Marcus Buckingham has spent his professional career studying the secrets to individual success and engagement at work. Ashley Goodall is the senior vice president of leadership and team intelligence at Cisco. Together, they’ve written a new book, Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real World. And lie #1, “People care which company they work for,” might be particularly surprising to many people. But Buckingham explains the reasoning in this short video.
The summary is that no matter what perks and culture and environment a company claims to offer, your day-to-day experience is influenced most by the actual work you do and the team with whom you do it.
There’s a corollary here for the college bound, one that you’ve read many times here before: what you do in college is much more important than where you do it.
And the best news of all? You have a lot more influence over how you spend your time in college than you’re likely to at any place of work.
Your major. Your individual classes and schedule. Your group of friends. Your chosen activities. Almost everything in college is a choice, one that you get to make. You’ll have more agency and autonomy than you’ve likely ever experienced before or will again.
Your college serves up the offerings. But what you get and what you take from the experience is up to you.