At yesterday’s Youth Matters Forum, Minister Tharman’s observations on what makes people successful at their careers came across to me as extremely practical and modern, definitely not the typical “study hard” monologue we’re so used to hearing.

Minister Tharman listed down 4 characteristics of successful career-person, and I paraphrase:

Successful People Make Their Jobs Interesting

These people aren’t content to do the bare minimum job description, they take the initiative to craft their jobs into an experience that is meaningful and interesting to them. They will always look to offer more value to the organisation, often collaborating with other teams in and even outside of the organisation to achieve mutual goals more effectively than the official hierarchical structure can address.

Successful People Develop Their Strengths

Everyone has a set of strengths and a set of weaknesses. Rather than spending an inordinate amount of time turning weaknesses into strengths, successful people identify their strengths and find careers that develop and ride on those strengths. Minister Tharman clarified that while education serves to create well-rounded individuals by honing strengths and beefing up weaknesses, upon hitting the workforce is is important for individuals to work according to their strengths because expertise is achieved more easily when one has passion for the field of work.

Successful People are Tenacious

Successful people don’t give up easily when trying to achieve the greater good. While their ideas might seem radical at first, they continue to push the boundaries and lift the team to new heights. Where once thought of as unreasonable, the ideas of successful people eventually gain acceptance as team members understand what it takes to reach for stretch targets. Being tenacious help these ideas persevere past the initial reluctance and inertia.

Successful People Spend Time to Master Their Craft

Minister Tharman observed that many Singaporeans habitually skip from job to job and industry to industry. It takes time to become really good at what we do. Author Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Outliers, suggests that a 10,000 hour rule — a rule that states that mastery is born not out of natural ability, but by putting in the hours. So it is important, if someone wants to be really good at what they do, to stay with the task at hand long enough to attain mastery.