In a previous post I wrote about the importance of “balance sheet” thinking vs. “income statement” thinking. The idea is to think of your career like an asset that pays dividends over time.

While most people think of their careers in terms of cash in – cash out (I work for 10 hours, you pay me for 10 hours), asset-based thinking realizes certain career investments will more than pay for themselves and are worth the delayed gratification.

When done well, your career stops looking like a ladder – slowly climbing rung after rung.

Instead it starts to look like a flywheel. Once you get it moving, it accelerates faster and faster. It might take a ton of momentum to get that first revolution going, but each subsequent revolution gets easier and easier.

It’s a very different way of thinking about your career, but one that can dramatically alter your career trajectory.

The Typical Career Progression

Payscale did a study looking at worker’s average lifetime earnings. They segmented their data out by gender, so I’m extrapolating a bit, but in general the typical career progression looks like this:

(Note: Compensation is obviously not the only variable one should consider when making career decisions. But it can often be a pretty solid directional indicator of one’s progression in their career.

You typically will make around 60% more at 30 than you did when you started. And around 45 or so you top off at 110% of your initial salary when you started. From 45-65 you will typically have an extended plateau.

Given this, you can think your career as having two phases – the Growth Phase where you’re working to get increase your worth as much as you can, and the Harvesting Phase where you reap the benefits of all the hard work you put into the first phase.

The Career Flywheel

I would submit you have two objectives in manipulating this curve.

The first is to make the slope of the Growth Phase as steep as possible. In the event you do eventually plateau, your Harvesting phase will be much more lucrative.

Even better is to avoid the plateau altogether. To have generated such momentum that you blow right past where things taper for most people and just keep on growing.

This is what the Career Flywheel can do for you – maximize your ascent, and avoid the plateau.

But how practically can you do this? How do you build your Career Flywheel?

I would submit there are four levers you can use to build your flywheel:

• Mastery
• Network
• Brand
• Wealth

Let’s explore how these can work for you.

Pursuing Mastery

Mastery is the foundational lever. It’s the one that’s available to anyone who decides to pursue it. It’s the process of becoming really good at something.

Good can mean many things. It can simply mean possessing knowledge of a particular domain. Anyone who commits to a discipline of reading and synthesizing can pursue this.

Tony Robbins used to say spending an hour a day reading about a topic would put you in the top 1% in the world in terms of expertise around that topic. This gets magnified if you pursue a systematic approach to remembering what you read.

But to really internalize a topic, it’s helpful to actually get experience with it. This isn’t always possible (I’m learning about quantum computing right now, even though practically I won’t be getting hands on experience.) But with most disciplines it is.

I don’t believe you should wait for your boss or organization to give you opportunities to practice. If they do, amazing. But in most cases you’ll need to submit to some form of self study.

A common approach in product design circles is to do a “design a day”. They’ll identify a design challenge (a login/registration dialog, for example), and attempt to design it. They’re typically using it as an opportunity to learn the UX of a particular interface, while also learning how to implement a particular design technique.

Go on Udemy or Coursera and look for courses in the domain you’re interested in. Either take the courses directly, or use them as an outline to build your own curriculum.

The other approach is do take on side projects. It’s one of the reasons I beat the drum around working for free so much. When you think of it as an investment in your career, you no longer are worried about how much money you’re making on the project. You’re worried about getting as many reps as possible in the shortest time possible. You’re focused on your portfolio of experience, not your checking account.

I believe anyone who seriously submits themselves to a discipline of reading one hour each day, coupled with completing at least one project a week will position themselves much more successfully for the rest of their career. They’ll be able to start charging more for what they do, and pursue projects with more visibility.

They will have built the first critical leg of their flywheel.

Building a Network

The second critical step is to build a network. A strong network is the primary mechanism people use to surface new opportunities. The best people don’t have to submit resumes to job sites. Because people come to them.

Some people feel like you can’t start building a network until you’re achieved mastery. While the kinds of opportunities you’ll see will certainly be more compelling and lucrative as you get better at what you do, you can start building your network immediately.

The secret is to focus on helping people. Go above and beyond what is typically expected to find out what people need and serve them.

The people who you aspire to be like – where do they hang out? What events do they attend?

Attend those events. Get to know them. Learn what they’re trying to accomplish in their career. Be listening for ways you can help. It could be sending them a book you’ve read related to a problem they’re trying to solve. It could be an introduction. It could be an offer to volunteer some of your time (another project for your portfolio!).

Don’t play the “collect business cards” game. Set a goal to get to know one person at each event well.

Take it to another level – who are the organizers of those events? Volunteer and get involved in those organizations, whatever that looks like. Say yes to all the crappy stuff no one else wants to do.

Don’t worry about what you’ll get out of all this help you’re providing. Don’t keep a tally. I promise it pays dividend far beyond what you invest in it. It just happens in scattershot, serendipitous, almost mystical ways.

If you want to put your networking process on steroids you can leverage the 5/25/150 networking strategy my buddy uses to systematically add value to his most important relationships. It’s not for the faint of heart. But after implementing it for several years, the guy has access to literally anybody he wants at any time.

Pursuing mastery and building a network put you in a position to start pursuing the third lever of your Career Flywheel.

Create a brand

One of the unfortunate misunderstandings of the Instagram generation is the belief that you build a brand first. While there are certainly examples of people who’ve done this, I would argue it’s the exception to the rule.

More importantly, it’s a brand built on a super shaky foundation. I’ve met dozens of people over the years who seem like they are competent, only to find out there’s nothing of substance underneath all their bombast.

The right order is to pursue mastery first. THEN start talking about it. Not the other way around.

What if you don’t have the expertise yet? Is there anything you can do?

The wrong answer is to attempt to convince people you’re good at things you aren’t, or that you’ve achieved a level of success you haven’t. Don’t rent the lambo and film yourself in your garage.

Instead, my buddy Nick Seguin suggests becoming known for competencies rather than skills early on.

If you develop a reputation for being hungry and curious (which you will have by now through your pursuit of mastery and your focus on helping your fledgling network), that in itself can be a great foundation for a brand.

Being known for curiosity and hustle will start to open doors for you, which will give you chances to improve your skills and meet interesting people, who will see your drive and want to introduce you to more opportunities. And so it goes.

Once you have mastery, by all means leverage it. There are plenty of people to follow to learn how to build your brand. Gary Vaynerchuk is a great one.

The rules are fairly simple. Get clarity on your message. Identify the channels that will be most effective at sharing your message. Be consistent about creating content around your message (it’s much easier to have ideas about what to talk about if you’ve already done the work of becoming an expert).

Write. Speak at events. Create video or audio. Take an idea and tailor it to as many mediums as make sense. Engage with your followers. Give, give, give. Ask occasionally, but focus on providing value.

But please, don’t get intoxicated by the temptation to shortcut the process. That guy toiled in the aisles of wine stores for years, learning how to sell and manage and grow a business before attempting to give anyone advice about how to do it themselves.

