As I described at the beginning of this book, my sixth company is
L2, a business intelligence (fancy term for research) firm that has
grown to 140 people in seven years. Seventy percent of our employees
are under thirty; the average age is twenty-eight. L2 employees are
often recruited by aspirational firms. They are kids: raw, having had
little time to shape their working personalities beyond the nature and
the nurture of their youth. It’s an interesting environment to observe
people and witness how their core personalities drive success and
failure. And from those observations, I’ve come to some conclusions
regarding what it takes to succeed in our evolving, horsemen-driven
economy.
Personal Success Factors
On average, smart people who work hard and treat people well do
better than people whose thinking is muddled, who are lazy, or who
are unpleasant to colleagues. That has always been and will always be
true—even if the occasional jerk proves the exception. However, talent
and hard work only get you in the top billion on the planet. There are
other, more subtle centrifuges and separators that create the cream of
the digital age.
Nothing is more important than emotional maturity—especially
for people in their twenties, in whom this quality can vary widely.
There are fewer and fewer fields in which a person reports to work
with a single boss, a specific set of tasks, and the expectation that
those parameters won’t change frequently or significantly. By
comparison, the digital-age worker must often respond to numerous
stakeholders and shift between roles throughout the day—an
environment that favors the mature. And as competitive and product
cycles shorten, our work life will see rapid swings between success and
failure.
How well someone manages their own enthusiasm through those
cycles is important. How people interact with one another determines
the projects they work on, who will work with them, and who wants to
hire them. Young people who have a strong sense of their own identity,
remain poised under stress, and learn and apply what they’ve learned,