Ibarra Quotes

How long have you been away from the country?" Laruja asked Ibarra. "Almost seven years." "Then you have probably forgotten all about it." "Quite the contrary. Even if my country does seem to have forgotten me, I have always thought about it.

I have observed that the prosperity or misery of each people is in direct proportion to its liberties or its prejudices and, accordingly, to the sacrifices or the selfishness of its forefathers. -Juan Crisostomo Ibarra

They have not considered that memories are like corks left out of bottles. They swell. They no longer fit.

Who do I really want to become?,” their work indicated that it is better to be a scientist of yourself, asking smaller questions that can actually be tested—“Which among my various possible selves should I start to explore now? How can I do that?” Be a flirt with your possible selves.* Rather than a grand plan, find experiments that can be undertaken quickly. “Test-and-learn,” Ibarra told me, “not plan-and-implement.

Lo miras como si fuera lo único en la tierra que valiera la pena contemplar.

Instead, she told me, in a clever inversion of a hallowed axiom, “First act and then think.” Ibarra marshaled social psychology to argue persuasively that we are each made up of numerous possibilities. As she put it, “We discover the possibilities by doing, by trying new activities, building new networks, finding new role models.” We learn who we are in practice, not in theory.

The paradox of change is that the only way to alter the way we think is by doing the very things our habitual thinking keeps us from doing." p. 5

La vida no se supone que sea un plan, Leah. Sólo sucede y arreglas los problemas que aparecen sobre la marcha.

It is something they will see everywhere - a disregard for danger, a companionship with death. By the end of a year they will know it well: the antic bravado, the fatal games, the coffin shop beside the cantina, the sugar skulls on the frosted cake.

The paradox of change is that the only way to alter the way we think is by doing the very things our habitual thinking keeps us from doing.

If you don’t create new opportunities within the confines of your “day job,” they may never come your way.

knowing what we should be doing and actually doing it are two very different things.

The end of all our exploring,” as T. S. Eliot reminds us, “will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.

A hunter? You? You can not be a hunter. You are a GIRL. - Perin Ibarra to Faiel, in the Dragon Reborn

we learn who we are only by living, and not before. Ibarra concluded that we maximize match quality

What Ibarra calls the “ plan-and-implement” model—the idea that we should first make a long-term plan and execute without deviation, as opposed to the “ test-and-learn” model—is entrenched in depictions of geniuses. Popular lore holds that the sculptor Michelangelo would see a full figure in a block of marble before he ever touched it, and simply chip away the excess stone to free the figure inside. It is an exquisitely beautiful image.

We have come to live among specters, Sara tells herself. They are not people, but silhouettes sketched on a backdrop to deceive us into thinking that the stage is crowded. She searches for an expression, any expression, in their eyes - the eyes of that man on the corner whose raised hand holds a cigarette he is allowing to burn to his fingers; the eyes of that woman who has lifted a dripping jar of water halfway to her head. They will never speak to me, she thinks. I will never know their names.

Paco had a way with plants.....Sara believed that whenever he walked under a tree it grew a new branch to shade him.

–   Develop your situation sensors. –   Get involved in projects outside your area. –   Participate in extracurricular activities. –   Communicate your personal “why.

Gary’s seemingly random, circuitous method actually has an underlying logic. But this test-and-learn approach flies in the face of the more traditional method, the

It’s all too easy to fall hostage to the urgent over the important.

Ibarra’s advice is nearly identical to the short-term planning the Dark Horse researchers documented. Rather than expecting an ironclad a priori answer to “Who do I really want to become?,” their work indicated that it is better to be a scientist of yourself, asking smaller questions that can actually be tested—“Which among my various possible selves should I start to explore now? How can I do that?” Be a flirt with your possible selves.* Rather than a grand plan, find experiments that can be undertaken quickly. “Test-and-learn,” Ibarra told me, “not plan-and-implement.

