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Working Smarter: The Key to Career Advancement · Zero Shot Podcast DEMO

• 0:00
  speakers: In this conversation, working smarter, not harder, is key to career advancement.
• 0:08
  Interviewer: You can't grow your career by working harder.
• 0:11
  Almost everyone tries.
• 0:13
  They add hours, but all it does is make them more valuable in the job that they already have.
• 0:18
  I spent 20 years at Amazon and reached Principal Engineer, a title only 1 % of engineers hold.
• 0:24
  But I was only able to do that by following four career principles that allowed me to leap ahead and land my dream promotion, while
• 0:32
  working less than everyone else around me.
• 0:34
  And it all starts with principle number one.
• 0:36
  Nobody cares how hard you work.
• 0:38
  Even if you could get ahead in your career by working 9am to 9pm six days a week, it would be a horrible trade.
• 0:45
  Why live to work?
• 0:46
  The good news is that working more is a flawed strategy from the beginning.
• 0:51
  The amount of work you do is a terrible measure of progress.
• 0:56
  Nobody at your next performance review is going to care about how many hours of work you put in.
• 1:01
  Let me prove it.
• 1:02
  In 2022, I was a Principal Engineer at Amazon, and a Principal Engineer's calendar is bonkers.
• 1:08
  Conflicting meetings back to back to back.
• 1:11
  Me joining every meeting that I'd been added to as optional.
• 1:14
  My work calendar looked like a game of Tetris gone horribly wrong.
• 1:18
  And my YouTube channel was starting to take off.
• 1:20
  I decided to go all in on YouTube while still working at Amazon.
• 1:25
  Amazon is known for grinding people into a fine dust.
• 1:29
  The hard work answer was to do it all.
• 1:32
  Keep the full -time Amazon load and put YouTube on top.
• 1:35
  But it was impossible.
• 1:36
  I simply ran out of hours during the week.
• 1:39
  So, I made one rule.
• 1:41
  I would only do the work that was going to show up on my performance review at the end of the year.
• 1:45
  That turned out to be a surprisingly small but critical amount of work.
• 1:49
  speakers: Of course, people pushed back.
• 1:51
  I'm not going.
• 1:53
  Bro, you're required.
• 1:54
  You gotta be there.
• 1:56
  Okay, if you want to talk about my priorities, let's get you, me, and my VP on a call.
• 2:01
  And we'll decide if this is the most important thing that I should work on.
• 2:04
  Hey, you know what?
• 2:06
  You're optional, buddy.
• 2:07
  Don't worry about it.
• 2:08
  We got it.
• 2:11
  That would usually get them to go away.
• 2:13
  That's how I ended up saying no to all the extra meetings, all the extra work, and just focusing on my highest priority.
• 2:19
  It was a little bit uncomfortable.
• 2:21
  I'll be honest.
• 2:22
  I'm a recovering people pleaser.
• 2:25
  But then a weird thing happened.
• 2:27
  I got top tier, the highest performance rating, both that year and every year after that.
• 2:32
  Till I quit.
• 2:33
  The reason working less will often get you further than working harder is simple.
• 2:37
  If you split your time between two projects, you'd expect to get 50 % of the impact of each task, right?
• 2:43
  You don't.
• 2:44
  In my experience, you get maybe 20 % of the impact of each.
• 2:48
  With three, it's like 8 % each.
• 2:50
  Make yourself responsible for 10 things and your impact practically can't be measured.
• 2:55
  On top of this, if you do projects in parallel, they land at the same time, but later.
• 3:00
  Do two two -week projects back -to -back and the first one lands in two weeks.
• 3:05
  Do them at the same time and both land in a month from now, if you're lucky.
• 3:09
  What causes that gap?
• 3:11
  Context switches.
• 3:12
  Every time you shift your focus from one thing to another, it absolutely kills your productivity.
• 3:17
  It takes about 15 minutes to get into the swing of real work.
• 3:21
  And the average knowledge worker checks their email every six minutes.
• 3:25
  So if you've got 10 things on your plate, your entire day is context switches.
• 3:30
  A little bit of this, a little bit of that.
• 3:32
  You're doing 10 things at the lowest quality possible.
• 3:35
  You don't get bonus points for quantity.
