Finding Your Third Place to Accelerate Your Career
Finding Your Third Place to Accelerate Your Career
How community is the unlock for career and professional growth
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In college, I pursued extracurricular activities to augment my school and personal life. This allowed me to find like minded friends to do interesting things and build connections with my peers. So many opportunities came as a result of this - Serving as a leader of student clubs, getting mentored by older students, professors, and administrators allowed me to develop confidence in my own abilities and strengths.
These opportunities gave me an outlet to pursue interests, build relationships, and find opportunities that I couldn’t find elsewhere just simply on my own. Above all, it allowed me to feel a sense of belonging and connection to something that was much bigger than myself or any accomplishment or achievement that I could make on my own.
After I graduated from college, I started my career as a management consultant at Deloitte. The adjustment from college to career was challenging, but over time, I was able to make the leap and navigated my way to succeeding in the workplace. While I navigated through the transition, I often felt a sense that something was missing when I joined the workplace. Sure, I liked my job and my colleagues, and outside of work, I enjoyed relaxing, but I felt a missing void in my life. I was feeling a lack of connection to something, and to others because I had nothing else in between my work and my life such as when I was in college.
Unfortunately, extracurricular clubs don’t exist in the real world in the exact same way as they do in college, but I tried to find them anyway. What I didn’t realize then, which I realized now, is that I was looking for what Ray Oldenberg calls the 3rd place.
Ray came up with this term in the 1970s. Here is what it is described as:
The third place is a term coined by sociologist Ray Oldenburg and refers to places where people spend time between home (‘first’ place) and work (‘second’ place). They are locations where we exchange ideas, have a good time, and build relationships.
Originally, the third place was meant to be a physical place where people could physically congregate, socialize and spend time with one another. The physical space was also meant to be a reminder that it was physically separate outside of home, and work. But as time and society evolved, so did the idea of what a third place could be, as well as its application in our lives.
In the early 2000s, many began to see the third place not just as a physical place, but also a digital one. With the rise of the internet and online communities, proponents of technology saw the internet as a way to recreate the third place and reverse the declining participation in traditional third places like churches and community organizations.
Here is what Pew Research had to say:
Although Oldenburg very clearly has physical interaction in mind when talking about third places, the Internet has spurred in cyberspace the types of conversations that Oldenburg describes in third places. Our survey suggests that significant numbers of Cyber Groupies are enjoying new relationships because of their use of the Internet. One-quarter (27%) of Cyber Groupies say the Net has helped them connect with people of different economic and ethnic backgrounds and 37% say it has helped them connect with people of different generations.
The Transformation of the “Third Place”
For the past two decades, third places have expanded across the internet. Social media platforms and the power of the internet connected people in virtual third spaces based on various interests, illnesses, sports teams, hobbies, professional and anything else in between. But COVID-19 hit, which brought the importance of the third place front and center.
COVID19 shut down the world, and hindered many physical third places, while online third places thrived as they were for many of us the only way we could connect. But while we all lived and worked from home. We began to realize something that was already there but now could see first hand: work and life were no longer two separate areas. They often butted up against each other, invaded each other’s column and fractured our ability to have time to think, reflect and engage with the world around us.
This is also why the concept of a third place became so important - when work and life are constantly pulling at each other, we need spaces in our lives to breathe, ideate, connect with others, think, and explore.
My Aha Moment of The Third Place
In my first job out of college upon realizing I was missing my own third place, I started stumbling my way to find it. I did many of the things many young professionals do, in terms of joining meetups, looking for kickball and dodgeball leagues. Those were fine, but they didn’t work for me. However, one unlock came when I joined a project where as part of the project I was given the chance to attend a week-long executive education course on digital technologies at Babson College.
While the course material was good, the opportunities to meet other people who cared about similar topics, the chance to share ideas and brainstorm around possibilities, and the opportunity to hear about careers outside of management consulting was what sparked my interest. I felt alive during the five days in a way that
I hadn’t elsewhere due to the ability to connect. I got the chance to hear new ideas, get feedback on what I was working on, work on a shared project where we got feedback on what we did, and got insight into the work, lives and careers of 20-30 other professionals who shared similar career and work interests.
There were a handful of other people who I went with from Deloitte who I had never met, but became friendly with them quickly due to our shared affiliation and interests. I still am in touch with some of the people that I met over 10 years ago, but getting a chance to engage with a community in that kind of way gave me a desire to find more opportunities like that.
Later on, I would ask to see if I could go to conferences, and even found a number of online communities dedicated for social media and digital technology practitioners, people that I never met in-person but who I began to collaborate with and engage with in meaningful ways.
I also began to start my own “third places.” In business school, I created a forum and space where people could tell their stories about their life, modeled off of Ted Talks. Eventually, I would create MBASchooled, which started as a blog about the MBA experience, and morphed into a media company and online community, where thousands of MBA students and graduates could share their experiences about business school, careers, and life.
And when I moved to San Francisco after business school, I knew that I needed to find another way to connect with people, and started my own mini brunch and coffee club with other MBA alums who had also moved to San Francisco and worked at Deloitte. This allowed us a space to talk shop, get feedback, and share the trials and tribulations of moving to a new city.
What I realized over time is that while these places served as a chance to feel that sense of belonging and connection that I craved and needed, it also served as the seeds that led to many opportunities for advancement in my career. Sure, putting in work in terms of bringing people together was at times arduous, and when I first started MBASchooled, it felt like I was writing and shouting into the void.
But as I reflect back to the inflection points in my career, the big opportunities that have come my way, all of them map back to being engaged in a community of people, and none of these would have happened without the third place that I was engaged in.
