“Only the Paranoid Survive” is not just the title of a book by Andy Grove, the former CEO of Intel, but also a sound warning to every career person to be consciously paranoid about their career.
In the book, Andy Groove emphasised the need for organisations to be persistently preparing and acting in readiness for the strategic inflection point which every business must go through.
This feels like what we would describe as the spirit of fear and lack of faith in Christendom. And as much as God has not given us the spirit of fear but of love, power and a sound mind, we should not therefore be paranoid about our career.
On the contrary, I think being paranoid is not about fear but having a sound mind and applying it to evaluate situations and take actions.
I do not think there has been any Christian that ever lived whose measure of faith in God is as much as that of Jesus Christ and there was absolutely no fear in Him when He lived physically on earth.
We have however seen Him in many occasions exercising His sound mind. An example was when Jesus did a great job of casting out demons from two possessed men. The whole city came and told Him to leave them. Jesus did not argue with them at the time, and with all the power He had, He left their city. Was He afraid of them? No! His sound mind only told Him that mob action was eminent and He needed to respect that. (See Matthew 8:34, Luke 8:36-37, 40). Note that Jesus Christ later returned to the city, but at this time, He was gladly welcome for they were waiting for Him.
In two other accounts, the people that wanted Jesus dead tried to lay hold on Him but He escaped. Again, being a fearless man, He used His sound mind and realised that His time had not yet come. He deftly planned His escape from the crowd.
When talking about His coming, Jesus insinuated being paranoia in the sense that it is meant here when He advised that since we do not know when the thief would break in, we must always be ready as if we knew that he was coming today. The wisdom in this saying applied not only to His second coming but also to every other aspect of our lives, including career.
More than half of the companies that were in the list of Fortune 500 companies a decade ago are not on the list today. Perhaps, if they had been paranoid about the inevitable change they would have remained on the list.
We cannot continue to feign ignorance of the changes around us that are greatly impacting our career. We therefore must act daily like our career is being taken away from us and we need to defend it. It is safe to be paranoid about your career; Jesus was paranoid about doing His Father’s business by applying His mind of reasoning, taking precautionary steps.
The most important admonition is to be alert to changes in your environment because career inflection point as Grove puts it is caused by changes in the environment that do not distinguish between the qualities of the people that they dislodge by their forces.
God bless
Akindele Afolabi
Author, the Christian Employee Series