Paul Graham, computer scientist and cofounder of Y Combinator—the start-up funder of Airbnb, Dropbox, Stripe, and Twitch—encapsulated Ibarra’s tenets in a high school graduation speech he wrote, but never delivered: It might seem that nothing would be easier than deciding what you like, but it turns out to be hard, partly because it’s hard to get an accurate picture of most jobs. . . . Most of the work I’ve done in the last ten years didn’t exist when I was in high school. . . . In such a world it’s not a good idea to have fixed plans. And yet every May, speakers all over the country fire up the Standard Graduation Speech, the theme of which is: don’t give up on your dreams. I know what they mean, but this is a bad way to put it, because it implies you’re supposed to be bound by some plan you made early on. The computer world has a name for this: premature optimization. . . . . . . Instead of working back from a goal, work forward from promising situations. This is what most successful people actually do anyway. In the graduation-speech approach, you decide where you want to be in twenty years, and then ask: what should I do now to get there? I propose instead that you don’t commit to anything in the future, but just look at the options available now, and choose those that will give you the most promising range of options afterward.

Sara understood this passion that beset geologists. Their minds were heavy with theories shaped by fire and water, their pockets weighted with residual bits of evidence chipped from road cuts and canyon walls, identifiable, able to be pigeonholed in time that stretched back five hundred million years. She understood that the rock in the Canadian's hand was likely to endure intact long after the bones of the four people in this room would be discovered set in sandstone among snail shells and ferns.

So, about that one sentence of advice: Don’t feel behind. Two Roman historians recorded that when Julius Caesar was a young man he saw a statue of Alexander the Great in Spain and broke down in tears. “Alexander at my age had conquered so many nations, and I have all this time done nothing that is memorable,” he supposedly said. Pretty soon, that concern was a distant memory and Caesar was in charge of the Roman Republic—which he turned into a dictatorship before he was murdered by his own pals. It’s fair to say that like most youth athletes with highlight reels, he peaked early. Compare yourself to yourself yesterday, not to younger people who aren’t you. Everyone progresses at a different rate, so don’t let anyone else make you feel behind. You probably don’t even know where exactly you’re going, so feeling behind doesn’t help. Instead, as Herminia Ibarra suggested for the proactive pursuit of match quality, start planning experiments. Your personal version of Friday night or Saturday morning experiments, perhaps.

Social scientists have argued that a strategy of “small wins”—making quick, opportunistic, tangible gambits only modestly related to a desired outcome—is in many instances the most effective way of tackling big problems.2 Part of the reason small wins can produce much bigger results than a grand strategy is psychological: Defining a problem as “big and serious” can make us feel frustrated and helpless and therefore can elicit a less creative (or more habitual) response. We become paralyzed. We make the wrong move just to change. When we see change as requiring “big, bold strokes,” we amplify our fear of it; we overcome this fear by putting one foot in front of the other, in a series of safer steps.

when we follow our passions, we also risk escalating our emotional commitment to a new course of action before we have evidence that it will be doable.

Small wins may be scattered, but what counts is that they move in the same general direction—away from the stifling situation we are trying to escape.4

this in-between period is not a literal space between one job and the next but a psychological zone in which we are truly between selves, with one foot still firmly planted in the old world and the other making tentative steps toward an as-yet undefined new world. Whether a person is working two jobs at once, finishing a lame-duck period, in outplacement, or taking an extended time to reflect on what comes next, the experience that June described as “living inside a hurricane” is common. It is a time rife with anticipation, confusion, fear, and all sorts of other mixed feelings.

To be in transit is to be in the process of leaving one thing, without having fully left it, and at the same time entering something else, without being fully a part of it.2 It is a gestation period of provisional, tentative identity when many different selves are possible and none are obvious. The psychology of this in-between period has been described as ambivalence: We oscillate between “holding on” and “letting go,” between our desire to rigidly clutch the past and the impulse to rush exuberantly into the future.3 Over a period of months or even years, we move back and forth between these poles as we explore new roles and possibilities. Rather than being a sign of one’s lack of readiness, this moving back and forth is in fact the key to successful transitioning. It is how we stave off premature closure until we have fully explored alternatives.