A great personal brand can be incredibly powerful. But focus on acquiring skills. Become great at them, then talk about it. In the meantime, simply be known for your work ethic, curiosity and character.

Avoid the Plateau: Reinvest wealth

Build the first three levers and you will dramatically alter the slope of the Growth Phase of your career. You will start having more lucrative, interesting opportunities more often.

You will start building wealth. This doesn’t mean that you’ll be “wealthy”. It simply means that you will have more resources than you did previously.

This is where many people go wrong. There is a huge tendency for people’s standard of living to increase as they make more money.

It’s okay to have some increases. But just like you want to make sure you’re investing a portion of that income into retirement, saving or investing accounts, you should reinvest as much as you can back into your career. Specifically, you can invest them into the first three components of your flywheel.

This is how you bust out of the plateau.

Reinvesting your wealth into your Career Flywheel will further increase and accelerate the slope of your Growth Phase. But even more important, it has the power to delay or even permanently eliminate the plateau that you typically see in a Harvesting phase.

What are some examples of investments you can make?

Increasing Mastery:

• Attend conferences or take higher level courses that might have been prohibitive before.
• Hire a part time assistant to learn management skills and to free up your time to focus on learning.
• Make capital investments to accelerate your skills – better gear, etc.
• Acquire new skills you didn’t previously have.

Improving your Network

• Identify higher level people that you’d love to add to your network. Figure out the conferences they attend and go to them.
• Create a travel budget specifically for visiting cities where these folks live to get coffee or lunch.
• Use the resources to help your network in ways that might have been prohibitive before.

Build Your Brand

• Hire someone to help you scale the creation and distribution of content.
• Submit speaker proposals to conferences, even if you have to pay to go to them.
• Level up your website.
• Get nicer cards or better clothes.
• Be like Garyvee and get a videographer to follow you around all day :)

Building your Career flywheel

Start building mastery. At the same time begin to cultivate a better network. Once you actually have something interesting to say, begin to create a brand. And use the income generated from the increases in those areas to reinvest back into your career.

Most of all, be patient. Everyone’s in such a hurry to be successful immediately. As a result they flit from thing to thing, looking for the silver bullet that leads to immediate success. Life doesn’t work that way.

Your Career Flywheel isn’t a one year endeavor. Plan to spend your entire career investing in building it. And plan to constantly reinvest back into it as you start to level up.

Track your time each week. Set a goal to spend 5% or 10% or 20% of your time investing in your Career Flywheel. Get a buddy to hold yourself accountable if you need to.

Putting in the work isn’t glamorous. It isn’t always fun. It will be slow going in the beginning.

But over time you’ll build momentum. Your flywheel will start going faster and faster. Eventually the momentum will carry you with it.

In 10 years you’ll look back and be completely blown away by the progress you’ve made. And you’ll know the next 10 years will be even more incredible. Your job will become to learn how to hold on for dear life without blowing everything up.

You will have achieved runaway career growth.

—

Thanks to Jon Klinepeter, Nick Seguin, Adam Haun, and Jenny Poore for reading drafts of this article.

The post The Career Flywheel: 4 Steps to Runaway Career Growth appeared first on Sean Johnson @intentionally.

A long time ago I read article by Tom Peters. He argued creativity was nothing more than combining two different ideas together in new ways.

It seemed logical that in order to be more creative, I needed to have more ideas at my disposal. And that meant more reading.

So reading became a much bigger part of my life after school than before it. Each year I try to read at least 20 books (you can see what I’ve read so far this year here.) Some are directly applicable to my field. Many aren’t.

The goal is to expose myself to as many good ideas from smart people as possible.

But over the years, memories get fuzzy. And when you read as often as I do it, jumping from one book right into another, it can be difficult to remember all the great ideas you spent so much time discovering.

And so a few years back I started to implement a system to remember everything, with help from my buddy Emerson Spartz.

It’s pretty straightforward, and requires a fair amount of organization. But the results are powerful.

Step One: Annotate.

Unless I’m reading fiction, I keep a highlighter and a pen next to me at all times. As I find passages that are interesting, I highlight them.

As I read passages that lead to thoughts of my own, I write them down in the margins. This allows me to remember not just that I thought an idea was interesting, but why.

I tend to pay particular attention to three sets of passages:

Principles

Most non-fiction books have frameworks or principles they’re attempting to explain. I make sure I highlight each of them, with any relevant action steps for implementation.

Stories

Stories are often more compelling than facts. Having good stories at your disposal allows you to explain ideas and argue positions much more persuasively.

References

It’s not uncommon for great books to reference other great books. These can be a great source of new ideas?—?if I see the same book pop up more than once I almost always pick it up.

Step Two: Transfer

As soon as I finish a book, I open up Evernote. I have a notebook for books, and I create a new note for the book. I transfer all my highlights and annotations, noting the page number and whether it’s a principle, story or reference.

I also have a second notebook for quotes. Any quotes I highlight I put in both the book’s note, and in their own note in my quotes notebook. I tag my quotes by theme so I can track them down later if necessary.

Sounds tedious, but it typically takes less than 20 minutes.

I’ve found that the act of typing my notes into Evernote dramatically increases the likelihood I remember the material later. But the next step makes sure of it.

Step Three: Remind

As an avid fan of GTD, I’ve come to appreciate the power of a good “tickler system”. It’s basically a process for reminding yourself to do something. Sounds simple, but it’s what makes my whole book system work.

Whenever I complete my transfer into Evernote, I create a reminder in OmniFocus to review the note a month from now. I also set it to queue up the next reminder for every six months after.
I have a reminder to review at least one book most days of the year. It takes 5 minutes or so, and I’m usually able to do it during my commute.

This is the key step. It’s allowed me to remember all the important information from books I care about. And it inevitably triggers new ideas for how I can apply the material to my current work or life situation.

The Power of Remembering

This probably sounds tedious. Perhaps it sounds like I have an OCD problem. That might be true.
But I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been in meetings trying to solve a problem and the solution has been an idea applying ideas from books I’ve read, often that I had recently reviewed again.

This process gives my brain many more “mental models” than it would otherwise have. It folds these ideas into my subconscious, where I’m able to recall and refer to them much more easily.
It allows my brain to ruminate on them in the background, to internalize how they could apply in more situations than I had originally thought when reading the material for the first time?—?perhaps more than the author even intended.

For me, it makes all the sense in the world. If I’m going to take the 5 hours to read the book, I might as well take the extra 30 minutes a year to ensure I never forget it.

Creativity is fast becoming one of the only ways to remain truly competitive in your career. And I can’t think of a better way to be more creative than to systematically increase your inputs.

P.S. This was originally sent to my Inner Circle newsletter, but got enough positive feedback I decided to publish it. Want to get my next Inner Circle? Message me on Twitter.

The post How to Remember Literally EVERYTHING You Ever Read appeared first on Sean Johnson @intentionally.

When I was growing up, my dad talked often about income statement thinking vs. balance sheet thinking.

Most people think of their finances like an income statement. You make income. You spend it on stuff. You make more. You spend it on stuff.

