Build career - a Lego game

Have you ever been in a situation where you may feel stressed by comparing what you’re having with what the market is demanding? Have you ever wondered about your capability in doing some special things? Have you ever felt lost in finding the way to success? If you ever have those questions bouncing on your mind, I hope this article can help you a bit.

The genuine of a child playing a lego game

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Let’s imagine you are in the lego game competition where you are asked to collect all the pieces from the store that you need to get ready but they didn’t tell you what you’re going to build. Or they may give you the topic for building the helicopter in the beginning but then change to the battleship in the middle of the game. What will you do? You may think it’s a crazy competition and if you have a choice, you will never join that game right?

Just wait, take a breath, but does it sound like the game we’re playing with our career? We studied hard in universities but did not really know exactly what is waiting for us after graduation. Once we have our first job, all the things a company may ask us to do is quite different from what we were taught before. After a short amount of time, once you feel like you have already gotten familiar with what you’re doing and suddenly, technology changed, new frameworks, new libraries, new domain, new projects and you may be asked for doing the transition to the new role. Things keep getting worse when you’re looking for your next job and you find out that the market may need another set of skills.

I hope that now you may feel some connection with the lego game that I mentioned before, right? So what can we do?

We, mature players, are really good at playing the lego games once we have the instruction and all the pieces that we need. But in this situation, a child can do a better job. How?

They use their imagination. With all the pieces in their hands, they know how to put them together to build a shape that “looks like the requirement”. And then they will use the remaining pieces to make their product better. If you give them more pieces or they can borrow, get, or even steal them they may not hesitate to break the remaining result and build a new better one.

So what can we learn from it to apply to the process of building our career?

In my opinion, the first thing we can do is be brave to try new things even without the instruction. I didn’t mean to ask you to come out of your comfort zone. The feeling of being forced to get out of our comfort zone may trigger our protection mode and also the fear of failure. Actually, we don’t get out of anything, we are expanding our comfort zone. We are trying to see what else can we do with what we’re having in our hands and we already know exactly how to build back the previous one in a short amount of time even in the worst case.

The second thing we could do is keep bringing more lego pieces to our side. The more pieces in your hand, the more options, and capabilities you can do in your next try. Apply the infinite mindset to set your daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly achievements. Achievements here can be lessons learned, can be skills we gain, can be networked we build… The moment we take the achievement, we may not know how it impacts our next shapes, but one day we’ll see their values.

You don’t know what will come

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Talking about career is that we are talking about a marathon game. Especially when we’re working in the software industry where changes happen every day so it can be more challenging for us. But the good thing is, new inventions always start from something in the past. And if we have the ability to understand carefully the root points, we can be able to adapt quickly.

Like the lego game, there’re rules that bigger pieces are always built from a set of element pieces and so on. So if we can be able to do the breakdown steps or in an active way is building a mind map of what we have learned and what is going on so far, it can help us to review quicker and start faster the new game we’re in.

Enjoy the journey

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Last but not least, the lesson I can see from observing the kids while they play with Lego is their joy and happiness. You can see their eyes shine whenever they think of something new or complete some small things. They may still be upset when they cannot complete something, but they forget it really quickly with our help and can easily get back to the game they are in.

I think it can be the biggest difference between the kids to us. We forget the fun, curiosity, and happiness to enjoy the journey. We focus too much on the final goal and sometimes it frightens us. You cannot ask someone to be creative and use their imagination when they are afraid of failure or stress right?

We tried the old way, and we know that it has not worked so far. So why don’t we try a new way, a way of a child playing their Lego game, and see how far it takes us in our career? Let’s just focus on adding more pieces to our Lego set daily, enjoy the possibilities of applying them to build different shapes, and be proud of sharing with the others what we can do.

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