It’s always ugly in the middle. At the root of transition is “transit,” a voyage from one place to another. As in any voyage, there is a departure, a disorienting time of travel and, finally, a destination. Transitions guru William Bridges calls the time between endings and new beginnings the “neutral zone,” a “neither here nor there” psychological space where identities are in flux and people feel they have lost the ground beneath their feet.

Dropping our long-held assumptions, however, is not a simple matter of letting go once and for all. We are usually dealing with a mixed bag of preferences, priorities, and habits, some that we should hold on to and others we should jettison.

McKenna uses this story of a drowning woman to illustrate how stubbornly we can hold ourselves back.

working identity involves revisiting the basic assumptions we use to evaluate possibilities. To illustrate what basic assumptions are, it is useful to think of our career choices as a pyramid with three levels (see figure 4-1).4 At the top of the pyramid lies what is most visible, to us and to the outside world: what job we hold in what setting. Dan, for example, was an executive in a high-tech company. One level below are the values and motivating factors that hold constant from job to job and company to company. These are what MIT career specialist Edgar Schein calls our “career anchors,” the competencies, preferences, and work-related values that we would be unwilling to give up if forced to make a choice.5 Dan’s experience has led him to value himself professionally as someone who excels at turnarounds—at making troubled companies healthy. He could perform this role on a smaller or larger scale (for example, big company or small start-up), in an advisory or a hands-on role, and as a manager or an owner, but the constant is that managerial challenge is what excites him. Dan’s turmoil over the offer of a “perfect job” that would have again robbed him of his family time, however, belies a conflict between his professional and personal values that is rooted at a deeper level. In his search, therefore, he has to plumb deeper: He must explore the final, bottom level of the pyramid to understand the basic assumptions—our mental maps about how the world works—that truly drive his behavior.

Even though our basic assumptions often remain hidden from our conscious awareness, they nevertheless determine how we manage our careers. Too often we fail to question them, even if they are obsolete or wrong. Precisely because they are taken for granted, basic assumptions are very hard to change. When they remain implicit, we only make incremental change. We only move from one situation into another that is superficially different. The organization or even the industry and sector may change and the coworkers may be different, but in the end, we fall back into similar roles and relationships, reproducing the same work and life structure we had before. Why?6 Because our working identity has remained the same.

Natural experiments get the ball rolling. They give us a peek at possible directions. But they only take us so far. After a certain point, a hypothesis starts to materialize, and another kind of test is required. Exploratory experiments are designed to answer fairly open-ended questions: Would I enjoy doing X? Could I be good at doing Y? Would I be able to make a living doing Z? Once a possible self begins to take form, we need to take more active steps to test the possibility more rigorously. Otherwise, we stay in the realm of daydreams.

Exploration is about formulating hypotheses or best guesses; confirmation is about rigorously testing preliminary conclusions. Confirmation turns best guesses into sure bets. As in scientific discovery, the less we know about a phenomenon, the more openended our questions. As relevant knowledge builds up, we become more precise about what we seek to learn, and we start to anticipate (more and more accurately) what we will find. Because hypothesis-testing experiments (for example, taking a new job on a provisional basis) are usually more costly than exploratory experiments (for example, working on a side project without leaving one’s job), we prefer to defer the former until we have solid data suggesting that we are going in the right direction. Variety for its own sake is not enough. In fact, a prolonged exploratory phase can be a defense mechanism against changing, and it can signal to others that we are not serious about making change. A true experimental method almost always leads to formulating new goals and new means to achieve them. As we learn from experience, we have to be willing to close avenues of exploration, to accept that what we thought we knew was wrong and that what we were hoping to find no longer suits

they derive much of their sense of identity from their title and employer and that such overidentification with any institution can lead to stunted growth in other arenas. Far into our careers, we can remain the victims of other people’s values and expectations.