But people who understand money think about their finances like a balance sheet. They make income. They invest it into assets that earn additional income. That they turn into more assets. And so on.

Balance sheet thinking requires a mental shift. It requires delaying gratification – realizing that the investment made up front will likely pay dividends later.

Your time works exactly the same way.

Your time is an asset

Most people subconsciously think about their time like an income statement. Time in, money out. They want to get paid for every hour they work. No money, no work.

But some people think of their time is an asset. An asset that can be used to build more value over time.

These people focus on maximizing the value of their hours, not necessarily being compensated for every hour they spend.

Rather than spending their time, they invest their time.

A tale of two freelancers

Imagine Lucy and Mike both want to start a freelance design business. Neither have great portfolios yet.

Mike reads articles about how you should never work for free. That you should be paid what you’re worth.

He talks to some people for advice and decides his time is worth $50 an hour. He only takes on projects he gets paid for. At the end of the year he’s done 10 projects averaging $5,000 each.

Lucy realizes her portfolio needs to get better. She needs to get better, by working on real projects with real constraints.

She decides to spend 8 hours a week promoting the hell out of herself (obviously unpaid) and the rest doing work. If she gets paid, great. If she has unallocated time, she fills it up with work regardless of cost, even if it’s free.

End of the year, she’s done 50 projects averaging $1000 each. Many of them, particularly in the beginning, she does for free.

They make the same amount of money. Mike made more per hour worked.

But Lucy is now a better designer than Mike. She’s had 5x the opportunities to learn on real projects with real constraints. She has 5x the logos and examples to put on her website, Dribbble, etc. She has 50 customers whom she can leverage for referrals.

After 1 year, she is able to command more than $50/hour on projects. And her pipeline is much bigger. In year 2 she makes considerably more than Mike. Because of a 1 year investment of her time.

It works in real life

This isn’t a fake story. I did something very similar in my first job. During the day I was an Account Manager. I had aspirations of becoming a Creative Director. Only problem was I wasn’t good enough.

So at night I did design work for my company on my client projects. For free.

I did dozens of them, outside of my normal job responsibilities. I didn’t get paid for any of it. But I got WAY better than I would have otherwise. And eventually it became my job. In 18 months my income tripled. And it put my career on a trajectory that would have been impossible (or at least taken considerably longer) otherwise.

Most importantly, it taught me a secret. Investing your time vs. spending it creates exponentially more value in the long term. It takes longer, but not as long as you think. And the rewards far outweigh the short term costs.

It’s a secret I use to this day.

When we started Digital Intent, we charged 30k to design and build entire apps for startups (web and mobile!). To some people that might sound like a lot of money, but I promise you it isn’t. It was barely enough to pay our team. The partners made nothing.

But we got the logos. We learned how to execute on multiple projects at the same time. We learned how to sell those kinds of services, how to manage those kinds of projects, how to allocate resources. And that investment allowed us to charge progressively more.

Today the same services cost 10 times as much – and it’s still a good deal. The team got the experience to become badass at what they do. And we’ve demonstrated the ROI enough times to make it a no brainer for our clients.

If we tried to “charge what we were worth” at the outset, there’s a good chance we’d still be a 3 person company today. At a minimum I think our growth trajectory would have been considerably different.

Same thing with Founder Equity. I had experience building and selling companies, but not as a GP in a venture fund.

Almost every fund charges a 2% management fee each year and gets 20% carry when there’s an exit. Our fund charges no management fee and has no traditional carry – we own the exact same thing our investors do.

That means we’ve worked our tails off for 3 years identifying promising companies, doing diligence, serving on boards and generally trying to make ourselves as helpful as possible for our founders.

And we take zero salaries from the fund to do so. In fact, any profits from our consulting company that don’t get reinvested in the business go right into the fund.

To income statement thinkers that sounds insane. But if it works, the upside is transformational.

We don’t look like typical VCs, don’t have the normal pedigree. I don’t think we would have gotten the fund off the ground had we not been willing to put substantial skin in the game ourselves and have our unusual no-free structure. It’s only been possible because we focused on asset value, not income.

Dumb Reasons to Work For Free

There’s a subtle difference between what I’m suggesting and what most (particularly freelancers) think of when this topic comes up. In that world, it’s not unusual for the potential client to ask you to work for free, not the other way around.

They might dangle the idea of “exposure” or of follow on work if they’re happy with what you do. They might be a startup trying to convince you they’re going to be the next big thing.

Those are dumb reasons to work for free. What I’m suggesting is more strategic.

In many cases, your aspirations (your means) are insufficient to reach your goals (your ends.) Whenever that’s the case, working for free can be a strategic way to close that gap and accelerate your growth.

Most clients that are reputable and actually have the power to make things happen for you won’t ask you to do something for free. You should wary of anyone who does.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t offer it. Especially when it’s an opportunity or person you wouldn’t be able to work with otherwise.

Looked at through this lens, you’re no longer someone being taken advantage of – you’re someone using it strategically to benefit yourself.

But I’m too old / busy to work for free!

A common objection to this thinking is that it’s only relevant for younger people without responsibilities. Folks who are older, with mortgages and spouses and kids can’t possibly be expected to do this.

Candidly, that’s just horseshit.

I had an employee who was getting his MBA full time at Kellogg. He wanted to become a product manager. There was no curriculum. So he created one.

He taught himself web and mobile programming – not enough to be a developer but enough to know what is and isn’t possible.

He taught himself how to use Sketch to make prototypes, how to leverage existing UI kits to quickly communicate his ideas. He taught himself Flinto so he could prototype animations.

He flexed his new skills on projects for us, effectively volunteering to be a product manager on top of his normal responsibilities to get experience. Now he’s a fast-rising product owner at a Fortune 500 media company.

I have a former student who wanted to transition into marketing. He took it upon himself to learn paid acquisition so he could rapidly test and validate ideas for his company.

He leveraged that experience to get on the radar of the VP of marketing, who ended up offering him a job on his team. He did this while attending grad school full time, running the entrepreneurship organization, and operating his own Jiu Jitsu studio.

These two both did this on top of full time jobs and full graduate level course loads while juggling the responsibilities of a family.

I’m not suggesting it’s easy. And I don’t want to minimize the difficulties some people face in their personal lives, things I couldn’t possibly imagine. Myself and the folks I know have certainly been given healthy doses of privilege, and to suggest otherwise would be ignorant and unfair.

But for most people, I do believe it’s possible to pull this off on top of your existing responsibilities. You adjust your lifestyle. You get focused and efficient at getting things done. You make the time.

Never stop investing

If you want to get good at something, don’t wait for your employer to build a development plan. Take control of your own career ladder. If that means doing some work for free, so be it.

If you want to accelerate your timetable for achieving some career or entrepreneurial milestone, working for free (or making compensation contingent on success) is a counterintuitive but effective way to get there.

This doesn’t mean you always work for free, or try to charge what you’re worth. If you get paid, great. But at a minimum keep it in your back pocket. It’s far more important to get the experience, the logo, the case study, the added network, the mental models that come from doing the work.