• 3:37
  Think back over your last year.
• 3:39
  I guarantee you can't remember the small stuff.
• 3:42
  Neither can anyone else.
• 3:44
  So pull up everything on your plate and ask one question of each item.
• 3:48
  Will this show up on my performance review?
• 3:51
  Most of it won't.
• 3:52
  Pick the one project that will and that you can meaningfully move this month.
• 3:57
  Work on that first, not on top of everything else.
• 4:00
  That means saying no to things, which feels kind of crazy at first.
• 4:04
  The optional meetings are the easy ones.
• 4:06
  Skip those.
• 4:07
  The harder part is when someone tells you that their thing can't wait.
• 4:11
  When that happens, do what I did.
• 4:13
  Make sure you sync with your manager on the top things that you need to work on.
• 4:17
  If someone comes in with an out -of -band request, ask them to sit down with you and your manager and work out whether it beats your established priorities.
• 4:25
  If it puts those things at risk, you can have a conversation about whether a reprioritization is warranted.
• 4:31
  Now that you've got some room in your week, you have to protect it.
• 4:34
  Block 60 to 90 minutes a day where you work on that one thing and nothing else.
• 4:38
  No email, no slack.
• 4:40
  I literally use this timer.
• 4:43
  Rotate it and you've got your focus block.
• 4:46
  If you like this one, I'll leave a link down below.
• 4:48
  During your focus block, you're allowed to do two things.
• 4:52
  The work or nothing.
• 4:54
  Both are acceptable.
• 4:56
  If you're not working, that's fine.
• 4:58
  But there's nothing in between.
• 5:00
  No fiddling with your pen.
• 5:02
  No phone.
• 5:03
  No getting up for a snack.
• 5:04
  You just stare at the wall.
• 5:06
  That's it.
• 5:07
  Or you do your work.
• 5:09
  You'll find that you can't sit there doing nothing for very long before the work that you've been avoiding starts to look pretty attractive.
• 5:16
  One 60 to 90 minute block of focus a day, in my experience, is enough to put you in the top 10 % of people with an exceeds expectation
• 5:24
  rating headed your way.
• 5:25
  If you can do two focus blocks a day, that alone will easily put you in the top 1 % of job performance.
• 5:32
  The reason is because everybody at work is distracted.
• 5:36
  So nothing gets done.
• 5:37
  Becoming a top performer is easy if you can simply focus on one thing.
• 5:42
  But being great at your job is not the same thing as growing your career.
• 5:45
  Which brings us to principle number two.
• 5:47
  Work on your career, not in your job.
• 5:50
  You can work hard at your job for years and never spend a single hour on your job.
• 5:55
  career.
• 5:55
  Most people I coach mash those two things together.
• 5:59
  Your job is the stuff with the deadline on it.
• 6:02
  The project, the tickets, whatever is due on Friday.
• 6:05
  Somebody is always asking you about it.
• 6:08
  So it gets done.
• 6:09
  Your career is different.
• 6:10
  Where do you want to end up?
• 6:12
  And what would it take to get there?
• 6:14
  Nobody is going to ping you about that.
• 6:16
  That includes the one person who could help you the most.
• 6:19
  Your manager.
• 6:20
  I did this myself.
• 6:22
  Early on at Amazon, I'd walk into my one -on -ones with a whole plan to talk about my career.
• 6:28
  I had it mapped out.
• 6:29
  The next promotion.
• 6:30
  Where I thought I stood.
• 6:32
  And what I wasn't doing enough of.
• 6:34
  And then my manager and I would spend the whole meeting on status updates.
• 6:39
  Is it on track?
• 6:40
  What's blocking you?
• 6:42
  That's what one -on -ones turn into.
• 6:43
  I wasn't even annoyed about it in the moment.
• 6:46
  That stuff mattered that week.
• 6:48
  But every single time we hit the last three minutes and we weren't even done with the updates.
• 6:53
  Okay.
• 6:53
  I think that covers the updates.
• 6:56
  So there's one more thing that I wanted to...
• 6:59
  Shoot.
• 6:59
  I've got a hard stop.
• 7:01
  Next week?
• 7:02
  Next week.
• 7:03
  So I'd tell myself I'd bring it up next week.
