Kickigai Weekly
Posts
The importance of discovering your natural attitudes

The importance of discovering your natural attitudes

A must-do exercise before chasing goals and success

Giammarco Pacifico & Federica Montrone
October 11, 2023

Startups are great places where, if you are fortunate enough, you get the chance to change the field you are working in, unlike you would in any other place.

Fueled with excitement, you might jump the gun and start approaching one or more companies because you have a sincere interest in the field and you believe what they are doing is cool.

But that alone is not enough to sustain a career development.

What should you look for instead?

Understanding your attitudes as a professional and combining it with what makes you lose track of time, will help you a lot more.

Sometimes sheer interest and willpower alone might overcome and compensate for the wrong fit. This might imply a little initial struggle, but such a struggle is made with a light heart and might eventually be useful to build the attitude required.

Natural attitudes instead are something different: they are the natural engines that drive your actions without you even noticing.

For example, some people find it easy to build internal networks in the company while others don't feel comfortable interacting every day with different people in new places.

Some people are control freaks and like to keep everything under their radar, while others need fuzziness and low constraints to eventually generate value.

Certain professionals feel comfortable and are able to deliver in a set routine, some others are challenged by working every day in different environments and completely new tasks.

Some are born to lead, others to be team players.

Although these might sound like rigid personality traits, they are the markers of your essence, and they can be leveraged to design a career that fits you like a glove. But be careful that leveraging doesn't mean bringing things to the extreme. Leveraging a trait makes sense when it allows you to give your best, making you feel satisfied with your time spent working.

Understanding this concept is one of the hardest parts of being a young professional and what makes all the difference is how soon you are able to recognise key facts about yourself.

Nobody will blame you if you take time to do this: on the contrary, it is more likely you will regret not having done it earlier in your career.

Of course, as with a lot of things, the sooner you stop to start building self-awareness, the better you become in making informed choices about your life, minimising the risk of crashing against walls.

How to recognise your unique traits before you feel you have mastered them?

The secret lies in asking yourself the right questions, targeted at understanding how different situations make you feel (if nothing comes into your mind, an entertaining personality test is available here).

Exploring different career paths also pays off in the quest. You force yourself into situations you can't even imagine while getting quick feedback on how you fit them.

But let's be honest: career-hopping is time-consuming too.

In that regard, a startup, even if it might be a high-speed rollercoaster, will also offer you the space to structure your professional development without setting too strict perimeters from the very beginning and without having to career hop from company to company, allowing for the flexibility and time you need to define yourself at first.

To make the most out of it don't forget to:

ask for others' experience, both within the company and before they joined
get involved in things outside of your comfort zone
offer your support beyond your strict responsibilities
propose to make a rotational program working in the different department

These steps will help you build a better understanding of the key roles in the industry (with the type of attitudes needed for each) and possibly give you the chance to explore opportunities where you might have a hidden edge.

The most treacherous error, that I also made as a young professional, was failing to promptly recognise the following:

Self-consciousness/ attitudes > goals/ambition: setting goals is useless if you aren't aware of who you are and what you really want. Failure to recognise your attitudes will likely build distance between your true self and the image of yourself, inevitably bringing unhappiness and frustration.
Authenticity > Success: Staying true to yourself and the rest will follow. Success builds itself if you have a personal definition for it and clarity about what you want. If you aim at building authenticity, you won't have to worry about success.

The point of work is doing the labor, not delegating it away. When we focus excessively on productivity, when our biggest concern is on how to “scale ourselves,” we miss the point of work—and, really, life—which is to find meaning in the daily tasks that consume our time. Like a bike chain catching a gear, there is a deeply satisfying cachunk that happens in your brain when you go from enjoying the outcome of your labors to enjoying the process of them

Evan Armstrong

Indeed, what is success if not a consequence of a well-conscious talent?

And how can we univocally define success, if not for every single person?

Before setting yourself up for the mad race toward goals, ambition and success, dig into yourself to discover what you can be for yourself and your professional community.

Everyone will benefit from this. Especially you.

Until next time,
Federica

If you enjoyed this issue, share it with a friend or two

This week's top scientific reads

Deep Brain Stimulation to treat depression (Nature)
A wearable to measure female hormones (Nature Nanotechnology)
GPT-4 to review scientific papers (ArXiv)
A malaria vaccine (finally) at scale (Reuters)
3D printing to repair the brain (Nature Communications)

Read my comments on these articles here.

Latest funding rounds in health & bio

Ready to turn this news into your next career opportunity? Here is how

SeaBeLife Biotech raised €1.2M for its drug candidate pipeline that targets necrosis in liver disease and eye disorders 🇫🇷
FlexSea closed a £3M seed round to develop their bio-based, biodegradable and compostable plastics using seaweed 🇬🇧
Pencil Biosciences raised £5.6M for its gene editing platform that leverages modular technologies instead of CRISPR approaches 🇬🇧
Tune Insight raised $3.4M to scale its security platform that allows hospitals to collaborate with each other without hearing patients' data 🇨🇭
Nagi Bioscience raised 12.4M CHF to commercialize their laboratory equipment for alternatives to animal testing in biopharma and agrochemical 🇨🇭
Atinary Technologies raised $5M to accelerate R&D and drug discovery via its no-code automated platform Self-Driving Labs 🇨🇭
Automata raised $40M to commercialize its platform that allows easy lab automation to research institutions, hospitals and biopharma 🇬🇧