Forget about dollars earned per hour. Think instead about % of hours spent building the asset that is your career. Your time is an asset. Spend it as such.

The post The Incredible Power of Working for Free appeared first on Sean Johnson @intentionally.

This morning I gave a talk to the team at Spothero for their Young Leaders series. Normally I give talks on how to build better products, so this was unique.

I think they invited me because I’ve had “approachable” success. I’m not Mark Zuckerberg. I’m a pretty normal dude?—?got an above average jumpshot, a wife who’s much smarter than he is, and a couple adorable kids.

But I’ve done a lot of the things I’ve wanted to do in my career, relatively quickly. I helped build and sell a company by 27. I started a multi-million dollar consulting firm by 30. Was a Kellogg professor at 31, and a partner at a venture fund at 33.

When people ask me how that happened, I usually say dumb luck. That’s honestly 90% of it. Needle in haystack opportunities.

But I did identify a few things I did in my career that helped. Hopefully they’ll help you too.

1. Show Up First

I followed a girl to New York in 2004. I got hired as an account manager at a startup doing lead gen campaigns for universities. I made 35k a year, and lived in the crappiest apartment in the world. 

I was thrilled. I had made it. I was also terrified.

I didn’t know what I was doing. I was sure everyone else was much better than me. The only thing I knew how to do was try to outwork them.

So for the first 2 years of my career, I went to Starbucks in the morning at 6am when they opened. I would work until 8:30, be the first person in the office.

This gave me an extra day every week to get stuff done. It allowed me to be productive even if my days got derailed by meetings. 

Just as important, my bosses noticed I was consistently the first person in the office. Which could have happened other ways, but dramatically accelerated the process.

2. Microvate

What did I do with all that time? I did what I call microvation. Microvation is the art of tiny innovations. 

Sign up for all the crappy projects?—?the stuff no one wants to do. Try to figure out how to reframe them in a way that made them more useful. And then make them amazing.

We would do CSV exports to give to clients. I turned them into visual reports that we sent as PDFs. 

We started using Salesforce?—?I learned how to create custom reports for the sales team (which was run by the founders). 

I tapped into my former life as a stand-up comic to create funny, quirky emails to send clients when their campaigns launched, when they got their first leads, etc.

You can do it with anything. Turn picking up lunch into a lunch and learn series. Turn a slack channel with links into a knowledge management program that collects and documents “the way we do things here.” 

Microvation demonstrates you’re someone who sees opportunity in everything, and can get things done.

3. Be the Note Taker.

Nobody knows how to execute. Which is a tremendous opportunity. Execution is simply identifying where you want to go, creating a specific plan to get there, identifying the specific next actions to take, assigning responsibility, and most importantly following up.

The best way to do this is to volunteer to be the note taker in every meeting. 

The note taker has a tremendous amount of power inside a company. 

Your notes become the record of what happened in a meeting. You literally have the power to shape projects and ideas.

If you’re 23 in a 10 person meeting and say “okay everyone, what are the specific next steps we need to take here?” you might get some odd glances. But nobody will look at you funny asking that if you’re the note taker. Nobody will get upset when you follow up in the next meeting.
Before long, they think you’re gifted at getting things done. Which by then, you will be.

4. Dress up.

This one might sound stupid. Especially in the world of tech where hoodies and white sneakers are the new uniform.

I had a mentor who ran economic development in Colorado. Harvard grad. Black guy who grew up in rural South Carolina, was the first in his family to go to college. Incredibly proud guy. Every single day he gave me feedback on what I wore to the office. I asked him why.

“Don’t give people a reason to ignore your ideas.”

It’s hard enough as it is, especially if you don’t come from a place of privilege (ie aren’t a white dude in America). 

If you dress well, at best they’ll think you’re smarter than you are. Most of the time, they’ll simply ignore it. But they won’t think you’re stupid. And they’ll be more receptive to what you have to say. 

I know for a fact as a young guy trying to raise money from wealthy LPs 30 years older than I am, it helps that I dress the way they dress. They spend the meeting listening to my ideas, not thinking about the ironic T shirt I’m wearing. 

Forget about trying to make a statement with your clothes. Let your work do the talking.

5. Design is a superpower.

When I was college I dabbled in design. I had a pirated copy of Photoshop and had done some projects in school, but I wasn’t very good. 

But I had read a book by a guy named Tom Peters, and he said design and branding were going to be a big deal in the future and it was something I wanted to get good at.

Turns out he was right. In a world when almost anyone can build a startup, good design and the ability to craft a compelling brand are a huge competitive advantage.

It’s also a big advantage for you personally. It makes every document you send, every Keynote you make, every project you work on better. 

Being good at design demonstrates you have taste. And people like to be around people with taste.

You don’t have to become a designer. But learn to develop good design sense. Start with your Keynote decks.

6. Work for free.

How did I learn design? I went to our Design Director and asked him if I could design my client’s sites. I said don’t show them to the client?—?I just want feedback on real projects with real constraints so I can get better. And I did it for free.

For 9 months I did this. I designed probably 50 campaigns. They sucked for a long time. But each one got slightly better. 

Eventually they started trickling over to clients as the “B option” in case they didn’t like the good one. Eventually they started going with the B option sometimes. Eventually I ended up having a weird split role with 2 bosses, doing half client services and half design work?—?always from 6–9am or after work, and always for free.

When you’re young, reps matter more than money. Your portfolio matters more than money. Opportunities to learn matter more than money.

If you can command the kind of prices you want and can get all the work you want, great. If you suck and really want to learn, don’t wait for some golden opportunity to get paid to learn. Start learning now?—?on real projects with real constraints. The money will come.

7. Master sales.

If you know how to sell you’ll never worry about money. 

They’re always the highest paid people in the company. They’re usually the entrepreneurs who are most likely to succeed.

As an account manager, I would go out 1 to 2 weeks a month to visit clients, usually with one of our top salespeople. We had to chain together these ridiculous trips to save money?—?Seattle to Los Angeles. New York to Tampa and back. So we’d try to cram as many meetings as possible in?—?some with clients, some with prospects.

I would watch the salespeople, learn how to overcome objections, how to ask for the close, etc. Eventually I started up selling my existing clients on new campaigns, new services, etc. I became the top selling non-salesperson in the company.

8) Become a unicorn.

In the tech world, the unicorn is the person who can design, code, go from an idea to a living thing. They say they don’t exist, but they do. 

As a hiring manager

, looking for one is probably foolish. But as a career move, becoming a unicorn is baller.

One of the products I had the most success selling didn’t exist until I made it. Our campaigns were all automated emails. The school would give us a list, we’d upload them, turn the thing on, the email blasts would start. But clients wanted to be able to send ad-hoc broadcast messages as well.

We didn’t have that. Mailchimp wasn’t a thing. But I found a PHP tool called that you’d host on your own server. I paid for the license with my own money. I installed it on one of our servers. I customized the files to have our branding. And then I started trying to sell it to my clients.

