advice

Randy Komisar is a good guy. He’s a Sil­i­con Val­ley CEO. Lis­ten­ing to him speak is like being sat down by your down-to-earth uncle, who wants to give you career advice. Komisar is good at giv­ing inter­est­ing advice about ‘fol­low­ing your pas­sion’ with­out sound­ing trite or overly moti­va­tional.  A lot of us get stuck on ques­tions like “what is my (one) pas­sion in life?!” Rather than wor­ry­ing about the right answer to that ques­tion, he rec­om­mends think­ing of your pas­sions as a port­fo­lio of inter­ests. Then just try to match your inter­ests to the oppor­tu­ni­ties in front of you. As long as you’re mov­ing in the right direc­tion you’re get­ting there.

(If you only have time to watch one of these, watch the first one).

In this sec­ond video, Komisar dis­cusses stay­ing bal­anced. The bal­ance changes as your pri­or­i­ties change. He talks about money, oppor­tu­nity and power (the 3 things peo­ple always wish they had in the career) don’t always come in the same pack­age. We need to be care­ful that our career doesn’t take up too much of our lives and some­times it’s worth it to say, sac­ri­fice money and power in order to increase opportunities.

He also sug­gests that we should never put our­selves in a sit­u­a­tion where we can’t say no, by hand­cuff­ing our­selves to too many oblig­a­tions (i.e. hav­ing too many time or money expenses). Keep your eye on the ball (your val­ues) and, as much as pos­si­ble, give your­self the free­dom to make the changes that respect the balance.

Real­ity check: When Komisar cut back in his life he went from being a full-time CEO to a doing part-time-CEO-temping. He made heaps of money as a CEO and, when he cut back, he made slightly-smaller heaps, but still prob­a­bly more than you and me and every­one who will ever read this post com­bined. It’s eas­ier mak­ing finan­cial sac­ri­fices when doing so doesn’t mean you’ll have to make any real sac­ri­fices at all.

Still, I think he’s giv­ing us some good advice here.

Randy Komisar’s book is The Monk and the Rid­dle: The Edu­ca­tion of a Sil­i­con Val­ley Entre­pre­neur.

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