Permission Seeking Mindset Is Keeping You Unemployed and Frustrated
What if you were the biggest blocker in your way to higher income and happiness?
Himanshu was describing how he plans to start applying for internships in 2 months. "Why wait for 2 months?", I asked.
Recently I sat down with Himanshu Aggarwal, a super-curious student from Delhi Technical University who reached out to me regarding advice on how to get ready for placements and internships. He was nearing the beginning of his third year in college and felt that he did not have adequate practice and skills to take on the seemingly arduous task of getting employment in a tough tech job market.
After listening to him for some time, I realised that like many engineering students, the solution to his problem has nothing to do with technical skills.
Himanshu and I had a lot in common. Looking back at the time when I was looking for internships in college, I identify two big mistakes which I was continuously making:
1. I used to think that I could start learning a new skill only when I was done learning the current skill at hand.
2. I fell victim to seeking permission from the world to get the things I wanted in life instead of going out and getting them for myself, now!
Himanshu was also making the first mistake. It tied into his idea that he needed to finish learning "all" of Data Structure and Algorithms before moving on to learning Web Development or Artificial Intelligence.
We, humans, tend to underestimate our current competence and tend to find comfort in sticking to things we are already good at. Learning is optimised when new skill acquisition is interleaved with existing skill reinforcement.
Sequential Learning Isn't Optimal
Often there is no concrete measure or metric which tells you when you are good enough at a skill to be classified as being suited to go out and show it to the rest of the world. And even if there is a qualifying metric, learning remains a continuous process and you need to continually invest in it to keep up with the changing world around you. This is the reason why I kept doing leetcode problems for 800 days straight. If I could go back in time. instead of explosively trying to learn one thing, I would have tried to repeatedly set aside time for wearing multiple hats and parallelly learn both DSA and Web Development.
No one is coming to tell you that you're good enough. No one is coming to tell you that you need to go back and revise the skills you have already developed. Set intentions, keep a calendar, and make time.
The second main problem is being boxed into waiting for a certain time to arrive or an event to occur before you can start taking "real" action. This is what I have learnt to call a permission-seeking mindset (thanks to Taylor Pearson for introducing me to the ideology).
You Don't Need Anyone's Permission (Not Even Your Own)
Consider these situations -
1. What if there is a recruiter out there right now, who might hire and is unable to discover you just because you are waiting for "the mental permission" to start applying?
2. What if a CTO is sitting somewhere who wants to hire someone by the end of this week and is okay to hire you with just X problems solved on Leetcode/Codeforces? But you are solely focused on 2X-ing your current solved count. This job probably would not be around by the time you have 2X-ed your skill.
3. What if the market is only going to get tougher every day from now on? Today might be the best day for you to demonstrate your current level of skills and hopefully land a job. Do you have to wait for the "internship season" to arrive before you can start reaching out and applying for work?
Ask yourself, why can't you start applying for jobs and reaching out right now? It's convenient to stick to the excuses in your head and not go out and be vulnerable, assuring yourself that you will go seriously and start once you have got skills X, Y and Z mastered.
The market only rewards the people who step up to the plate, and the market disproportionally rewards people who show up consistently, without really caring about how ready "they feel".
Shout out to Himanshu for reaching out and agreeing to share his struggles with all of us If you are an employer or recruiter and are looking for a great addition to your team, I would urge you to reach out to Himanshu.
For more such deep dives into how you can take actionable steps to improve your life, subscribe to my newsletter on substack. You can also check out last week’s podcast recording on youtube.
One good idea w.r.t balancing acquisition and polishing of existing skills is to shape your knowledge to the letter 'T'. The long-end of 'T' represents the stuff you think you're good at (and optionally but helpfully, you like) or have already invested most of your time on so you keep specializing on its sub-branches. And like the two short ends of 'T', you invest time to acquire new skills which in this case might be new frameworks, languages or a different domain altogether. You don't need to be an expert here—just need to know enough to be dangerous. Rinse and repeat—as you grow, you can go beyond two short ends and one long end. You'll grow to be formidable and hard to disregard in any team you present yourself in.