Becoming our own person, breaking free from our “ought selves”—the identity molded by important people in our lives—is at the heart of the transition process. So is ridding ourselves of an unhealthy overidentification with the organizations that employ us, a harder-to-recognize but equally problematic self-definition.

One of the reasons it is so hard to change careers—or why we change, only to end up in the same boat—is that we can so fully internalize our institutional identities, relying on them to convey our worth and accomplishments to the outside world. Even when we can honestly admit that the external trappings of success—titles, perks, and other markers of prestige—don’t matter much, we can, like Harris, hide from the need for change by telling ourselves how much the company needs us. Like Dan, who postponed vacations and overrode family obligations when the organization needed him, most working adults organize at least some portion of their working lives according to the principle that self-sacrifice is OK when it’s for the good of the institution. Since basic assumptions tend to exist in interlocking clusters, what may often appear to be a work-life balance problem, or an inability to extricate ourselves from unrewarding or overly political working relationships, is in fact our inability to separate our commitment to an organization from being the organization.

Sometimes the best way to find oneself is to flirt with many possibilities.

all face two basic and interrelated questions: What to? How to?

Once we are armed with more self-knowledge, the plan-and-implement method urges us to swing into action and proposes a thoughtful series of logical steps: • Research career fields. (“Knowing your interests and most enjoyable skills allows you to begin matching them with professions and industries.”) • Develop at least two different tracks or lists of ideas. (“One might be a variation on what you’re currently doing, while another might be a completely different profession than you’re in now.”) • Go out into the market for a reality check. (“Begin researching your chosen field by reading about it and joining professional groups. Network with people in the same career and ask them what the day-to-day work is really like.”) • Home in on a career target and develop a strategy for getting there. (“If you can identify your long-range target, you can identify a critical pathway for getting there.”)

Change always takes much longer than we expect because to make room for the new, we have to get rid of some of the old selves we are still dragging around and, unconsciously, still invested in becoming.

We learn by doing, and each new experience is part answer and part question.

Self-creation is a lifelong journey. Only by our actions do we learn who we want to become, how best to travel, and what else will need to change to ease the way.

Most people who have made big career changes have heard loved ones tell them, “You’re out of your mind.” Sabotage is not their intention, but a shared history has entrenched certain expectations, and reinventing oneself can amount to breaking the implicit “contract.” People who have quit smoking, lost weight, or gotten divorced are familiar with the mixed reactions of friends, who see the change as loss.

Consider how many times we have heard people reproach their organizations by saying, “There is no one there I want to be like.” The reinventing process corrects this deficiency, heightening our desire for role models and people we can relate to. These people and groups provide a “safe base” that enables us to take risks with our new selves and a professional community in which we can develop a new sense of belonging.

One of the central identity problems that has to be worked out during a career transition is deciding on the story that links the old and new self. Until that is solved, the external audience to whom we are selling our reinvention remains dubious, and we too feel unsettled and uncertain of our own identity.

If we interrupt the reinventing process prematurely, as Susan nearly did, we jeopardize our ability to fully internalize this new self-definition. Often it isn’t until we are fairly far along in the reinventing process that we realize we must also reassess the foundations of our working identity.

Elizabeth McKenna, who wrote about the life and career changes of women struggling to balance work and personal life, tells a parable about a woman swimming across a lake with a rock in her hand. As the woman neared the center of the lake, she started to sink from the weight of the stone. People watching from the shore urged her to drop the rock, but she kept swimming, sinking more and more. To the gathering crowd, the solution was obvious. Their “drop the rock” chorus grew louder and louder with her increasing difficulty staying afloat. But all their yelling did little good. As she sank, they heard her say, “I can’t. It’s mine.”3

pedagogía del amor” viene en valorar la búsqueda interior como san Agustín. Esta pedagogía no es una teoría propiamente dicha. Es más bien un estilo educativo, un talante, una actitud que todo educador debe encarnar.

