Early Career Advice

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.

The feedback from... See more

Don’t force yourself to do anything you hate. If you get too good at this, you won’t be able to figure out when to quit.

Maintain a diversity of pursuits — you want to ensure that, no matter how engrossed you become in one, you never forget that the others exist.

How to Be Lucky¶

You make your own luck. There's a great experiment that I can't cite, but it has stuck in my mind since I was a child. They identified people as lucky and unlucky, and asked them to count the number of photographs in a newspaper. The unlucky people took a long time to count the photographs, while the lucky people took a very short... See more

I like to think of careers as less like ladders and more like lily pads. In retrospect, some hops might look as if they were on a path, while others might look like a digression. Some might prioritize work, others might prioritize life outside of work. But whatever you hop to next, know you’ll have the chance to hop again. Little in life is

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