1599: [Part 1] The Biggest Mistake People Make in their Careers (and lives) by Benjamin Hardy

[00:00:00] This is Optimal Work Daily, The Biggest Mistake People Make in their Careers and Lives, Part 1 by Benjamin Hardy of BenjaminHardy.com. A Career Builders survey found that 49% of all workers accept the first offer given to them. For people under 35 who are far less likely to negotiate, these numbers are surely much higher.

[00:00:24] Losing an extra few thousand dollars may not seem like a big deal. However, over a long enough period of time, small things become big things. According to an analysis by Salary.com, negotiating your initial salary and renegotiating every few years will earn you over a million dollars more during your career. Here's the kicker. Raises and future offers generally build on your current salary or position, which means your first mistake can haunt you for a long time.

[00:00:52] I had a conversation with Jeff Goines, best-selling author of The Art of Work about eight months ago. I asked his advice about publishing a book I wanted to write and he said, quote, Wait. Don't jump the gun on this. I made that mistake myself. If you wait a year or two, you'll get a ten times bigger advance, which will change the trajectory of your whole career. End quote. Most people can't wait.

[00:01:17] In the famous Stanford marshmallow experiment, four-year-old children were offered a treat of their choosing, an Oreo cookie, a marshmallow, or a pretzel stick, and they were told that they could have the treat now, or if they waited 15 minutes and resisted temptation, they could have a second treat. So, for waiting 15 minutes, the kids who waited would get a 100% increase in their reward. Follow-up studies on these children later in life found that those who delayed gratification were more successful in generally all areas of life.

[00:01:47] We've all heard this before, yet despite knowing about this famous study and the loads of research on willpower and self-control since, most people are still impulsive about their decision-making. The wrong motivations. The reason most people fail to make the best long-term decisions is because they don't know what they really want. If you don't know what you want, of course, you'll take the best thing offered you. In his book, Good to Great, Jim Collins said, quote,

[00:02:14] A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity is irrelevant if it is the wrong opportunity. End quote. According to Collins, most companies don't go from good to great because they lose track of their original intent. When you start to succeed or get a degree, etc., more opportunities come your way. Unless you know exactly what you are and what you're not, you'll be easily swayed. Because most people haven't decided what they intrinsically want, their primary motivation becomes external validation.

[00:02:43] Thus, rather than actually being good, the objective is to look as good as possible. Why do you really want to do what you are doing? Ryan Holiday, best-selling author of The Obstacle Is The Way, told me that people write a book for one of two reasons. Get a book deal. Write a book that does well long into the future. Most people trying to develop a writing career, if they were honest with themselves, want to get a book deal.

[00:03:08] They'd sacrifice the long-term goal of writing a classic at the expense of merely becoming an author. The same is true of most people trying to start a business or doing anything else. The problem is, in most cases, it doesn't go both ways. Holiday, for example, took a substantially smaller book contract for his book The Obstacle Is The Way because the book was on an unproven concept. But he was fine with the initial pay cut because his goal was more long-term.

[00:03:34] He wanted to write a book that would continue to sell well years into the future. This is the exact opposite of how most people approach their goals. The goal for most people is to be a bestseller or an entrepreneur or a college grad. It's all about the image. The external validation becomes more important than truly doing great work. To be continued.

[00:03:55] You just listened to part one of the post titled The Biggest Mistake People Make in Their Careers and Lives by Benjamin Hardy of BenjaminHardy.com. And thank you to Benjamin. He is an organizational psychologist and bestselling author of Willpower Doesn't Work and Personality Isn't Permanent.

[00:04:19] His blogs have been read by over a hundred million people and are featured on Harvard Business Review, New York Times, Forbes, Fortune, CNBC, and many others. He's a regular contributor to Inc. and Psychology Today. And from 2015 to 2018, he was the number one writer in the world on Medium.com. He and his wife Lauren adopted three children through the foster system in February 2018. And one month later, Lauren became pregnant with twins who were born in December of 2018.

[00:04:48] They live in Orlando and you can check out his site to sign up for Benjamin's free life-changing 30-day future self program. So find that and a lot more at BenjaminHardy.com. But that should do it for today. I hope you are having a great weekend if you're listening in real time. And thanks as always for subscribing. And I will see you back here tomorrow where we'll finish up this post and where your optimal life awaits. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. Thank you.