• 7:06
  Then my manager would go on vacation.
• 7:08
  And suddenly four weeks had passed.
• 7:11
  Here's what I didn't understand back then.
• 7:13
  My manager was never going to bring it up for me.
• 7:16
  And even when you do get close, managers are really good at pushing that conversation down the road.
• 7:21
  Great topic.
• 7:22
  Let's find time for it after the launch.
• 7:24
  There's always another launch.
• 7:26
  There are two reasons that managers do this.
• 7:28
  First, your manager's busy.
• 7:30
  They have a whole team, a boss of their own, and a calendar that looks worse than yours.
• 7:35
  In a 30 -minute one -on -one, the urgent stuff wins every time.
• 7:45
  The importance of working on one's career rather than just the job. They share personal experiences of how proactive discussions with managers can lead to career advancement.
• 7:56
  Interviewee: Look at what you just did.
• 7:57
  Your manager now knows you want more, which puts you ahead of most of the team.
• 8:02
  And you took the work off of their plate.
• 8:04
  Then all you have to do is the homework.
• 8:06
  You can compare your work to the next level criteria.
• 8:09
  You could write down what you think is holding you back, and a couple of things that you could take on.
• 8:13
  One page is plenty.
• 8:15
  When you bring it in, put it first on the agenda before the status takes over.
• 8:20
  Now your manager's job is easy.
• 8:22
  All they have to do is react.
• 8:24
  Editing a plan takes five minutes.
• 8:26
  Writing one takes hours.
• 8:28
  And if your list is wrong, that's great.
• 8:30
  You just found out what your manager thinks matters, and you never would have guessed it on your own.
• 8:35
  Bring that list back once a month.
• 8:38
  10 minutes, top of the one -on -one.
• 8:40
  That's how the conversation stays alive.
• 8:42
  But it can be hard to know how to have those conversations, or even what the right roadmap looks like for you.
• 8:47
  You only hit inflection points like this a few times in your career.
• 8:51
  And I talk to hundreds of engineers every year who are stuck at the same one.
• 8:55
  That's why I built Top Tier, my coaching program for engineers and scientists who want to jump ahead, get promoted, and break out of their current level.
• 9:04
  Inside of Top Tier, we identify the bottleneck in your career, and then we teach you how to take a hammer to it.
• 9:09
  You work with coaches, including me, who are one to three steps ahead of you.
• 9:14
  We face the same challenges, and we know how to sidestep the problems that keep great engineers stuck.
• 9:19
  If you want to learn more, check out the link below.
• 9:22
  Let's dig into the next principle.
• 9:24
  Principle number three.
• 9:25
  Complex things don't require more work.
• 9:27
  If you don't know what kind of problem you're working on, working hard on it is going to backfire.
• 9:33
  If your work is challenging, but you know exactly what to do to complete it, that's called difficult work.
• 9:38
  It's going to be a slog, but working hard will help you finish it faster.
• 9:42
  The second kind of work is the kind where you don't know what the hell to do.
• 9:45
  There's no clear starting point or a way to attack it.
• 9:49
  That's complex work.
• 9:56
  speakers: Effective communication is essential for career growth.
• 10:01
  Second, supporting someone else's growth is a lot of work.
• 10:04
  They have to figure out where you stand, find the gaps, find the right projects, and then go sell it to their own boss.
• 10:10
  My friend Gergay Arosh writes the Pragmatic Engineer.
• 10:13
  When he became a manager, he built a growth plan for every single one of his direct reports.
• 10:18
  He did all of that work.
• 10:20
  And when he shared the plans, 75 % of the people were perfectly happy where they were.
• 10:25
  They didn't want a plan.
• 10:26
  So he changed his approach to what most managers do.
• 10:30
  They only put effort into people who tell them that they want to grow.
• 10:34
  Managers have limited time, so they spend it on the people who ask.
• 10:38
  I've had clients who finally told their manager they wanted to get to the next level, and they got promoted within a month.
• 10:44
  The manager said, I've been thinking about promoting you.
• 10:48
  I just didn't know that you wanted it.
• 10:49
  So you have to be the one that brings it up.
• 10:51
  And the way you bring it up has to respect those two problems.
• 10:55
  Here's how most people do it.
