Follow up: When you ask someone in your network for something (like a reference, advice, an introduction) and she follows through, let her know what happened. Did you get the job? Did the idea work? Most people don’t do this either. I do all kinds of things people request of me and I rarely hear back about what happened. When I do, it is the

Here’s a trick: If you only think about why things are important, you will always be stuck thinking everything is important. Try another approach. Ask your team, “How bad is it if we fail?” You will then see an actual priority emerge.

Another great approach is to build in third-party checkpoints along the way. For example, instead of you being the one to review the quality for a product support plan, make one of the milestones review and approval by three salespeople, one in each region. That gives you a way to let your people really learn what “good enough” means for

When you step up, it’s not about doing the work, or even worrying so much about the content of the work anymore. It’s about growing an organization beneath you that can get the work done even better than you could do it. It’s about figuring out how to do things better when the world and budgets are set against you, as we talked about in the last

The more clear you can be about your true desired outcome, the more clear you can be in the moment about whether or not you are wasting your time. You can ask, “Is my role building capital to achieve my desired outcome or degrading it?” It lets you make judgments at different points to see if what you are doing in the moment is helpful, neutral, or

Highly successful people seemed to get there by breaking through limitations of how their jobs were defined—by conceiving and doing extra things above and around their job descriptions.

Do what you love for free. Work for money. Change how you do your job to feel less tortured about it—and maybe even feel pretty good about it. Spend the money you make on doing the things you love when you’re not at work.

KEY INSIGHT: The trick is to create that opportunity in your own company. Create opportunities to sell yourself to the decision makers in your company. This doesn’t always happen naturally. No one may line this up for you. It is up to you to create that opportunity.

KEY INSIGHT: The ability to work this way is not a status that is granted to you. These people were not given permission to focus on a few things and drop others. They were not less busy or less constrained than others. They took risks. They worked it out. You need to work it out.