My bosses found out of course, and were pissed. Today most companies have protocols in place to prevent that kind of thing. But clients started asking how much it would cost to use our Direct Mailer, and my bosses forgave me.

There’s a tremendous amount of power in being a one person execution machine. While the world is full of “idea people”, there are far fewer people who can have an idea, design the thing, build the thing (even if it’s cobbled together from 3rd party tools?—?in fact those are often the best ones), and sell the thing. While it makes it harder for you to talk about what you do, it’s really powerful.

9) Read all the things.

At least once a week I was at the bookstore, trying to learn things that would make me better at my job. Sales, design, negotiation, whatever I could find.

One of those things was CSS. Web standards were becoming a thing, and accessibility was a big issue with universities. 

All our campaigns were in flash. Because that’s what the design director knew. And he didn’t want to learn how to do it another way. Clients started complaining. Eventually it came to a head. He chose to quit instead of learning how to do it. I got promoted to Creative Director, with the salary to match.

In about 18 months, I went from Account Manager to Creative Director, my salary had tripled. The previous 8 things all played a role. But the catalyst was my being the only person who knew CSS. Because I read.

I still do this —in my current role at the venture fund I really had to shore up my finance and accounting skills. So I started taking online classes and downloading HBR business cases to work on at night. 

Lots of people complain about not having mentors, or a plan from their company to help them learn. But you have all the mentors you need at the bookstore or library or online. 

The career ladder isn’t in your office. What you do at night matters.

10. Study management.

So I became Creative Director, and life was good. We got acquired by a private equity company doing a rollup. I was suddenly managing a much larger team than I ever had before. 

I got brought in to meet the new CEO, feeling pretty good about myself. But he brought me down to earth. 

“The things that made you good as an operator are going to kill you as a manager. Today your career starts over.”

He was right.

Management is a skill. There are strategies and practices to it, just like anything else. You can’t just be a good operator with people skills. You have to learn new skills, exercise new muscles.

Two great books to start are High Output Management and The Effective Manager.

Become a student. Submit yourself to the discipline of management.

11. 5/25/150

After the acquisition, we moved to Chicago for my wife’s job. I figured my days were numbered, and I needed to start building out a network here.

The best system I know of for doing this is the 5/25/150 method. It’s basically a spreadsheet with 5 names, 25 names an 150 names. You reach out to the 5 multiple times per week, the 25 weekly, the 150 monthly.

This approach is how I got to know Joe Dwyer, who was a venture partner in town. I left that NY company to became the VP Product at one of his fund companies. A few years later, I started Digital Intent with him and my other buddy Matt. And a few years after that we started the fund together.

The secret to pulling this off is to truly care about the people on that spreadsheet. You’re constantly looking for ways to add value to their lives, to help them out, to introduce them to each other. 

You aren’t worried about when it will come back. You aren’t keeping tabs. You probably don’t get as much back as you put in. But you have 180 people who love you. And you get back more than enough opportunity for a lifetime.

12. Write and talk.

A guy named Craig Wortmann asked me to guest lecture in his class at Booth. I frantically put together a deck, and because I have imposter syndrome I loaded it with way more content than I needed. I put the deck up online after, and it got picked up by Growth Hackers. And then Kellogg found out about it. And that’s how I got the gig to teach at Kellogg.

Putting my thoughts online has led to so many opportunities for our company and for me personally. Going to speak around the world. Getting published. Being asked about writing books.

I have no desire to become Tony Robbins. I love creating and investing in products. But I do realize the power of a platform. 

Building your platform amplifies everything else you do. And it’s free. 

It just takes the willingness to be brave and put yourself out there.

13. The office is your dojo.

I love work. I love being in an office. I think it’s more than just a place to make stuff. 

The office is the perfect place to practice life. To learn what it means to be disciplined. To humble yourself and pursue mastery in a craft over a long period of time.

It’s the perfect place to develop character. Smashed together with a bunch of people you might not hang out with otherwise. To learn how to compromise, how to be patient, how to control your emotions, how to build empathy, how to serve others.

Treat it like your dojo. In addition to your KPIs or business goals, have some personal development goals. One guy on my team realized he interrupts people in meetings all the time. And so he’s actively working in meetings on talking less, letting other people finish, actively listening.

You are molding yourself into something, ever so slowly, whether you realize it or not. Mold yourself into something awesome.

Increase the needles in your haystack.

None of this is a golden ticket. I’m always hesitant to suggest “rules”?—?like I said, most of my success has been dumb luck. 

But I do think these strategies can exponentially increase the number of needles in your haystack. They’ll make luck much more likely to appear.

Disagree with any of this? Think there’s things I left out? I’d love to hear what you think.

The post 13 ways to turn your career into an f-ing rocket ship appeared first on Sean Johnson @intentionally.

Office politics have a bad rap.

The phrase is typically used to refer to sleazy posturing, sucking up, and cutting others down to lift yourself up. All bad things. But politics doesn’t have to be a dirty word.
Politics is really about execution.

It’s about building consensus. Getting the right people on board. Moving your ideas through an organization in a structured, systematic way until they become a foregone conclusion.
Look at most organizations and you’ll find the people who rise the fastest are great politicians.

It’s not a replacement for talent?—?you still have to be great at what you do. But given two people with the same skill level, the more gifted politician will win almost every time.
Here’s how to become one of them.

Stop Pooping Your Idea

You see it all the time. Someone has an idea. They open their email or Slack, write a couple paragraphs on the idea, hit send, and wait for the congratulations to pour in and the ball to start rolling.

What happens instead? Nothing.

This is pooping your idea. You drop an idea on everyone else’s doorstep and expect them to take it and run with it. But they have other things they’re working on, other pressures they’re facing. The last thing they want to think about is how to make your fledgling idea happen.

An idea is worth precisely nothing without execution and hustle. If you want to see change happen, it’s going to have to start with you.

Build a reputation as a doer.

When your team is evaluating your idea, they’re not just thinking about the merits of the idea.
They’re asking themselves whether the idea will work (otherwise they’ll look bad), and they’re asking themselves if you’re the person to pull it off. If the answer to either of those questions is a no, the idea dies.

We’ll talk more about solving for the first question later. But to solve for the second, the answer is to become known in the organization as someone who gets things done. And the best way to do this is what I call Microvation.

Microvation is the process of taking little crappy tasks and turning them into something awesome. And what’s great is anyone can do it, regardless of level.

Picking up lunch? Turn it into a lunch & learn series and bring in smart people to learn from.
Printing out new employee paperwork? Turn it into an amazing onboarding experience for new hires to feel truly welcome.

Taking on customer support? Turn it into a project to have the best support site in the world, with forums, FAQs, and fanatically fast and helpful responses.

Writing a blog post? Turn it into the first step in a marketing automation process that drives more leads for the business.

Start small, execute well, and over time you’ll develop a reputation as someone who can make things happen.

Start with a story. Usually with pain.

