Work on what matters.

Worse, to be a successful preener requires a near invulnerability to criticism of your actual impact, and your true work will suffer if your energy is diverted to preening.

Whatever it is, things that simply won’t happen if you don’t do them are your biggest opportunity to work on something that matters, and it’s a category that will get both narrower and deeper the further you get into your career.

We only get value from finishing projects, and getting a project over the finish line is the magical moment it goes from risk to leverage. Time spent getting work finished is always time well spent.

Pacing yourself becomes the central challenge of a sustained, successful career: increasingly senior roles require that you accomplish more and more, and do it in less and less time. The ledge between these two constraints gets narrower the further you go, but it remains walkable if you take a deliberate approach.

A surprising number of projects are one small change away from succeeding. With your organizational privilege, relationships you’ve built across the company, and ability to see around corners derived from your experience, you can often shift a project outcomes by investing the smallest ounce of effort, and this is some of the most valuable work you... See more

Now that you’re done snacking, preening and chasing ghosts, the first place to look for work that matters is exploring whether your company is experiencing an existential risk. Companies operate in an eternal iterative elimination tournament, balancing future success against surviving until that future becomes the present. If you’re about to lose o... See more

If you’re taking a short-term look at career growth, then optimizing for your current organization’s pathologies in evaluating impact is the optimal path: go forth and preen gloriously. However, if you’re thinking about developing yourself to succeed as your current role grows in complexity or across multiple organizations, then it’s far more impor... See more

Many folks would assume that companies, rational optimizers that they are, avoid spending much time on low-impact high-effort projects. Unfortunately that isn’t consistently the case. It’s surprisingly common for a new senior leader to join a company and immediately drive a strategy shift that fundamentally misunderstands the challenges at hand. Th... See more

This is also an important factor to consider when choosing a company to work at! Dig into what a company values and ensure it aligns with your intended personal growth.