Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - Ep169: TikTok is destroying your career.

Episode Date: March 10, 2023

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Welcome to the Corporate Survivor Podcast, where we talk about how to grow your career confidence, build your skills and value, increase your salary, and the many lessons we learn in the corporate world. For more career support, click on over to www.mayping.com. This is Mayping, your corporate leader turned career coach. I hope you enjoy, like and subscribe. Hey, welcome back to the podcast. Today, let's talk about how TikTok is destroying your career. Now, if you are one of those people who have been spending 2, 3, 5, even 10 hours on TikTok every single day, every single week,

I'm sure that you can relate to some of the points that I'll be sharing with you today. So let's dive in. Okay, let me start by saying that if you have not heard of TikTok, you must be living under a huge, huge, huge rock because it is one of the most popular apps amongst Gen Z. And honestly, a lot of millennials, Gen Zs, and even boomers are starting to get on the app. And there are a lot of videos out there talking about how TikTok is destroying Gen Z, how TikTok is destroying the society and so forth. But we're not going to get into any of those today. But we're going to talk about something that is much closer to you and I. And that's how TikTok is destroying your career without you realizing it. And it's something that is a bit more subconscious, a bit more unconscious, but how TikTok as an app and the way that you are using the app is slowly hurting your career

bit by bit, step by step. So let's start with the first point. TikTok is destroying your career, is killing your attention span. If you look at a lot of people who use TikTok, you'll notice that their attention span is getting worse and worse. And yours could be the same as well. Maybe in the past, you find it easy to concentrate for maybe 10 minutes or 20 minutes. But you find that nowadays, even concentrating on something for one or two minutes feels like a challenge. And you have this very big work project that you really need to focus on. Or you have a very important piece of activity or task that you really need to pay

attention to, you'll find it very difficult to pay attention because you are being trained for hours every single day using TikTok that you don't actually have to pay attention, right? So when you get back to your real job, and that's like, you know, for all of us, let's call it your real life, you find that it's very uncomfortable because that's not what your natural behavior now is. And how it is gradually going to affect your work quality is that you might find it very difficult to pay attention to details. You might start producing work that's very poor quality. You might start making even more errors because you can't just pay attention in general. And what that is going to lead to is,

obviously, you know, your boss or your senior or your manager might not be very happy with the quality of work that you're producing. The next thing is, it will start reflecting very negatively on your performance, which is also a very big problem. And ultimately, it will affect your chances of getting promoted or a salary increment, basically all this other stuff to grow your career and grow your income. And what is the starting point that we all don't talk about? And it's really down to the low attention span, right? The low focus time, basically killing your ability to focus,

that's leading to this negative snowball of effect in your entire career. And it starts from being too obsessed and being too fixated on something that really drives down your ability to focus. And later you'll see it affect every single part of life. Because that's the way that TikTok as an app is created. Because they want people to pay attention and get obsessed and just keep watching one video after the next video and the next video. But guess what? In real life and at the workplace, it doesn't really work like that. There are a lot of things that does require concentration.

It does require time, does require focus. It does require attention to detail. All of these lead to the second way TikTok is destroying your career, and that is the behavior and the expectation of instant gratification. So if you don't know what instant gratification is, it means that everything needs to be done fast and everything should happen right now. Basically, things just appear like magic.

And guess what? As I said earlier, there are a lot of things at the workplace, you know, in your 9-to-5 job, in your career, that doesn't really happen like magic. But again, if you're really looking at the essence of a 5 to 15 second video of everything is so simplified to the point that there is no context, everything just magically appears, everything magically can be done. There's no real DIY because all videos are

so sped up and eventually you only see the final results, which is what all the videos are showing you. You can have the sort of mindset that things are supposed to be easy, things are supposed to be fast, things don't actually need any time, and the worst thing is that things are supposed to be perfect. So this, I think, is a danger that I see a lot in people who use TikTok, particularly the younger generation, but I am also still seeing it in millennials as well. So I'm not saying that it's something that only happens in Gen Z or Generation Alpha. No. In fact, there are people even in their 30s or 40s who are very fixated on TikTok, also starting to feel the same way as well. And how this is really killing your mood and your confidence and your competence in your