My friend Craig Wortmann talks constantly about the power of story. People make emotional decisions, and use data to justify their choice. Stories hijack a part of our brain, make us sit up and listen, and stick in our minds long after the meeting ends.

The best stories for moving ideas forward start with pain. People respond more to fear of loss than the opportunity for gain. So paint a picture of how bleak things are, how you can’t possibly stay where you are. Make it clear it’s imperative the organization go from A to B.

Know your stuff cold.

Stories matter, but so does the evidence to back up the story. Before you start talking about your new idea, make sure you’ve got your case put together. Have good data backing you up, don’t be afraid to leverage the work of experts, or smart frameworks developed elsewhere. Anticipate the objections you’re likely to encounter.

A prototype is worth a thousand meetings.

Immediately begin working on a prototype of your solution. This can be a document, a presentation, a clickable demo, working software, whatever. And show the prototype to people before you think it’s ready.

Prototypes give people something to latch onto. They demonstrate there’s actual momentum?—?that there’s a “there” there.

Prototypes also provide opportunities for concrete feedback?—?which as you’ll see shortly is critically important.

Prepare to change your prototype 10 times, 100 times, 1000 times if necessary. Every change is a chance to improve the original concept, and as you’ll soon see a chance to recruit a supporter.
Find someone who’s willing to call you out. Even better, build a board.

When you really want to make things happen, you can quickly become blinded to the flaws in your thinking. It’s extremely helpful to have someone on your team (or outside of the organization) who can privately tell you when you’re full of crap. Better to have them tell you than have your boss kill the idea.

An even better approach is to cultivate a group. These could be old bosses, subject matter experts, or internal team members. They should know the industry enough to give candid feedback, and know you well enough to tell you when you’re about to lose control.

Never retaliate.

People are going to put up a fight if what you’re working on is worth doing. Change is upsetting.

But no matter how aggressively they try to kill your idea, no matter how poorly thought out their objections are, you must always keep your cool. Losing control of your emotions won’t improve the substance of your ideas.

Forget about credit.

Perhaps the most important rule in here. The people who are the best at building consensus know the key is to make others feel like it was their idea.

As you formulate your case, plan in advance for areas you’re willing to compromise on. There will always be some, and knowing in advance allows you to let others co-create your idea without losing it’s teeth.

In doing so, you give others a chance to feel some ownership. And people are much more likely to go to bat for their own idea than one they had no hand in.

Sell laterally (or down) before selling up.

Building a base of support is essential before trying to push an initiative up the food chain. You want to build a groundswell of people who’ve seen the concept, given feedback you’ve incorporated (making it their idea too), and letting them help you build enthusiasm.

When you do sell up, start in private.

Your boss is busy and has many things going on. They don’t want to be surprised in a big meeting with a new initiative that will require lots of change.

So begin your pitch before the pitch begins. By now you have a prototype that has been tested with internal or external people. You have a groundswell of people who are excited about the idea.

Once you have sufficient evidence, you introduce the idea in private. This gives your boss a chance to push back more gently, not worry about wasting everyone else’s time, and ideally provide feedback (that you of course incorporate).

Your job is to make your boss look good. So give them a nice package, backed by data. Let them tweak it so they feel ownership. And let them take the credit?—?they won’t forget, and most of the time they’ll pass the credit right back to you anyway.

Find a champion

A champion might be your boss, but often isn’t. They’re almost always above you. They’re someone who takes an interest in you, probably because they see a younger version of themselves.

Your champion will fight fights you don’t have the political capital to win. They’ll be a persuasive influence behind closed doors. They’ll tell you when it’s not worth pursuing, and they’ll go to bat for you when it is.

Don’t Hitch Your Wagon to One Horse

That said, you need a broader base of support. People change jobs, get promoted, get fired. Your champion might not be there forever. Make sure you have a broad group of people who want to see you be successful.

The best way to do this? Do what the best networkers in the world do?—?figure out what other people need and go out of your way to help them.

Shower your supporters with love

It’s commonly said it’s 8 times (or 10, or 12, or whatever) harder to get a new customer than keep a current one. And yet nearly every company makes the mistake of neglecting their supporters.

Don’t assume because they were intrigued initially they’re willing to expend political capital for you, especially if you don’t keep them in the loop as things progress.

Remind them how important they are. Keep them regularly updated. Take the time to grab a beer and ask for their advice and feedback.

Clients are powerful allies.

It’s easy to discount the ideas of other internal team members. It’s much more difficult to discount ideas of team members who have the support of clients. Keeping (or growing) revenue can be a powerful motivator to overcome inertia.

Don’t give them a stupid reason to say no.

Being the person who shows up late to every meeting hurts your political capital whether you know it or not. So does being a sloppy dresser, or being the “brings tuna fish for lunch” guy.
None of this has anything to do with the merits of your idea. But when evaluating your idea they’re bringing their perceptions of you as a person into the subconscious decision making process.

So show up on time. Do what you’ll say you do. Say please and thank you. Dress like someone who wants to make things happen. Don’t steamroll people. Don’t hog credit. Don’t constantly take personal calls in your office or hang on Facebook all day.

Thank people.

Pick up a box of nice stationery. Use it.

When someone (internal or external) lets you show them your prototype, thank them. When someone gives you feedback that makes the idea better, thank them. When someone recruits another ally, thank them. When someone goes to bat for you in a meeting and risks some of their own capital, thank them.

Brag. But not about yourself.

There’s nothing wrong with talking about the success your projects have. People like being associated with things that already have momentum?—?if you communicate the progress you’re making, you’ll find more people jumping on board.

But if you’re patting yourself on the back, you’ll rub people the wrong way. Again, give the credit to everyone else. As long as you direct the praise everywhere else but you, people will love to hear about the progress your initiative is making.

You’re in sales.

Everyone is a sales person. You’re selling your friends on where to go to dinner. You’re selling your spouse on plans for the weekend. And you’re sure as hell selling your internal team on this big idea that’s going to reinvent the company.

So become a student of it. Learn how to build rapport, how to uncover needs, how to position solutions, overcome objections, and follow up. Learn how to ask for the close.

Study great presenters. Watch TED Talks and Apple keynotes. Study the pacing, the progression, the pauses, the areas of emphasis, the division between emotional appeals and cold hard facts.
You’re in sales whether you think you are or not. The question is whether you’re good at it.

Listen to objections. REALLY.

Objections to your idea are not obstacles to barrel through. There are likely very legitimate holes. Truly listen when colleagues challenge you on points. Brainstorm with them on how those obstacles might be able to be overcome. Ask “if I can address this issue, will I have your support?”

Again?—?giving people the opportunity to co-create is one of the best tools in your toolbox. Once they touch it, it’s their idea too. Leverage that.

Make sure your rollout plan includes early wins.

Before the rollout, you’re selling the vision and everyone’s excited. But once the idea is in the real world and customers or internal team members are using it, the rubber meets the road.

Ideally you want your early launch to have some quick wins baked in. Plan for those in advance.

While the initial pilot is primarily about learning and improving, you definitely want to be able to demonstrate the early returns are positive.

