This is the fifth of ten posts where we follow Marcos Salazar’s personal branding journey, as he uses the concepts and four-step process outlined in Me 2.0 for his own career.
In my last post, I introduced the concept of a Renaissance Worker and how I came to see this term as a way to unify all of my skills, passions, and work experiences into a personal brand. It was an idea I had been thinking about for months, but during the discover phase of my personal branding journey I realized that it really encapsulated the career adventurist in me. In addition, the brand just felt right.
I have always been the type of person who loves learning from a wide array of fields, and I have made the conscious effort since college to develop skills from a diverse set of disciplines. This mindset has been at the heart of almost all my career decisions and I have seen many, many benefits of approaching my professional life in this way.
However, I am by far not the only person who has adopted the Renaissance Worker mindset. More importantly, I believe that developing a Renaissance Worker mindset will need to become an essential part of any personal brand if you want to succeed in the working world of the 21st century.
Twenty-First Century Renaissance Workers
What do Bono, Diddy, and Tim Ferriss have in common? They are all modern day Renaissance Workers.
Diddy, for example, owns Bad Boy Records, has his own clothing line Sean John, has a movie production company, and owns two restaurants. He has also taken the roles of recording executive, performer, producer of MTV’s Making the Band, writer, arranger, clothing designer, and Broadway actor.
Bono is a rock superstar, but he is also a dedicated humanitarian as well as owner of Dublin’s five star Clarence Hotel, on the board of the Elevation Partners private-equity firm, has invested in the Forbes Media group in the US through Elevation Partners, and been in multiple movies.
Tim Ferriss is a bestselling author and much sought after speaker, but he has also amassed a diverse (and often odd) roster of credentials. He has been a Princeton University guest lecturer, the first American in history to hold a Guinness World Record in tango, a National Chinese kickboxing champion, and was named Wired Magazine’s “Greatest Self-Promoter of 2008.”
While these are examples of individuals at the far end of the Renaissance Worker success spectrum, Diddy, Bono, and Ferriss demonstrate how you don’t have to stay in a single niche anymore. Today, you are able to diversify your professional life and succeed in many areas that don’t always seem to relate to each other.
Gen Y and Millennials – Renaissance Workers in the making
What I have discovered on my personal branding journey is that my generation (Gen Y) and Millennials are all adopting the Renaissance Worker concept – both out of choice as well as necessity.
In many ways, the foundation for becoming a Renaissance Worker was laid out for us by our educational system. Most students are required to take liberal arts classes where they learn about topics unrelated to their major (sadly, colleges still don’t do a good job of helping students see how the knowledge and skills they learn in one field could be beneficial other fields as well as in the potential career paths they may take after graduation).
In addition, there has never been a time where we have access to so much knowledge, are able to use so many tools to express our creative potentialities, and are not penalized when we jump from job to job. Today’s working world is perfectly set up to become a Renaissance Worker.
Our generation has also come to see that work is no longer designed for someone who is going to stay in one job, or even profession, for 30 years. These jobs are vanishing each day therefore, we are all forced to constantly seek out new knowledge and develop new skills just to survive.
The benefits of diversifying your professional life
On March 12, 2009, Bernard Madoff pled guilty to 11 felonies and admitted to operating what has been called the largest investor fraud ever committed by an individual. Prosecutors estimate that his 4,800 clients lost over $64.8 billion.
Now, what does Bernard Madoff have to do with being a Renaissance Worker and personal branding? Three words: Diversify, Diversify, Diversify! Many of the people Madoff defrauded lost virtually everything because they decided to put all their money into one single investment. Then when things went bad, poof – all their money was gone!
Today, we are told to diversify our investments and this is why people buy mutual funds instead of putting all their money into one stock. Sure, sometimes a single stock can pay off short-term, but in the long run this strategy could be extremely risky and potentially catastrophic. So when it comes to the career investment game, doesn’t it make sense for you to start diversifying your knowledge and skills as well?
In her book One Person/Multiple Careers, Marci Alboher says that adding “slashes” i.e., having multiple jobs or professional identities, is just like diversifying your investment portfolio. This way, if the market goes south or one employer runs into trouble, a diversified career portfolio can buffer you against hard times, especially if you have other potential income streams.
Becoming a highly valuable worker
Adopting the Renaissance Worker life can also benefit you by making you a much more desirable job candidate. If you have many more slashes on your resume then the other candidate, you have a much better shot at landing the job because your additional skill set sets you apart and will bring added value to the organization. And if you are already within an organization, your slashes will create new opportunities and potential promotions.
In my own professional life, my day job is a psychology and leadership researcher for the Girl Scouts Research Institute. However, on a daily basis I am constantly using the creative and entrepreneurial skills I developed when opening up my clothing business, am being sought for my technology skills, and am helping IT, Marketing, and Communications create a social media strategy that will increase awareness of our new Girl Scout Leadership Experience that will help usher in a new generation of girl leaders for the 21st century. So because of my diverse set of knowledge and diversified skill set as a Renaissance Worker, I add value to my organization in a way that is far outside my job description.