career is, again, it goes back a little bit to the low concentration that I talked about, but the flip side is that expecting things to be done fast. So that means that just by putting in a bit of effort, expecting 100% of results. So in other words is that maybe putting in 20% of the effort, time and energy required to do a piece of work, but you expect perfection in the outcome and you expect somebody to applaud you and give you positive feedback. So as you can see here, it's not really balanced and that incorrect perception of reality, a lot of it is actually caused by instant gratification. If someone who spends a lot of time on TikTok or you have friends, family or colleagues who spend a lot of time on the app, you'll start noticing that you are becoming more and more impatient. So again, it kind of goes back to the instant gratification

where you think that things should magically appear, things should happen very fast and should be very easy. And therefore, one of the most important characteristics that you will have for long-term career success or long-term life fulfillment is patience because good things does take time. No matter what social media tells you, good things truly takes time. And it takes time to build foundations in your career, including learning new skills, enhancing those skills, mastering those skills so that you can have a more successful career. But if you're someone who is in the false illusion of what TikTok is giving you, that everything will magically happen. You will find it

very impatient. You will find yourself becoming very impatient to learn any skills at all. And therefore, so even if you're working in a job for a few months or a few years, you may feel that you're not exactly progressing. That's because you're not really spending the time, energy and effort to learn the skills because you might have already given up because you're impatient and you are expecting instant gratification that does not actually happen at the workplace. And what do you think will happen when you feel like things should happen very quickly but it's not really getting you the results that you want? Naturally, you'll start feeling very upset and that brings us to the third danger of TikTok and how it's killing your career is it's creating an emotional imbalance

in yourself and what that means is that you are easily triggered by very strong emotions. Now, let's kind of talk about a lot of the TikTok content that goes very viral. You will notice that a lot of times, they are either controversial videos is one thing, but a lot of times those videos actually invoke very strong emotions in you,

whether it's joy, happiness, or usually it's more on the negative side where you see people crying and then people who are really upset, people are very angry. And one thing that you may not realize is that the things that you are consuming, it does frame your feelings, it does frame your thoughts as well. So if you're always looking at content, you know, whether it's, you know, posts or videos or from content creators that are very strong emotionally, very negative, strong, intense emotions that will actually trigger those same emotions in yourself. And I'm not saying that you shouldn't be authentic or you shouldn't be yourself. But what I am saying is that if you're at the workplace, one of the really most important lessons or skills that you need to learn is emotional intelligence and the ability to stay calm.

Because problems will always appear at work, right? Challenges will always appear. But being able to be calm and really knowing what to do next without panicking is something that's really invaluable that will help you grow your career in the long run. But if you're someone that is so emotionally triggered all the time, and again, if you're watching content that's very negative, it's very easy to always feel like people are against you or everything is very toxic around you or things are very unfair towards you. That's not a very good frame of mind or that's not a very good kind of like feelings that you really want to bring to your workplace because for sure it's going to start affecting your work

performance. It's going to start hurting your relationship with your colleagues, your team, your manager, your boss and so forth. And if those relationships are impacted and you are not being calm all the time, then definitely it's going to affect your ability to get promoted, salary increments, getting new opportunities as well. So these are the three things that I really notice in people who use TikTok a lot. And I know that it's okay to use any social media for entertainment, for sure. But I think it's also important to realise that some apps more than others can be subconsciously,

unconsciously altering your feelings, altering your behaviours and how you see things, right? Altering your perspectives on how things are supposed to be to a point that it doesn't really make sense anymore. So I leave it to you to really consider how you are supposed to be, to a point that it doesn't really make sense anymore. So I leave it to you to really consider how you are using social media, you know, the people that you are following, the apps that you are using,

particularly TikTok, specific to this episode, and how that is positively or negatively impacting your career. Because as I always say, you gradually become the people that you listen to, the people that you learn from. So if you're learning from someone who has the success that you want in your career, then likely you'll pick up positive knowledge, positive attitudes, so that you can shape your career in the right direction. But if you're listening to the opposite, then maybe you might spiral out of control. So that's my honest thoughts on TikTok

and how it could destroy your career if you're not aware of its dangers. So let me know in the comment section if you're watching on YouTube. Do you agree, disagree? What are your thoughts on TikTok? Do you use TikTok? Share a little bit more in the comment section. I'd love to hear from you. And if you have not yet followed the podcast, make sure that you follow or subscribe. I always like to share my career thoughts with you and hopefully you can use these guidances to help yourself grow your career.

So if you enjoyed this episode, make sure that you check out the other playlists in this podcast and share this episode with your friends so that you can also help them grow their careers. Till then, I'll see you in the next episode. Bye. you can also help them grow their careers. Till then, I'll see you in the next episode. Bye!