Don’t Go For The Home Run Swing.

It’s unlikely you’re going to get approval to do the full rollout. Nor should you try.
Take a page from the startup world. Do a limited launch. Be a concierge, hand-holding your beta testers through your new process. Collect their honest feedback. Patch up the parts of the process that are busted. Iterate and do it again.

The best initiatives look small early on. They have the air cover and lack of visibility to make their mistakes, take their lumps and improve before they’re ready for prime time.

The big launch sounds intoxicating. You’re on everyone’s radar, and your project is clearly designed to make a big dent in the way things are done at the company. But there’s a ton of carnage when projects are that visible. Your margin for error is tiny?—?and there’s almost always error.

Start small. Learn as much as you can. Get momentum. You’re much more likely to make a dent this way?—?it just might take longer.

Politics can be a force for good, for your company and your career.

You don’t have to use the power of politics for evil. You can use them to remove logjams, move important initiatives forward, create lasting impact in your organization, and put the gas on your career trajectory.

Stop pretending like politics doesn’t exist in your company. Stop acting like its inherently bad. Learn how to harness it to make great things happen.

The post Want to Get Ahead? Start Playing Politics. appeared first on Sean Johnson @intentionally.

There are 3 primary ways to rapidly accelerate your career.

The first option is to be so damn good people can’t ignore you. This takes years of dedication, a passion for your craft, and probably at least some degree of natural ability.

The second option is to outwork everyone. This doesn’t have to mean hours. It’s more a function of intensity, consistently focusing on maximizing output and focus each hour of your workday.

The third option is to be way better than everyone else at building relationships.

This is the easiest to accomplish. Anyone can do it. When done correctly, it’s probably the most valuable. It makes everything your company needs to do easier?—?raising money, finding customers, attracting talent, partnering with great vendors and more.

And yet most people do it very poorly, if at all.

For them, networking means grabbing business cards at events, getting coffee to “pick people’s brains”, and seeing if there are immediate ways to get something from them.

The more talented ones realize that it’s largely about giving. Making introductions, offering to help, providing feedback and advice. Give, give, give. They avoid the tit-for-tat mentally and in the process build up so much goodwill that it comes back to them in waves.

This is great. But it can be so much better.

The Secret: 5/25/150.

I have a friend who is the best networker I’ve ever seen. They’re that person who can get you tickets to the impossible show, who is one degree away from anyone in town, who people go out of their way to help.

When you meet them, they’re not terribly impressive. They didn’t go to an amazing school. They didn’t build a rocketship startup. They would be the first to admit that they don’t really have any tangible skills.

Their secret is their system. They call it 5/25/150. The simplicity is incredible. But it blew me away when I heard about it.

They have a spreadsheet in Google Drive. It has three groups of people, organized based on the goals that are important to them and their business at that time. Each person is on a row, with their contact details and a notes field about their last conversation. (You can see an example here?—?feel free to make a copy.)

They live inside of that spreadsheet?—?literally their entire day. And this is what they do:

• The 5 people they think are most critical in accomplishing those goals, they contact multiple times per week.
• The next 25 people, they contact once per week.
• The next 150 they contact once per month.

Why Does This Work?

That might sound bananas. My first question was how you can possibly contact people that often without driving them crazy?

But remember?—?the best networkers are givers. What the system does is force you to be a giver, and to do so in an extremely consistent way.

For their 5 most important contacts, they seek to understand exactly what they would need to make huge headway in their own goals. And then they go out of their way to help them get there. As a result, they have a regular stream of updates on the activity they’re doing.

The 25 and 150 are similar, in progressively smaller orders of magnitude. Although the level of activity is less than the 5, it’s certainly much more than the typical person those 25 interact with.

Imagine having someone willing to go that far to help you out. For most of us, there is a natural desire to want to reciprocate. And while this totally backfires if your goal is to track the favors owed to you or default back into a transactional way of thinking, don’t be surprised if over time a whole world of opportunities begin to open up to you.

What It Takes

This requires a tremendous amount of empathy?—?you have to genuinely love helping other people.

It requires patience, and a willingness to avoid a transactional mentality. Many of those people don’t respond in kind?—?there’s probably nobody that is as lavish with their generosity as this person is.

And it requires intense discipline (that candidly even I lack). After every conversation, this person updates their notes and scans the notes of every other person on the spreadsheet, looking for ways to make meaningful connections. It’s the only way to be sure they can consistently help at scale.

A Single Spreadsheet Can Change Your Life.

Because of one spreadsheet, this person’s career has been a straight up rocketship. I believe the same would be true for anybody with the empathy, patience and discipline to implement it.

The post 5/25/150: The Secret of the Best Networker I Ever Met appeared first on Sean Johnson @intentionally.

My wife was showing me slides from a meeting she recently attended. I’m sure the material was great, but I didn’t read to find out. The slides literally made my eyes bleed.

Between my time as a partner at an early stage venture fund and a digital consulting company, I effectively live in Keynote. Creating proposals, reading pitch decks, making presentations.

Great slide-making is a tremendous skill to develop. It will make your internal presentations more persuasive. It will help you win more business or close that round of funding. It will accelerate your career.

You’ve no doubt seen gorgeous presentations at conferences and other events, but don’t know how to make them.

But you don’t need to know how to make those kinds of presentations for your day job. What you need are some simple tips for polishing up your decks. Making copy more readable. Making tables and charts more useful. Telling the story you’re trying to tell.

This deck is my attempt to help you with that.

I’d love to hear what you think?—?if you have other ideas for improving slides let me know. And if you found this useful, please recommend!

The post How ANYONE can make insanely better slides appeared first on Sean Johnson @intentionally.

After three months of doing it herself, my wife dragged me into a CrossFit gym.

For most of our marriage, I’ve worked out pretty consistently once or twice per week, mostly lifting weights, and I’d routinely leave the gym feeling pretty good. I thought I knew what working out meant.

CrossFit taught me I had no clue what a hard workout was supposed to feel like.

The first session is the worst. It’s like getting hit by a truck. Your body is telling you it’s literally about to die. It’s not even remotely fun.

The workouts don’t get any easier. But you at least know what to expect going forward. You also find yourself slowly making progress. Two weeks in they had me repeat the workout from the beginning, and I found I’d shaved 30 seconds off my time. I still sucked, but it felt good.

Most importantly, I’ve learned that my body, even in its current pear-shaped form, is capable of far more than I thought. When you see the number of reps that await you – 200 push-ups or 100 burpees or whatever – you don’t think you can possibly do it. But you push through. And even if your time on the whiteboard is worse than everyone else’s (which mine consistently is), you have a feeling of satisfaction.

You now know what a hard workout feels like. And you have the satisfaction of knowing you put in your work that day.

Most people don’t know what hard work is.

I think most people don’t know what hard work is when it comes to their professional life.

There is a group of people who don’t know and don’t care. They believe their job is a necessary evil, and the best approach is to keep your head down and do just enough to avoid getting fired. Thankfully this isn’t the majority, and they usually get found out pretty quickly.