How do you become a Renaissance Worker?
To answer this question, I am going to take you back to my previous posts. They are all related to the discover phase of personal branding outlined in Me 2.0 and will help set the foundation for becoming a Renaissance Worker.
First, you have to get a better sense of who you are and see if this professional lifestyle fits with you (however, like I said earlier, I think sooner or later everyone is going to have to become a Renaissance Worker). Next, you have to figure out what are you passionate about. I have never done a job in my career that I didn’t enjoy or feel I was growing from. If the learning curved leveled off or I lost interest, I realized that job was not for me and I went exploring for something else I was passionate about. Never settle for a mediocre job experience.
Next you have to figure out what you were born to do and see if this aligns with your passions. As I said in my third post, there is a huge difference between doing what you are good at versus what you were made to do. Next, you have to figure out how to connect all your interest, skills, and work experiences so there is a level of synergy that all your professional identities benefit from each other. Once this is done, you can then see how to put them all under a unified personal brand.
Do you think you will adopt a Renaissance Worker mindset soon? What value do you see it bringing to your professional life?
Author:
Marcos Salazar is the author of The Turbulent Twenties Survival Guide, which focuses on the psychology of life after college and what graduates go through as the make the transition from school to the working world. He writes a career adventurism and psychological development blog for young professionals at www.marcossalazar.com. You can connect with him on Twitter @marcossalazar.
Related posts:
- My Personal Branding Story Part 4: I am a Renaissance Worker This is the fourth of ten posts where we...
- My Personal Branding Story Part 6: Narrative, Context, and Being a Purple Cow This is the sixth of ten posts where we...
- My Personal Branding Journey Part 9: Maintaining Your Brand This is the ninth of ten posts where we...
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Hmmm. Catching up with you here, Marcos, and find myself thinking you’ve gotten a bit off track. Yes, adopting a Renaissance outlook and willingness is beneficial on many sides, but the thing about branding is that it takes you from an awareness of all the possibilities to an articulation of your own very unique responses. In other words, you’re thinking you’re at the end of the branding discovery process, but you’ve only gone half way. Now take the Renaissance idea and define it much further. What needs of other people do you satisfy with your Renaissance offerings? When you have this clearly articulated, you’ll be much closer to a useful brand.
Hi Ruth. Thanks for your feedback. I appreciate you taking the time to read my posts and give me your honest feedback! In terms of defining it more, I am not sure what you mean? I think it was pretty well defined in this and the last post.
I also think this is a generational difference. Manisha did a good job to point out in a previous post about a comment I had received about needing to focus on a single niche (http://bit.ly/q2Yn4) “’…If you cannot define yourself in one sentence and state your one, single niche in it, you’ll continue to be confused.’ Marcos, love how you bridged the gap between the Boomer mindset of needing to focus on “just one thing” and the Gen Y attitude of multiple points of engagement.”
Marci Alboher does a good job in her research of describing how slash careers “integrate and fully express the multiple passions, talents, and interests that a single career often cannot accommodate.” Gen Y fully embraces this while other generations may not just yet. In terms of calling myself a Renaissance Worker, I take the slash career concept and turn it into a brand. So I couldn’t just call myself an entrepreneur because that would not encompass my psychology background. And I can’t call myself simply a business owner because that would not encompass my leadership research background. So being a Renaissance Worker allows me to put all my passions, talents, interests, and work experiences under one umbrella and allows me to add more in the future. So, if I eventually decided to run for political office, that would be another “slash” and this would be very, very different than all my other slashes. But it could still fit under the umbrella brand of being an Renaissance Worker.
Hi Marcos:
Your posts are very interesting to me. For the first time in history, there are at least three generations working together side-by-side in any given organization. Having been exposed to this myself, I would agree that there is a general lack of understanding across the board, especially with Gen Y/Millenials, which is why so much attention is being paid to them. Every generation has had its share of innovators, but because Gen Y was raised with technology at its fingertips, you’ve come along and knocked your elders on their behinds.
I wanted to say that perhaps Generation X (me) may have been the first group to realize that one needed to be more flexible in their skills and thinking. Our grandparents retired from their 30+ year jobs, and their children, the boomers – our parents – really may have wanted to, but then the 80s and 90s took that away from them. We had two decades of consolidation, booms and busts, and more importantly, the NEED to change because of the advances in technology. It has been during this time that it was officially decided that a person would have five careers in their lifetime.
As a job seeker myself right now, I am reading your blog saying, “yes!!!” because things seem narrow to me. I am a marketer by education and experience, and I see it as a skill and process that can be applied to any organization/department/job/problem. There are those on the hiring side that don’t see what I see because I get things like, “you don’t have X specific experience.” True, but I didn’t have A, B, C experience either before I did all the things that fill my resume.
You call it Renaissance Worker, I’ve been calling it Dimensional. People are not one dimensional. We have tons of interests, passions, soft skills and experiences that can be brought to the table and provide value to an organization that, at first glance, may not be noticeable on a one dimensional page (resume).
