures as soon as the pandemic was over. https://news.prudential.com/presskits/pulse-american-worker-survey-is-this-working.htm. These statistics say nothing about the churn within organizations in which employees leave one assignment for a more promising role in another department or for another boss.
If change is inevitable, why not use it to your advantage? For employers, this means creating programs that will help employees develop skills that will make them more versatile and valuable, even if they choose to take those skills to another employer at some point. For employees, this means thinking differently about roles and assignments as opportunities to build specific skills, rather than assuming every job must be your dream job.
OJT
While I didn’t realize it at the time, I learned invaluable lessons through “on the job training” from every job I had before beginning my career as a lawyer at Ice Miller. To name just a few:
From the paper route I started at 13, I learned the discipline of waking up early, billing and collecting and dependability. (I also learned how to throw a newspaper in such a way to make it walk up my customers’ front steps end-over-end, but it turns out that particular skill doesn’t translate very well.)
From working at a family-owned pizzeria in my hometown of Henderson, Kentucky, I learned that the success of a business depends on meeting your customers’ expectations every single time and that you don’t get extraordinary rewards without extraordinary commitment. (Shout out to Rick’s Una Pizza, which still has the best pizza around, IMHO.)
From working the quarter pounder grill at McDonald’s, I learned that if you clean when it’s clean, it never gets dirty.
From my ill-fated summer at a chemical plant, I learned the hard way that working quickly without working carefully can be a recipe for multiple trips to the ER.
From working at a sandwich shop while in college in Nashville, I learned there can be artistry in something as simple as making a deli sandwich and that the work you do before the shift begins can make or break your day. (The secret, by the way, is slicing the meat in thin layers rather than in slabs and layering them so that air comes between the slices—try it!)
Coming full circle, if changing the world requires us to first change ourselves, then every job, every project, every assignment gives us the opportunity to craft new skills we can use to bring our vision one step closer to reality. To individuals, this means asking yourself, “what can I learn from this job or this boss that will help me grow even if this isn’t my dream job?” To leaders, this means understanding the aspirations of your people well enough to give them assignments that will help them progress toward their goals and to tell them how and why, much like Mr. Miyagi did with Daniel.
Changing the world is a lofty goal, but it can only be accomplished one skill at a time. After all, borrowing one last piece of wisdom from Mr. Miyagi, “First learn stand, then learn fly. Nature rule, Daniel-San, not mine.”
Mike Tooley is a Co-Founder with Upstream Principles LLC, a coaching and consulting firm dedicated to helping individuals, leaders, and teams go upstream to discover solutions for their leadership and employee development challenges. As a certified Leadership and Strengths Coach, Mike is committed to serve as a guide to help others discover, and live out, who they are designed to be.