How to be happy in your career; advice from my time at Google
What do you want to be while you’re grown up?
At any given time in a career, you should be able to answer this question concisely. However, most people give you a blank i-just-got neuralized stare if you ask them. Why is that? I think this happens because of something I’ll refer to as ‘the fog’. The fog makes it incredibly difficult to synthesize what you actually do every day, which parts of it you like and which parts of it you hate. The fog is the reason why you can’t easily describe what you do for a living to friends and family. I mean really describe it so that they understand. And if you can’t describe what you do now, how are you supposed to define what you want to do in the future?
There’s a solution to clear the fog that can be borrowed from physics; thinking from first principles. When thinking from first principles you define axioms, which are statements that are definitely true. Then you can build your theories from there. But you know that the foundational assumptions everything else is based on are solid.
What are your career axioms? What simple statements are definitely true about what you enjoy.
My career axioms are:
- I need to operate in an entrepreneurial environment
- I prefer to work in small cross functional teams
- The product I work with needs to involve emerging technology
With these axioms firmly defined, things get easier. You now have a framework to answer questions like: Do I like my job? Should I get a new job? Which parts of my job do I enjoy? Should I look for a new opportunity? Can my current company make me happy? Most of the time, if your axioms are well defined, and you say them out-loud to other people, it becomes 100x easier to find out what you want to do.
With axioms defined, you can fairly successfully get rid of the fog. Now comes the hard part. Few of us are starting a career from scratch, which means there’s a lot of path dependency. You can’t change your past decisions, but you can change the future implications. With your fog clearing axioms in hand, I’ve found there’s really four key components to being happy in a career.
#1: Avoid the plateau (or don’t)
“I’ve plateaued in my role”
When you hear someone say this, it has a horribly negative connotation, like they’ve failed and need to leave. It’s important to understand exactly what the plateau is before establishing if it’s good or bad. Most roles follow this curve:
Stage 1: Learning. Your individual value to the team is quite low. You don’t really know what’s going on around you. While you’re in the ‘learn’ stage the goal is to deeply understand why things are the way they are. What problems are trying to be solved? How were they solved in the past? Why did or didn’t they work? With unlimited resources would things be done differently?
Stage 2: Question. You start to add more value to the team by asking well informed questions. With everything you now know from the ‘learn’ stage, you approach the problems that the team is trying to solve from ‘first principles’. Do you end up with a different approach? Are new resources required? New processes?
Stage 3: Influence. Understanding of ‘how we got here’ + deep understanding of problems to be solved + insights from first principles approach = innovation.
Using these insights you influence stakeholders toward change. Your historical context + new approach will give credibility. Arguably this stage is the most valuable to both you and your organization.
Stage 4: Preach. At this point it’s likely that you’ve been on the team longer than many of your teammates. That means YOU are the one contributing to the others ‘learn’ stage.
Your influence will come easier, because you are known as ‘the team expert’. Because you’re the resident expert, you may not question things so deeply, slightly decreasing your value to the team over time.
Now, which stage is best? Is the plateau actually bad? You need to remove the fog to truly find an answer. Each answer is highly personal. Evaluating the curve through my axioms, it’s clear that I like to spend my time in the Learn, Question & Influence stages. If I stay in the Preach stage too long, I’m no longer acting entrepreneurial and I need to course correct.
If you’re someone who has an axiom that involves mentorship and teaching, the plateau is a very comfortable place to live. If you abandoned the plateau you’ve just made a foggy decision that violates one of your axioms. It’s okay to do this from time to time, but the decision should be well thought out and support your axioms in the long run.
#2 The longer you’re in your job, the less of it you should do
This sounds counter productive. But take the advice at face value for a minute; the longer you’re in a job, the more stuff you accumulate. And stuff compounds over time. Think of how many 1-off tasks you’ve accumulated once you reach the influence and preach stage of your current job.
The problem with these kinds of tasks is they’re like a time virus. They eat up any free time you have and the longer you stay in your role, the more these task viruses thrive and take valuable free-thinking time away from you.
This is why it’s critical to always get rid of tasks. The longer you’re in a role, the more efficient you should be at (a) recognizing the truly critical work (b) not doing the work that isn’t critical. This means that you should be able to do your core job in 60% or 70% of your time when you hit the influence and preach stage.
This is a career competitive advantage. With 30%-40% of your time remaining, you can spend time nurturing your axioms, thinking about new approaches to solve problems (climbing back into the question stage). People who operate like this are often labeled as ‘innovative’ and lauded for their ability to always come up with new ideas.
In my experience these people just aren’t infected by the time virus. They understand the alternative is staying in the fog; thinking you’ve plateaued in your current role but not even knowing what that means. This often leads to cycles of Learn > Question > Influence across various roles. Typically this means you never become efficient enough at your job to open up your 30%-40% time to do good axiom nurturing.
#3 Move towards scarcity
One of the challenges in large distributed organizations, like Google, is that they’re incredibly successful at building products that people love. And when billions of people use a product, it creates the need for highly specialized organizations of people who all generally do the same thing. Working in these specialized orgs creates tens of thousands of employees with interchangeable skill sets. Of course, this is by design. It creates a resilient business to have modular skill sets within large pools of talent.
From the individual’s perspective, this can be detrimental. Imagine the situation where a coveted new role opens up. What differentiates you from the remainder of the org who, by design, has the same skill set?
The solution is to move towards new initiatives that emerge in large organizations. New initiatives are always looked at with a skeptical eye; especially in large distributed organizations where change is disruptive. You can use this skepticism to your advantage. By evaluating new initiatives (through the lens of your axioms) you can gain opportunities to work on new things which are scarce, and thus valued more highly in comparison to the work others with the same skill set are working on.
If you’re able to contribute to new initiatives that are successful, you’ve now added a badge to your resume that is scarce. These scarce experiences differentiate you as an employee and allow you to take another step towards finding a role that is informed by your axioms.
#4 Own equity in what you do
This idea is typically only applicable to start ups. The reason that ‘equity’ is valuable in startups is because it aligns the incentives of investors, employees and founders. Everyone’s financial and career success is coupled to the company being successful.
In large organizations it’s important to find work where the success of the project/product is tightly coupled to your personal success. In this way, you actually have equity in the initiative. Learning from the previous section, the opportunities that allow you to own equity in what you do is often scarce.
Also, if you’re in a large organization, it’s likely these equity-opportunities are not going to be a part of your day job. Equity building opportunities are most often available to those in the influence / preach stage of their current role. This is because those people are most likely to have 30%-40% of their time to focus on a new initiative in which they can build equity.
Having a good career consists of understanding how to be successful in your current job, when to get a new job and what new job you should get. These decisions are inherently complex because of the myriad of variables that are involved. To make these decisions easier you need to have some framework to evaluate decisions. I’ve found that the axiom definitions work well in both startups and large companies like Google. The main reason for this is that most people are genuinely interested in helping you; you just need to be able to articulate what you want.
