Start with passion

Increment logically

On Tuesday 4 January 2000, I walked into the head office of Wesfarmers, one of Australia’s largest and most respected companies. I was starting a new job, doing IT support. But this was no ordinary IT support role. Not because the Millenium Bug was meant to have rendered IT systems worldwide near useless, but because a large part of it was fixing computers of some of the highest paid executives in Australia.

Whilst applaudable, getting such a job isn’t really that big of a deal, except I was just 17 and my only formal ‘qualification’ was finishing high school. Nine months earlier I had decided to skip university entrance examinations, on the belief it was not necessary to go to university to get an IT job*. I just didn’t expect I’d be able to prove it so soon after finishing high school. Turns out, it is character that matters more than anything else.

I had a ‘mis-spent’ youth. For most people, that means drugs and drinking. For me, it meant computers and games.

I was a computer nerd at school, and spent too much time on them outside of school for it to be healthy. But it was a passion. Plus, I was pretty good at making Windows 98 behave itself. I’d spend many hours just tinkering around on the PC. Regularly wiping my disk drive clean and reinstalling everything, just to get my PC’s performance back to like new. Tweaking hardware device settings for maximum performance, then re-tweaking to see if I could push it a bit more. Sometimes this worked, but more often it resulted in the ‘blue screen of death’ and I’d have to start all over again. That was fine though, I had an interest, and plenty of discretion on how I used my time.

Based largely on self-taught skills, I impressed the IT team at Wesfarmers during a one-week work experience placement part way through year 12 of high school. At the end of the year, they decided to offer a traineeship. I was asked to apply, and my application was successful. This role provided an incredibly strong foundation for the rest of my career, which transitioned from IT to finance over the almost 15 years I worked at Wesfarmers. After that I tried my hand at sales role (not for me), then moved into management consulting and now I’m a freelance business advisor.

All this happened from following interests and taking opportunities as they presented themselves to me. Sometimes I tried to force things, and invariably this is where things felt hard, I’d feel strong resistance and things would go wrong. Although I always persevered, it was during times of not trying to force anything I seemed to have the most success.

Similar to Michael A Singer in The Surrender Experiment, when I let opportunities unfold naturally and said yes to those that made sense, success usually followed. Not every move was right, but on balance I’ve done well doing whatever seemed to be the next logical step that would be an increment, big or small, on my situation. I call this “logical incrementalism”; a concept I learnt from Michael Chaney, former Managing Director of Wesfarmers.

In my teen and young adult years I had a passion and I followed it. I just kept chipping away. Kept learning. Kept improving. Good things inevitably followed. As I’ve matured new interests, new passions emerged and I’m now following them to see what happens, one logical increment at a time.

What’s your next logical increment?

*I did end up going to university, balancing part time study with my full-time job. This was after realising that it would be valuable for career advancement and job mobility. But even for those who do follow the usual path and go to university upfront, in getting any job character matters more.

Cover image: Photo by alexeyzhilkinv on Freepik