When I was at Google, my very first promotion from Eng 1 to Eng 2 got rejected after 2 years in the role. The feedback from the promo committee was “work on more impactful projects”. I was disappointed, but I also learned that “I’ll just do what I’m told and I’ll get promoted” is simply not true. I needed to rethink my approach.
Everyone wants to decouple time from money.
The problem? It's an extremely unpredictable way to make a living. For every successful creator, there are thousands who make nothing or almost nothing.
So, how do you make the unpredictable, predictable? Here's what I learned:
Love this speech by Bill Gurley - one of the common things across top professionals like Bob Dylan, Danny Meyer, etc was that they studied everything they could find about their field, they were masterful students first.