Avoiding the Red Queen Effect in your careers

“I am working hard to stay abreast of advances in tech. Yet it seems like I am stuck at the same place while I see start-up founders half my age crushing it”. ‘Will I ever get ahead of the curve?’

This was from a mid-management professional.

There is a term for this – The Red Queen Effect.

The Red Queen Effect is based on the character in Alice in Wonderland

The queen schools Alice when she finds herself running faster and faster but staying in the same place.

“It refers to the increased pressure to adapt faster just to survive, is driven by an increase in the evolutionary pace of rival technology solutions”

What does this mean for us?

Rather than run harder, it is recommended to run smarter.

Here are three of the ways we can try to avoid the Red Queen as per a FS blog.

#1 Invest in learning and adding real-world value to people. This is not a popular path as it’s incredibly expensive in time and money. Standing still, however, is more expensive.

#2 Spend our limited mental resources working on things that won’t change next week. Ex – Working with first principles, negotiation et all

#3 Acknowledge ‘how the world works and not how we want it to work’.

The one I struggled with adapting to the most is #3. Constantly questioning ‘but why not me’, or ‘no fair’, doesn’t help anyone.

What other skills do you think would help us in tackling the Red Queen?

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