El mítico libro de Fritz Springmeier Bloodlines,

«Los trece linajes illuminatis»,

No one pigeonholes us better than we ourselves do.

popular books like David Epstein’s Range

I liked problem solving but found the work repetitive and the tools constraining. I longed to manage the problem, not the client. I wanted ownership of the problem.

What Ibarra calls the “plan-and-implement” model—the idea that we should first make a long-term plan and execute without deviation, as opposed to the “test-and-learn” model—is entrenched in depictions of geniuses. Popular lore holds that the sculptor Michelangelo would see a full figure in a block of marble before he ever touched it, and simply chip away the excess stone to free the figure inside. It is an exquisitely beautiful image. It just isn’t true. Art historian William Wallace showed that Michelangelo was actually a test-and-learn all-star. He constantly changed his mind and altered his sculptural plans as he worked. He left three-fifths of his sculptures unfinished, each time moving on to something more promising. The first line of Wallace’s analysis: “Michelangelo did not expound a theory of art.” He tried, then went from there. He was a sculptor, painter, master architect, and made engineering designs for fortifications in Florence. In his late twenties he even pushed visual art aside to spend time writing poems (including one about how much he grew to dislike painting), half of which he left unfinished. Like anyone eager to raise their match quality prospects, Michelangelo learned who he was—and whom he was carving—in practice, not in theory. He started with an idea, tested it, changed it, and readily abandoned it for a better project fit. Michelangelo might have fit well in Silicon Valley; he was a relentless iterator. He worked according to Ibarra’s new aphorism: “I know who I am when I see what I do.

Cromagnon: Ibarra debe renunciar (3 de enero de 2005)

the fastest way to get to people we don’t already know is through contacts as far away as possible from our daily routine.

that none of their existing contacts could help them reinvent themselves. That the networks we rely on in a stable job are rarely the ones that lead us to something new and different.

Only by testing do we learn what is really appealing and feasible—and, in the process, create our own opportunities.

This is not to say that “what we do” is tantamount to “who we are,” but for most of us, work is an important source of personal meaning and social definition. Work activities and relationships are tightly woven into the fabric of our lives. In fact, work often provides the defining framework within which we set priorities and make decisions about other important facets of our lives. It is no wonder we feel so lost when that framework is in question.

Rarely does “becoming an ex” happen as a result of one sudden decision. Instead, it happens over a period of time, one that often begins before we are fully aware of what is happening.

It takes, on average, three years from the time a person decides to leave the company until the day he or she walks out the door. Those are not good or productive years.

oscillating among the different possibilities allows us time to come to new and different ways of integrating who we were then with who we are now and who we are becoming. When this self-exploration and self-testing ends prematurely—either because we are not able to tolerate the contradictions or because we are unable to assimilate new information about ourselves—we risk either letting go of the past too rapidly or holding on to it too rigidly.

How do we create and test possible selves? We bring them to life by doing new things, making new connections, and retelling our stories. These reinvention practices ground us in direct experience, preventing the change process from remaining too abstract. New competencies and points of view take shape as we act and, as those around us react, help us narrow the gap between the imagined possible selves that exist only in our minds and the “real” alternatives that can be known only in the doing.

Working identity is not just who we are. It is also who we are not. Being able to discard possibilities means we are making progress.

How do we move forward and reinvent ourselves when our very selves have been so shaken? For starters, we must reframe the questions, abandoning the conventional career-advice queries—“Who am I?”—in favor of more open-ended alternatives—“Among the many possible selves that I might become, which is most intriguing to me now? Which is easiest to test?” Getting started depends on whether we are looking to find our one true self or whether, instead, we are trying to test and evaluate possible alternatives.

