Beyond Encouragement 2024.6.26

 If you are a parent, I believe your expectations are similar to mine. Parents want to encourage their kids to do everything nowadays. When our kids encounter frustrations, we say phrases like, “I Know you can do that because you are the best.“, or “Practice makes perfect, so you should practice more to get better results.“ undoubtedly, we love our kids unconditionally, but is this kind of encouragement good enough? Should we also take care of more spheres in our family?

First of all, our world is changing so fast that we can’t just have a single approach and always be positive when encountering everything. Flexibility, resilience, communication skills, and adaptability are also crucial for survival. The path to learning these skills is learning from experiencing frustrations. We all have negative emotions when we face frustrations, and parents should teach their kids to realize these emotions and manage them healthily.

Second, families should embrace both positive and negative emotions. In my opinion, that is not the only but the most essential value in a family. Kids at school are not encouraged to cry or yell, so they don’t affect other kids. Adults in a company may need to hide their emotions when facing supervisors and clients. However, we as human beings do have emotions and family plays a role in containing all kinds of emotions. We don’t always have to be optimistic in front of our family members.

In conclusion. while it is good to encourage our kids and foster a positive spirit, it’s equally important to teach them how to face negative emotions and learn more approaches from them. Too much positivity would let our kids misunderstand that the  warmest function of a family is loving each other unconditionally. A family has many sides, and it’s essential to maintain the balance.

Embracing Agility: Thriving in an Unpredictable World 2024.6.20

This world is changing so fast that we can’t always predict everything precisely. We used to be taught to have a plan for our lives and implement the plan before, but it becomes more and more difficult because many things happen accidentally. If the conventional approach doesn’t work, I think we can learn or have the new idea to face the future: An agile mindset. I would like to apply an Agile mindset in my life in these three spheres.

Education: 
The traditional approach to learning a particular skill is to learn the origin first and then expand the levels step by step. This process is fine for a child because if you know the origin well, you will have a better foundation to learn some more difficult parts in this field easily. For an adult, this cause you so spend too much time that , and you don’t have enough free time slots to follow the steps. Therefore, you need to set the goal first and then try to plan a path that can make you reach the goal from the beginning. Essentially, realizing the goal and the path allow you to know how to find the resource to become your personal educational content and then you focus on the content, knowing that not everything in the field can make you achieve your goal more easily; that is a kind of agile mindset.

Work: 
I’d been asked questions such as “What is your career goal?“ or “What role do you want to play in this company after five years?“ before, especially in a recruiting review. I used to answer these questions carefully because I wanted to demonstrate my vision, ambition, and loyalty through my responses. Now, I have different ideas about these questions. First, it doesn’t matter if I really have a career plan or not because my plan might not perfectly align with the organizer’s expectations. Second, Things can change a lot in five years and my five-years imagination may not exist in the future. Therefore, I see these questions as an opportunity to show my agile mindset and I should express more like ”No matter what role, I hope I can always stand a step ahead of the market. Because… .” and “I don’t have an ending goal of my career because this changing world brings countless interesting things I’d love to try. I believe I can… .“ This approach can allow the discussion to continue and help the reviewer know my advantages better.

Family entertainment: 
My kids are still young. When I was as young as my kids, my parents spent a lot of time taking me to a family restaurant that had a kids’ play area. I always tried to finish my meal fast because I couldn’t wait to play with the other kids. I guess my parents were bored when I played in the kids’ area. The family restaurant is super exciting for a kid; however adults can barely have fun at the same time. I alternately change what we do for family entertainment with kids’ and adults' ideas. This time, my daughter wants to see ocean creatures in an aquarium, so we can enjoy the underwater world together. Next time, it’s the adults’ turn. Maybe my wife wants to go to a paid art exhibition, so everybody should join Mama’s plan together and try to experience something fresh.

Applying an agile mindset will help you not only survive well in a job, but also give you different ideas for many spheres in your life.

Beyond the Degree: Innovative Hiring Strategies for Evaluating Young Talent 2024.6.14

If you have two candidates both are around 22 years old, one has a degree and another doesn’t. First, they might not have many working experiences at the same time so you can’t easily ask questions like “What have you achieved?” or “How did you complete such a big project?“ to verify their working abilities. One thing you can do is to research the college of the one who has a degree, and assess if his/her major is competitive in the specific area. However, this approach is unfair to the other one who does’t have a degree. That’s why more and more companies choose a skill-based hiring process. Additionally, I imagine three other criteria that companies can use when recruiting and selecting candidates.

1. Short-Term Contract: 
In the NBA, if there are too many injured players on your roster, you can sign a short-term contract with a player. This player will put in a lot of effort to prove he can survive in the league and contribute his skills to the team. In some cases, they may sign a long-term contract before next season. It’s a win-win situation for both the player and the team. Organizations and companies can utilize this approach when facing a dilemma between two candidates. Aggressively, a hiring manager may offer two short-term contracts and then promise that one of them will earn the official offer. One thing to be cautious of is that everything you do must be legal under the Labor Standards Act.

2. Demonstrating Real situations: 
Some skills can’t be measured by standard qualifications or tests. For instance, it’s really hard to assess one’s sales skills. Therefore, there are behavioral tests in specific recruiting processes. Some companies give candidates a demo solutions and then let them sell it to the hiring manager. It doesn’t matter how much you realize this solution’s advantage, and the most important thing is how you introduce and make clients feel confident to you and the services your company offers. Moreover, how you react to questions you are not sure about during a pitch will determine if you are a good salesperson or not.

3. The Critical Thinking test: 
If you own a startup company, you don’t need a person who operates daily tasks but a talent who can bring new inspiration and critical ideas. Start by sharing some background information about your vision and encourage the candidates to ask you questions. In this approach, some will ask out the key issues worth resolving and some will show their whole research of the field by their questions. Sometimes, those who can ask the right questions are the ones who will provide the right solutions and they must be the suitable employees you need.

These three approaches help employers have different angles to find a better talents your organization needs.

Discover Your Next Must-Read 2024.6.6

After entering the workforce, I haven’t read many books in the last eight years. However, if I have time to read one, I would like to find a useful book for myself. I found some by searching Bill Gates’s recommended list of readings and some by popular rank of bookstores. In light of the above, most books I read are suitable to be recommended to everybody, though there are not many. However, the must-read one is “Zero to One” by Peter Thiel.

First of all, what is “Zero to One”? “Zero to One” is a concept about invention and breakthrough. “Zero to One” allows us to bring a new solution for difficulties we have faced now and for some difficulties in the future. “Zero to One” tries to solve the problems. On the other hand, “One to N” consumes the limited resources we have.

In Peter Thiel’s opinion, success is not from winning the competition but from inventing new technologies to improve our lives. For example, Google monopolized a smaller request of searching and then expanded the services. Now, searching is a common way when we use the Explorer online and Alphabet is a top IT company in the world. Did Google win on any battlefields? No! I believe that Google just avoided the competition and tried to optimize users’ experience on the Internet through innovations.

This book is more like some excerpts from Peter Thiel’s class at Stanford University. When you read this book, you will feel like you are reading some successful stories about startups, histories, business, management, and technology. It doesn’t matter if you are interested in these areas because all the topics are interesting and thought-provoking. I think everyone can enjoy this book regardless of what age they are. One more thing, this book is worth rereading again and again. I reread it four times and that’s why this book has already been recommended by many celebrities and I still marked it as my most-recommended one.