Best of luck to you on your discovery. I look forward to reading it.
Thanks for your response, Marcos, and I absolutely do follow your (and Theresa’s) thinking, even though I’m an aging boomer. Slash careers make total sense, and are much closer to true humanity than the old idea of one ‘line,’ exclusive of all others.
NONETHELESS, what’s crucial, and what you will refine as the years tick by, is the very specific combination of slashes. This is what makes all the difference. Entrepreneur/psychologist/branding expert describes a different person from entrepreneur/psychologist/community builder or business owner/self-development expert/psychologist, etc. See what I mean?
I think describing yourself as Renaissance is more like describing yourself as ethical, or generous; it’s the opposite of specialization. But the question dangles … Renaissance in what ways that are unique to you? Pinpointing what is specifically unique to you is what branding is about.
Your unique selling proposition – absolutely! Mine is that I can save your life AND do your marketing planning…literally. I’ve been in marketing for 15 years and I’ve been a certified EMT for 10 years. I turned it into my brand: http://www.marketingresuscitator.com.
To Marcos point, I have a degree and work experience in advertising & marketing, but medicine is my passion, so I became an EMT. Believe it or not, my resume is cohesive because in my last year working for an ambulance company, I used my business and marketing backgrounds to start a profit center for them and direct market our new service. We turned a profit in less than 15 months.
Hi Marcos,
Great piece – great concept.
Two things I’d like to add:
- Two books you might also enjoy on related topics: “Renaissance Soul” by Margaret Lobenstine and “Refuse to Choos” by Barbara Sher. Wonderful reading!
- As a professional resume writer and former recruiter, I do have to add that in the professional world, the way you present yourself is vital. Having a diversified skill set is great, but make sure to present what is relevant to each prospective employer you apply with.
Also, the work world is, for the most part, still in love with specialists. In practical terms: focus your resume and create several versions if you’re after different types of functions.
We know that unfocused resumes don’t get read. Recruiters and hiring folks don’t have time to figure out how you might fit in. Make it clear. Unless you have a complementary skill set or a combination of talents that make sense to employers, be very careful presenting yourself as “jack of all trades” to an employer.
Btw – I’m one of those Renaissance people myself, so I’m totally for it! : ) Just adding some perspective from the hiring world on this topic.
Yes, Theresa, exactly. Sounds like your experience has been right on target! Wonderful combination of skills, and you’ve made it work for you. Congratulations!
Nice, thought provoking post.
You suggest that everyone should/could become a Renaissance Worker. Perhaps, but it may not be our choice. We each might already occupy our own point on a spectrum reaching from the Motzarts on one end to the Franklins on the other.
It may be that our multiple and varied inerests, coupled with our affinity for learning new things is both our passion AND what we were born to do. This could be our personal brand, or it could be what gives us the ability tto field several brands.
As far as the generational thing, I see a lot of this quality in Gen-Y, and I also see a lot of it in tweeners like myself (c.1954-1964). Not quite Boomers, not quite Gen-X, we have a tendency to wear multiple hats. Just ask our lawyer/community organizer/President. Could just be that some times favor the specialist while in others, the genrealist thrives.
Again, great post. You might find these of interest:
The Renaissance Soul: Life Design for People with Too Many Passions to Pick Just One – Margaret Lobenstine
Refuse to Choose!: A Revolutionary Program for Doing Everything That You Love – Barbara Sher
Also check out Steve Hardy at The Creative Generalist:
creativegeneralist.blogspot.com
People like you and me who were born between the boomers and gen xers are part of a generation which finally has a wdely-used name, with an increasing collective consciousness: Generation Jones (born 1954-1965, between the Boomers and Generation X). (“Tweeners” is a term which is commonly used for those between childhood and adloescence, and never developed any following whatsoever for those between boom and x.) Many top commentators from many top publications and networks (Washington Post, Time magazine, NBC, Newsweek, ABC, etc.) now specifically use the term “Generation Jones”. In fact, the Associated Press’ annual Trend Report forecast the Rise of Generation Jones as the #1 trend of 2009.
Our generation has also come to see that work is no longer designed for someone who is going to stay in one job, or even profession, for 30 years. These jobs are vanishing each day therefore, we are all forced to constantly seek out new knowledge and develop new skills just to survive.
So true – when I graduated from business school in 1997 the piece of advice I remember most strongly is “a commitment to life-long learning is the most powerful skill you can acquire.” Your journey embodies this sentiment perfectly!
[...] my last two posts, I described why I decided to use the concept of being a Renaissance Worker as my personal brand. [...]
Hi Marco,
I do volunteer work for the Girl Scouts of the Philippines, which by the way, has no research unit. I’ve done 3 researches for them so far as part of my volunteer work. We are in the process of changing our logo. How was the new logo of GSUSA launched and how did they get it accepted by different social markets of GSUSA? Thanks very much.