Hard work is important, but not enough
An individual who wants to succeed must work hard, and must produce good work, but anyone who works in the corporate world knows that hard work alone is never enough, and that the most successful people who work hard get help and breaks along the way.
While I’m not suggesting that hard work doesn’t matter, I do believe that people who acknowledge that in order to succeed they must think outside of their individual aspirations and goals and connect with the world around them are best positioned to achieve success. And one way to do that, is to find your own third place(s) which helps increase the surface area for connection, ideation, and opportunities to germinate and take flight.
For the past 6 months, I’ve been hosting small online events for Members of the MBASchooled Community all around the intersection of life and work. Recently, someone who has been coming to events of the past few months emailed me to tell me they were taking a new job and thanked me for putting on the events that I did because it was “something that they were missing in their life that they didn’t know they needed.”
At one of the events, this individual heard a speaker share their story and that speaker said something that resonated so deeply it gave this person the permission and confidence to pursue a big career and life change. They recently took a new job at an entirely different company and an entirely different function, and they had emailed to say how grateful they were for having this community because they didn’t feel like they had the space anywhere else to talk about these topics.
This was humbling to hear, but above all, it reinforced my belief in the idea of finding your own third place to accelerate your own growth in the workplace and in the world. By opening yourself up to the world around you and the people within it, you connect yourself to the opportunities that you cannot see solely on your own.
So much of the existing advice for success in the workplace or career whether you’re an entrepreneur trying to strike out on your own or an individual trying to climb the corporate ladder comes back to “build your personal brand” or “build your network.” I think those things are still true and important, but those things also promote this concept that rugged individualism and individual work ethic alone are enough to be successful in our world today.
However, I’d like to offer a new addition to that - instead of just networking and building your brand, go out and find your third place - look for your own “career community” that can create those feelings of connection, and that can amplify your surface area for opportunity, ideation and advancement.
Finding Your Own Third Place
So how can you find your own third place, and find a career community that can help connect to the outside world? Here are a few examples, both of how individuals, and companies are doing this:
#1)Tech Pod, and Finding Careers in Business at Tech Companies
Joseph Choi was a student at the University of Michigan searching for non-technical internships working at tech companies and running into challenges in finding opportunities. He realized other people also might be having this problem, and then created Tech Pod, a newsletter and community for students and young professionals who also shared his desire and interests. The community has thousands of members and regularly helps students connect with other students, find internships and jobs, and gain knowledge about careers in tech.
#2)The RadReads Community and Khe Hy
After a 15 year career in the financial services industry, Khe Hy left the corporate track to start his own endeavors. Initially, Khe tried his hand at a bunch of different things, but one that stuck was his RadReads newsletter, which covered topics like productivity, and people and their relationship with time, money and work.
While this started just as a way for him to write and be creative, now, with tens of thousands of subscribers, Khe has also built a community and course attracting people all across the world who are also wondering more about their life and work. Writing the newsletter has not only benefited thousands of readers, but opened up opportunities for Khe himself, allowing him TV appearances on CNBC, partnerships and sponsorships with brands and organizations, and plenty of other opportunities to meet other entrepreneurs in his niche
#3)Cohort Based Courses that serve as Career Communities
A few weeks ago, I published a piece on some of the most interesting professional development programs that I had seen over the past year or so which got a lot of interest. In particular, I got a lot of questions around programs like OnDeck, Maven, Reforge.These learning programs give professionals a chance to build skills, connect with other like minded peers, and advance their careers. In many ways, these companies/organizations represent a new age of professional and trade associations but for the modern digital world.
While many of these programs offer good content and education, after talking with dozens of participants from OnDeck, Reforge, Product Marketing Alliance and others, a huge portion of them raved about some of the intangible and hard to quantify outcomes of the experience - the ability to talk about challenging issues with like-minded peers, the chance to find opportunities to create projects or initiatives outside of their work, or the ability to find new career opportunities.
One of the things that came up time and time again from people who did OnDeck was the specific slack channel called “Give/Get” where people routinely can ask for or offer up advice, opportunities, etc. The combination of the 3C’s - Content, Connection, and Career are what make these communities,
#4)Venture Capital Firms that Create 3rd Places For Founders, Employees and Members to Thrive
One of the interesting trends in VC strategy from the past decade is the move towards the “Platform approach.” In a way to differentiate from the competition and increase their value add In addition to providing founders with funding, some VC firms now also offer a platform/portfolio of services to their portfolio companies from everything from recruiting, to design to specialized expertise.
One of the very first VC firms to do this was First Round Capital. While the success of this approach has helped them continue to win over founders of top startups, they’ve taken it a step further. By thinking just outside of themselves and the founders they serve, they’ve also created derivative third places.
For example, their Angel Track Program provides education on how to angel invest, and creates more funding opportunities for their founders. Their First Round Recruiting Track, helps professionals make career transitions, and also allows these individuals to get jobs at First Round Portfolio companies.
And their First Round Fast Track program gives employees who work at their portfolio companies their very own career community to get guidance and exposure outside of their day job with like minded professionals and peers. This mindset of creating business and career opportunities outside of themselves has increased their ability to create third places that provide opportunity and connection that fuels growth for the firm, their companies, and the people they engage with.
While many of these examples come from individuals who have built their own communities, I don’t believe everyone has to do that. A good starting point would be to consider the third places or communities that exist in your life right now. And if there aren’t any, consider where you might want to start engaging, or the areas in your life and work that you would want to engage further in.
The world around us is much bigger than ourselves, but we can find meaning and success in life and our careers by choosing to engage within it, and finding our third place is a great way to start.