• 10:56
  With three minutes left in a one -on -one, they blurt out, So what do I need to do to get promoted?
• 11:03
  Interviewer: You've just handed a busy person a huge homework assignment with zero warning.
• 11:08
  So you're going to get a vague answer.
• 11:10
  Don't worry about title.
• 11:12
  Keep doing what you're doing.
• 11:14
  And then the conversation dies.
• 11:16
  Here's what I teach instead.
• 11:17
  At your next one -on -one, say this.
• 11:20
  I want to talk about how I can grow here, but I don't want to blindside you.
• 11:23
  Can I come to our next one -on -one with some ideas on what I could be doing better?
• 11:28
  And we can go over them together.
• 11:31
  That takes 10 seconds.
• 11:33
  And the answer is always yes.
• 11:39
  speakers: learned this as a junior engineer.
• 11:40
  I was building a system that processed work in batches, and I had to decide what happened when something went wrong.
• 11:47
  What if the whole batch is bad?
• 11:49
  What if one item fails?
• 11:51
  Do I retry the whole thing and redo the work that already succeeded?
• 11:55
  Or do I retry just the one that failed, which means now I'm tracking partial completion forever?
• 12:01
  I had no idea.
• 12:02
  So I did what I always did back then, and I threw more hours at it.
• 12:06
  And every time I handled one failure case, a couple more showed up behind it.
• 12:11
  My head was swimming in edge cases.
• 12:13
  What I finally shipped did almost nothing.
• 12:16
  When a batch hit trouble, it just stopped and alerted a human.
• 12:21
  More effort was never going to solve the complexity.
• 12:24
  I eventually had to approach it completely differently with a novel solution, not more of the same.
• 12:30
  That's the trap with complex problems.
• 12:32
  When you don't know what to do, working harder means doing more of the wrong thing.
• 12:36
  Every failure case I handled created two more.
• 12:39
  The hours were making the problem bigger.
• 12:42
  Complex problems need a different kind of work first.
• 12:46
  Disambiguation.
• 12:46
  You take, I have no idea what to do, and turn it into a list of things you do know how to do.
• 12:52
  Once you have that list, you have a difficult problem on your hands.
• 12:56
  And hard work pays off again.
• 12:58
  Getting to the next level in your career is a complex problem too.
• 13:01
  Most people don't know what it takes to get promoted.
• 13:04
  But they do know what got them rewarded in the past.
• 13:07
  So they do more of that.
• 13:09
  I did one project to get here.
• 13:10
  So I'll work really hard and do three projects.
• 13:13
  That's treating a complex problem like a difficult one.
• 13:17
  More of the work you already know how to do cements you at the level that you're already at.
• 13:22
  So when you're stuck, ask yourself one question.
• 13:25
  If I kept showing up and doing the work, would this eventually get done?
• 13:29
  If the answer is yes, put in the hours.
• 13:31
  This is the one place where working harder pays off.
• 13:34
  If the answer is no, stop adding hours and start asking questions.
• 13:39
  Write down everything that you don't know.
• 13:41
  What does done look like?
• 13:43
  What's the smallest version that would count?
• 13:46
  Then go get answers.
• 13:47
  And most of them will come from other people.
• 13:50
  One conversation with the right person can replace a month of guessing on your own.
• 13:54
  Keep going until you can write out the steps.
• 13:57
  Once you can, you're back to a difficult problem and you can put your head down.
• 14:01
  Your career works the same way.
• 14:03
  That list you're bringing to the manager, that's disambiguation.
• 14:07
  You're turning, how do I get promoted into specific things that you can go and do.
• 14:12
  And your manager will probably name something that you hadn't considered.
• 14:17
  It's usually outside your current projects and outside what you're already good at.
• 14:21
  The good news is that it's often a lot less work than what you're doing right now.
• 14:25
  It'll feel harder at first because it's new to you, but hard work can hurt you even when it works.
• 14:30
  That leads us to principle number four.
• 14:33
  Hard work becomes the expectation.
• 14:35
  When you work hard, exceptional work becomes the new expectation.
• 14:40
  Once that happens, you've raised your own bar.
• 14:43
  And the reward for hard work is often even more of it, whether you like it or not.
