TransformingYourCareerTransformingYourself

Academia establishes and keeps reinforcing showcasing high intelligence. For example, you are encouraged to challenge with thoughtful questions. But even there, as I observed during my time in that system, it's not unusual to wind up being penalized for being, well, too smart for your own good. Recall the old adage: Would you rather be right or successful? Outside academia, this seems to be standard. That is, sidelining professionally the highly intelligent. Reddit introduces the subject: "Factoring out experience, wages, etc. Have you ever been rejected or you know someone who has because your/their intellect might be too good or perceived as problematic?" The more than 250 replies tend to 1) Agree this happens and 2) Explain why that might be a pattern. I second: This happens and frequently. I have experienced those smarter than I - even Mensa smart - get turned down for jobs and contract assignments. Overall, the reason seemed to be that they were obnoxious. Always run...

  Academics such as Leon Botstein, Noam Chomsky and David Gelernter usually don't acquire extreme wealth like Leon Black and Bill Gates. But, as The Wall Street Journal reports, Jeffrey Epstein nurtured them just as he did billionaires. That was to enhance his prestige aura. Not only did he use them for name-dropping. And he did plenty of that. He needed to extend his reach. That included landing an office in Harvard. And it was available to him after his conviction. It was located in the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics in Harvard Square. The same Epstein drill went on with many in branches of professional services, such as practicing law. Those primarily turn out millionaires, not billionaires or trillionaires. Name drop, Epstein did. And legal thought leaders such as Brad Karp at Paul, Weiss certainly did their part in generating stimulating dinner-party conversation.  So, scrutiny about what went very wrong that could create a global public menace like Epstein now include...

  Bill Gates does the mea culpa at the Foundation's town hall. Melinda was right to dump him. Larry Summers will never be associated with Harvard again. Remember when he was president of Harvard. Harvard will probably never be Harvard again. Nobel Prize winner Richard Axel resigned as co-director of Columbia University's Mind Brain Institute. That's just the latest reputational ruin and more from being a Friend of Jeffrey. So many other careers have collapsed. More will be in tatters. How will Bard College president Leon Botstein wind up in the WilmerHale investigation? Who knows, Woody Allen could also get roughed up. As if the Farrow family didn't cause him enough trouble. What to do? For the rest of their lives they might play out in their heads and over too many drinks with someone trusted how they became so embedded in the Epstein web. But there they are. It's documented in the emails, videos, photos and more.  There's no going back. There could be a way fo...

How many of us Boomer females wanted to be Kitten! Just like we had wanted to be Caroline Kennedy.  Kitten was that cute younger daughter on "Father Knows Best."  Played by Lauren Chapin she seemed to hold a special place in Jim Anderson's heart. And unlike our working class fathers who chowed down food at all hours in the kitchen because of shift work, Kitten's wore a suit as an insurance salesperson, was always home for dinner in a dining room and listened. Anderson even smiled when she said something cute. Most of our own fathers were too bone tired to notice we were there. At the time I didn't realize Kitten was my age. Starting at nine years old. Back then, with the darkness of Depression-era parents ever present (mostly fearing another economic collapse), we offspring tended to be born old. Never be young.   Well, Chapin has died, at the age of 80. My age. Like so many of us she did run into health problems. For her it was cancer. As the saying goes, life in...

Performance reviews. They now have a new wrinkle, at least in tech. The Wall Street Journal reports that Google, Meta and Microsoft are among the tech players embedding AI use in the performance review. There are all versions of assessment, ranging from achieving productivity gains to creating a new workflow tool the team can leverage. This, of course, adds not only to the angst associated with being formally evaluated. It significantly shifts what you should be paying attention to. That is, if you want to keep your job and perhaps aspire to a promotion. There is also all the decoding that overall must be done when you interpret what's in that review. For instance, when I coach those in professional services such as law they strain to decide if what's flagged as "needing" improvement" represents well-thought-out mentoring feedback or a legalized kind of warning that you could be on the way out.  In addition, there's the possible political aspect: Someone in p...

  Not so much the tariff thing. The 800+ plunge on the stock market primarily had been generated by a Substack post by Citrini Research. Running 7,000 words it sketched out a hypothetical in which the bullishness about AI is so on the money that it destroys the money. As AI quickly moves along in improvements it wipes out just about everything from the historic value of human intelligence to the commercial and personal value of human relationships.  Here's a snippet: "It should have been clear all along that a single GPU cluster in North Dakota generating the output previously attributed to 10,000 white-collar workers in midtown Manhattan is more economic pandemic than economic panacea. The velocity of money flatlined. The human-centric consumer economy, 70% of GDP at the time, withered. We probably could have figured this out sooner if we just asked how much money machines spend on discretionary goods. (Hint: it’s zero.)" And all this could possibly kick in by 2028.  The...