Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/164802
The Art of Manliness Continued boosting your leadership abilities, and deepening your experiences. How to Become a Mr. T JOBS for TEAMS Gain mastery in one skill. Don't be a "hyphen."These are folks who flit around from one skill or discipline to the next without ever gaining competency or mastery in a specific domain.They only work on creating the horizontal stroke of the T.These folks typically don't accomplish much in life, and Tim Brown describes them as people with empty experiences. If you want to make a dent in the world, you have to become an expert with deep knowledge in a specific area. If you've spent most of your adult life jumping from one interest to the next without fully immersing yourself in it, make the commitment today to focus your time and energy into creating the vertical stroke of your T by beginning your path to mastery. Remain curious. While you're focusing most of your time and energy in one skill or discipline, don't lose your curiosity about related and unrelated disciplines. Make it a habit to go out of your way to talk and work with people outside of your particular department or industry. For example, if you work in product development at a company, go have lunch with somebody in customer support. You might be surprised by the insights you'll gain from talking to them. When you meet people outside your area of expertise, ask lots of questions. Read broadly. One of the best ways to create the horizontal stroke of your T is to read as broadly as you can. Read books and magazines from areas outside of your expertise or even your interests. If you're a computer engineer, spend some time reading about art; if you're a lawyer, read up on the latest developments in science and medicine.You get the idea. Actively dabble. As we discussed in our post about becoming a life-long learner, to truly learn, you need to take action. Make it a goal to set aside a certain amount of time each week to dabble in skills outside of your area of expertise. If your expertise is in the ethereal world of the mind, spend some time this weekend working with your hands on an easy DIY project. If you spend all day working with your hands, spend an hour or two writing each week. Increase empathy. According to Tim Brown, empathy is an important characteristic to foster if you want to become a T-shaped person."It's important because it allows people to imagine the problem from another perspective — to stand in somebody else's shoes. Second, they tend to get very enthusiastic about other people's disciplines, to the point that they may actually start to practice them," says Brown. Viewing a problem from the perspective of another discipline allows you to better see how to apply your own expertise to come up with a solution. It makes collaboration across disciplines much more fruitful. One of the more interesting ways to increase your empathy, or "fellow feeling," is to read more fiction. Studies have shown that people who read more fiction have a more developed "Theory of Mind" which is the backbone of empathy.> Are you a Mr.T? What's your area of expertise and how do you broaden it with other interests? | 18 JobsForTeams0813_manliness.indd 3 www.jobsforteams.com 8/6/13 2:32 PM