notes on leverage
Put time to think in your schedule. Thinking is working.
Your career will be decisively impacted by things that don't look like work - your kindness, how you communicate, how you collaborate, how you resolve ambiguity and conflict and so on.
Your career is the most important product you (should) own and work on. Career needs work, planning and dedicated attention. If you wait and wish someone else advanced it, you'd end up disappointed with lost time.
When you receive appreciation for hard work and success, don’t underplay it. Accept it graciously. When it’s your turn, be generous in appreciating teammates.
People don’t forget those who leave an impression.
If you set the meeting, you owe the attendees a thorough preparation. End them early.
Take time to give estimates. Don’t commit on feet.
Help up and help down.
Document your work. Flag small wins in green and setbacks and failures in yellow. This comes in very handy in yearly assessments, writing case studies and in reflecting later.
Reason with people. In order to make things work, you'll have to convince people and negotiate with them. Prepare before meetings, create evidence and corroborative artifacts for leverage.
Wait before you speak. Avoid speaking until the most in the room have done so first. Not only do you learn a ton but you can also craft your answer after hearing everyone's inputs.
Ask questions first, design later (often never).
Pair design. Find a great design partner who you can bounce off iterations with.
Conduct 1:1s - lots of them. Understand people, ask questions, pick their brains and on-board them to 'you' - as a product. Go prepared, sound contextual, relatable and kind and end with the door open for future meetings.
Talk less. Not everything that comes to your head needs sharing. Keep the bar extremely high for when you speak up.
Not having an opinion is fine (at times, good). It’s definitely better than having an uninformed one. (Also: avoid knee jerk reactions)
Being able to network proactively and productively is an acquired skill. Introversion doesn’t help much in an increasingly collaborative workplace.
It's no longer about how good you're with tools, it's about how good you're with people.
Ask what you want. Ask respectfully but confidently. Most people never ask and when you don't ask, you almost never get.
A solid network is 20 - 40 extremely strong relationships instead of 200 - 500 weak and superficial ones. Networking is tiring and futile when it lacks depth and value exchange.
Building on top of that, in today's world, people make careers happen. Your skills are essential but beyond that, how good you are with people becomes the differentiator in how far you can go. Being great at tools is an individual skill and is relatively easy and well defined. Being great with people, building relationships and keep them alive and thriving over years takes effort that is non-linear, unstructured and emotional.
Approaching life with a notion full of binary choices and binary outcomes is a very limiting and often erroneous framework to control and assess situations. Binary thinking is reactionary.
Situations and people in life are a collection of variables. They are of 3 kind: Variables you control, variables you can influence and variables you cannot control or influence.
People never pay attention to variables they can influence - because that takes non-linear effort and a lot of attempts to master the skill
Initially tiring and frustrating
Be the person who takes decisions and keeps things moving. Always be deciding and moving projects forward. People love to argue, question, pose barriers and raise doubt. Seek bias for action despite the ambiguities. People who keep things moving are the most valuable assets to a team.
Shippers and movers will always be invaluable to a product company. They're the ones who make things happen.
Aim to become a fluent generalist.
It can only get better but it could always be worse.
For everything going right in your life, always know that at any point the answer could've been ‘No’.
Stay humble.