- When choosing a job, prioritize interest > opportunities to gain experience that advances your medium- and long-term goals > pay and benefits.
- Honesty > self-motivation, a sense of mission, clear goals, or ambition > ability to learn, especially information literacy > professionalism, especially the ability to execute > experience.
- Show your enthusiasm. Think about what you’d willingly do even if nobody paid you. Entrepreneurs like employees they can easily exploit, especially those who welcome it without complaint.
- Find where your job and your interests overlap. Great ideas emerge where two fields meet, and exceptional people stand on the shoulders of two giants.
- Start building three broadly useful skills that compound over time: statistics, programming, and writing.
- Keep notes about your work. They’re your save files in the game of office life. Load them often to recover your gear and experience.
- Charlie Munger suggests that if you lack natural talent, you should choose an industry where skills build slowly. That gives you a chance to become excellent through day-to-day accumulation.
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Get off a sinking ship. If you’re in a weak industry, at a middling company, in a peripheral role, make a clean break.
- Try the Stoic practice of imagining the worst. If you were going to be laid off at the end of this year, what could you do now to improve your chances of landing a new job next year? Use the time you have to fill the gaps in your skills and résumé.
- Use the airport test to choose bosses and coworkers. If our flight were delayed, would I be happy to wait at the airport with this person?
- There are three ways to be indispensable: get things done exceptionally well, be exceptionally good at managing your boss’s emotions, or be exceptionally good at holding the company together. Max out your skill in any one of them and you’re less likely to be let go.
- Prepare three versatile stories from your own work history. You can mix and match them like Lego bricks to answer interview questions such as “Tell me about a time you faced a difficult situation” or “Tell me about a collaboration that stuck with you.”
- If you’re joining a startup, don’t be afraid to ask for stock options when discussing compensation. Lei Jun once interviewed a candidate who refused to give up the salary they earned at a multinational, cared a great deal about how many days of leave they’d get, and showed little interest in shares or options. Lei passed because he took this to mean that the candidate saw it as just a job and had little stake in whether the startup succeeded.
- Quantify your value. If you can make a sound, step-by-step estimate of how much revenue you could bring the company, ask for a good price with confidence.
- Don’t let your current path dictate your next move or take a job you dislike as a stopgap. Think through where you’d fit best and go straight for it. How can a B2B product manager without consumer experience move to a B2C company? I’d look for a company with a freemium business model, such as LinkedIn or Dropbox. These companies offer free services to consumers and charge businesses. You’ll gain B2C experience, and they need the B2B experience you already have.
- Find out the profit margin on the company’s main product and see if it covers costs. In this economy, a company still burning cash is likely borrowing from its future unless investors are willing to place an exceptionally high value on its prospects.
- “A blessing is also a curse.” Being too unattractive, too attractive, too inarticulate, or too articulate can all cause problems.
- Rent a place close to the office. I’d rather spend 30% more on rent to free up over 30% more time for self-improvement.
- Don’t pin all your hopes on one ideal job. Have a BATNA, or best alternative to a negotiated agreement. In other words, have a fallback.
- In a negotiation, the person who cares least always wins.