Potential employers or coworkers come to know (and therefore, trust) us when they know our story and can accept it as legitimate. Sometimes it takes many rehearsals before it comes out just right. What happens in the retelling is not just a more polished story; we finally settle on a narrative that can inform the next step.

Time-out periods—sometimes as short as Jane’s ten-hour drive, other times as long as Brenda’s multiyear moratorium—help people make changes by providing a space for reflective observation.18 Stepping back makes room for insights we have been incubating but cannot yet articulate. It helps us see the coexistence—and incompatibility—of old and new.

Changing careers is not merely a matter of changing the work we do. It is as much about changing the relationships that matter in our professional lives. Shifting connections refers to the practice of finding people who can help us see and grow into our new selves, people we admire, would like to emulate, and with whom we want to spend time. All reinventions require social support. But as this chapter reveals, it is hard to get the support we really need from career counselors, outplacers, or headhunters, or even from old friends, family members, or trusted colleagues.

What makes a contact useful for a job change, argued Granovetter, is neither the closeness of our relationship with them nor the power of his or her position. It is the likelihood that the person knows different people than we do and, therefore, bumps into different information. The acquaintances, neighbors, and coworkers who operate in the same spheres as we do can rarely tell us something we don’t already know because they hear about the same things we do. Of course, having an Ivy League, Oxbridge, or Grande École connection can dramatically improve one’s prospects for moving into certain closed circles. But even members of elite tribes need “weak ties” to connect to worlds outside their immediate experience. Yet most people, like Harris, wait until they have been stuck for quite some time before starting to look outside their core circle of friends and colleagues. Our close contacts don’t just blind us, they also bind us to our outdated identities. Reinventing involves trying on and testing a variety of possible selves. But our long-standing social networks may resist those identity experiments. Remember Gary McCarthy’s chagrin when he learned, three years out of college, that his family had already pegged him as a “finance person”? Without meaning to, friends and family pigeonhole us. Worse, they fear our changing.

Aristotle observed that people become virtuous by acting virtuous: if you do good, you’ll be good.3

Explosions are meant to make a statement.

Vows are worthless unless deeds are wedded to them,

Insight is an outcome, not an input.

Aristotle observed that people become virtuous by acting virtuous: if you do good, you’ll be good.

Yo pensé en Bogotá porque ahí fui feliz veinte años antes, en plena adolescencia. También porque no quedaba tan lejos de Quito, así que me podía sentir adosada, como si hubiera ido a Ibarra o a Cuenca y no a otro país. Miraba los cerros y era evidente que había elegido una ciudad parecida a la mía, una ciudad cercada por montañas que en algo se parecían al Pichincha, tal vez en su forma de estar arrojándose sobre uno, o abrazándolo a uno todo el tiempo, contra el cielo. Me fui sin irme, como cobarde. Pero ahora sentía un agradable silencio a de pesar la música, no había zumbido, y por un rato, tampoco miedo.

Simple Traditional Mexican Hot Chocolate Makes 4 cups 4 cups of whole milk 4 cinnamon sticks 1 1/2 round tablets of Mexican chocolate, also known as rustic chocolate de mesa (such as Abuelita or Ibarra brand, or others) Optional: 1/4 to 1/2 tsp chili powder (ancho, cayenne, or guajillo chili powder to taste) Break up chocolate in a saucepan and add milk. Add chili powder if desired. Heat on medium, stirring occasionally. Do not boil. When chocolate is melted, and milk begins to steam, whisk with a wire whisk or a molinillo for 3-4 minutes or until a frothy consistency is achieved. Serve with a cinnamon stick in a mug, and enjoy!

How Leaders Create and Use Networks” Herminia Ibarra and Mark Hunter

[H]indi maitutuwid ang isang mali ng isa pang mali, at hindi mapapatawad sa pamamagitan ng walang-kabuluhang pagtangis ni sa paglilimos sa simbahan. —Don Rafael Ibarra mula sa Kabanata 4: Erehe at Filibustero