• 14:48
  My friend Peter Yang recently quit a high -paying job at Roblox.
• 14:51
  He'd been working crazy hours there while making content on the side.
• 14:55
  But as he started to approach his next potential promotion, he started to look closer at his boss.
• 15:00
  That's when he had the horrible realization.
• 15:02
  He didn't want his boss's life.
• 15:04
  It looked way worse than his own.
• 15:06
  More work with higher expectations.
• 15:09
  In another universe, Peter would keep grinding, working crazy hours, pushing for the next promotion.
• 15:15
  Instead, he asked the uncomfortable question, do I even want the life that I get from this promotion?
• 15:21
  And so he walked away.
• 15:22
  He quit a probably seven -figure job to work for himself.
• 15:26
  He'd gone months without having breakfast with his kids.
• 15:29
  Now he walks his daughter to school.
• 15:31
  Working hard often leads you somewhere you never wanted to be in the first place.
• 15:35
  Companies function like simple machines.
• 15:37
  They add work and see how you handle all of it.
• 15:41
  If it's all well, they add more.
• 15:43
  Say your sustainable pace is shipping two projects a quarter.
• 15:46
  Then for one quarter, you push exceptionally hard and ship three.
• 15:50
  To get there, you work nights, you stop going to the gym.
• 15:54
  Your manager doesn't see any of that.
• 15:56
  All they see is three projects.
• 15:58
  So three is what they expect from you going forward.
• 16:01
  You can't keep that up forever.
• 16:03
  No one can.
• 16:04
  So the next quarter, when you take your weekends back and ship two, it looks like you're slipping.
• 16:10
  From your manager's side, you got worse.
• 16:13
  And that's how people end up working their hardest year ever and ending up with the meets expectations or low performance rating.
• 16:20
  Sometimes you have to sprint.
• 16:22
  Something's on fire, or it's the kind of opportunity you only get once.
• 16:25
  But a sprint is supposed to end.
• 16:28
  If you burn out, your career is definitely going to stop.
• 16:31
  And if you sacrifice your relationships to get there, what's even the point?
• 16:35
  Ethan Evans, a retired Amazon VP I interviewed on my podcast, told me that he was a C parent to his kids.
• 16:42
  I told him, a C is an Asian F.
• 16:45
  Nobody from your company is coming to your funeral.
• 16:48
  Nobody will mention your company in the eulogy.
• 16:51
  The only people who will remember that you worked late are your kids.
• 16:55
  So look at the people two levels above you.
• 16:58
  Think about their stress and what the job costs their health.
• 17:02
  Ask yourself, if someone offered me their exact life tomorrow, would I take it?
• 17:07
  If the answer is no, I'm happy for you.
• 17:10
  Don't chase a goal that will make you miserable.
• 17:13
  If the answer is yes, great.
• 17:15
  Just don't try to get there by doing even more of the same work.
• 17:19
  Promotions are an argument that you deserve bigger scope.
• 17:22
  Go from shipping two projects a quarter to three and you haven't widened your scope at all.
• 17:27
  You've just added more volume.
• 17:30
  Senior engineers are great at being handed a project and then going and finishing it.
• 17:34
  But the level above that works differently.
• 17:37
  They create the new projects that then get handed to other people.
• 17:41
  I call that being upstream.
• 17:43
  So the next time a project lands on your desk, get curious about where it came from.
• 17:48
  Somebody scoped it.
• 17:50
  Who was that?
• 17:51
  And how did they know that it was worth doing?
• 17:53
  If you want to get to the next level, don't try to bargain with the universe.
• 17:57
  I want the promotion.
• 17:59
  I'll even work harder.
• 18:00
  Just don't make me change the type of work I do.
• 18:03
  But the universe is undefeated.
• 18:04
  If you want to change where you are, you have to change what you do.
• 18:08
  No more being the hardest worker at your level.
• 18:11
  Instead, start working at the next one.
• 18:14
  That's the only thing that's going to get you ahead.
• 18:16
  And you'll discover you don't need to work harder to do it.
• 18:19
  Another thing that next level people do instead of working hard is improve their communication.
• 18:24
  How you speak and how you're perceived by those around you.
• 18:28
  To unlock the communication skills of the top 1%, watch this video next.