The problem is the second group, which I believe is the majority of us. This group cares about their job, and truly wants to do well. They show up every day, and believe they really are doing their best. When their bosses get frustrated with them for not doing more, they don’t understand it. They’re working as hard as they can.

Or so they think.

Why don’t they know?

Perhaps they don’t know because they’ve never been truly pushed. They’ve never had solid models to follow, like a family that drilled it into their head or a teacher who pushed them beyond the limits of what they thought was possible.

Perhaps it’s the nature of knowledge work. So much of it is sitting behind a computer, and if you’re not making clear deliverables like mock-ups or code or phone calls, it can be difficult to recognize who’s really hustling and who’s just screwing around.

Perhaps it’s because their peers don’t know either. Most of the people they’re surrounded by are as clueless as they are. In a typical office, there might be one or two people who truly know what hard work feels like and do it consistently.

Regardless of the reason, the effects are terrible.

Not knowing is why you might not love what you do.

Many people have been taught to pursue something they’re passionate about. They take a job, don’t like it that much, jump to a new one, and repeat.

There is a growing body of evidence that they don’t like their job because they aren’t good at it, and that passion comes from having mastery, not the other way around.

And the path to mastery is hard work.

Social scientists call it “deliberate practice”. While most people’s days consist of what Cal Newport calls “shallow work”, the people who love their work instead pursue deep work, work that requires intense bouts of concentration. That concentration leads to much more rapid progress, which leads to mastery, which leads to passion.

Not knowing how to work hard and deep makes it less likely you find the thing you’re passionate about.

Not knowing is why you might not be moving up the ladder.

My first job in New York was at a startup that had tons of turnover. This was because most people didn’t get promoted and didn’t get raises very often.

But some people did.

There were 5 or 6 people who got promoted rapidly and received generous raises in very short periods of time. Not surprisingly all of those people stuck around. And those people were instrumental in helping the company eventually sell.

Those people came from different backgrounds and had different personalities and skills. What they had in common though was an understanding of what hard work looks like. There were developers and designers who had 10x the impact of their peers. There was a sales guy who consistently outsold everyone else on the team by orders of magnitude.

Many people in the company saw those folks rise up, got frustrated and left. What they might not have done is ask themselves honestly what the founders saw in those people.

If you’re in a company that doesn’t have strict hierarchies and timelines for advancement and are watching other people who are younger or joined later vault ahead of you in the pecking order, it might be worthwhile to ask yourself why.

While there certainly might be unconscious (or conscious) biases driving some of these decisions, those are largely out of your control. Is there anything you personally can do to change the situation? It’s’ worth reflecting on this. Honestly.

Not knowing might be why you’re not as happy as you could be.

The phrase “workaholic” implies that it’s an addiction. And while I’m a huge believer in balance (having been through the startup meat grinder and with two small kids, I’m about as big an advocate for shutting things down and being present as you’ll find), I understand why they feel that way.

Just like a hard workout releases endorphins and makes you feel good, I think workaholics do so partially because they love how it makes them feel.

Watch an episode of Gary Vaynerchuk’s DailyVee series. He works 14 hour days because he has huge ambitious goals (like owning the Jets) and knows that working longer is one way to make that happen. But he also works that long because he loves it. You don’t get the impression that he cares about the money at all. He cares about the work itself.

Hard work doesn’t necessarily mean putting in long hours. You can spend 14 hours in the office and not get a single meaningful thing done.

But there is often a correlation between the people who work the most and the people who work the hardest – just like exercising.

Again, I don’t advocate 14 hour days. My team works 8. What I do advocate is bringing a higher level of intensity to those 8 hours.

I think your work day should feel kind of like a workout. You should be able to take the train home and feel like you gave it 100%. It makes it easier to connect with your family or read or crack open a beer and binge watch Westworld. Because you know you earned it.

How to Start Working Harder

Let’s assume you buy into this premise. How do you practically learn to do this?

1. Decide to start working harder.

The first step is simply to resolve to do it. Make a decision to show up on Monday and bring a higher level of intensity and focus. Like any character trait you’re trying to develop, you can’t wish your way there. You have to make the decision.

2. Prepare for discomfort.

Understand that working like this is very much like starting a new workout routine. In the beginning, it will feel uncomfortable. That’s to be expected.

Anticipate this, and come up with a strategy for dealing with it in advance. Tell yourself “when I get frustrated and want to quit, I will _______.” Your blank could take many forms – a reminder of some goal that your new focus will help you achieve, a reward you’ll treat yourself to at the end of the day, etc.

3. Measure your effectiveness and level of focus.

It’s almost impossible to improve your physical strength without tracking your workouts. Tracking tells you when you really pushed it and when you went through the motions. It also can help you stay motivated when you hit plateaus.

I suggest doing the same here. You can start tracking your level of focus on a scale of 1-10. Or you could get fancier and track your time, evaluating what % was spent on meaningful work. Once you have a baseline, you can set yourself goals for improvement.

4. Give yourself grace.

You will screw up. Every day. One of the secrets to success in life is learning to live comfortably in the gap between who you want to be and who you currently are. When you mess up, don’t beat yourself up. Dust yourself off, gently resolve to do better tomorrow.

5. Find a mentor who knows what hard work looks like.

There are people around you who already know what this looks like. People whose families were immigrants often know. Athletes who competed at the college level often know. People who spent years playing an instrument often know.

Find these people. Take them to breakfast. Ask them everything you can about how they go about their days, what drives them. Try to identify common patterns you can apply. Consider going one step forward and enlisting them as your personal coach to hold you accountable.

6. Build in renewal routines.

When I say you want to work with intensity, that does not mean non-stop. That is a recipe for burnout. When you exercise, you have periods of intense concentration and rest, both in between sets during your workout and between workout days.

Do the same – every 90 minutes or so, create a ritual that can help you recharge. Get away from your desk. Talk to some coworkers. Go for a walk. Grab a cup of fancy coffee from your favorite spot. Take a 15-minute power nap.

While this sounds indulgent, if you do it as a reward for 90 minutes of hard work I guarantee your days will be orders of magnitude more productive, even with the breaks.

It’s also important to build in routines in the evenings and weekends that recharge you. My wife and I have found that TV or movies at night don’t give us more energy or life – they usually drain it. After a hard day, ending on a stressful note is not helpful. Our routines involve cooking (which we love), reading with our kids, stretching, spending time in prayer or meditation, taking a bath, enjoying each other’s company.

7. Order your tasks from most to least important.

For most people, their willpower dwindles throughout the day. A good practice is to spend the first 90-minute block working intensely on your most important task. Each morning (or the night before) ask yourself which thing on your list would make the most impact. If you got nothing else done today, what one thing would make you feel like the day was still a success?

8. Identify your unproductive triggers.

Most of us have developed bad habits over the years that prevent us from truly focusing at work. For many, this involves things like constantly checking email or jumping into Facebook, launching an Internet death spiral you emerge from 30 minutes later. For others, it’s a constant need to get up and walk around.

There’s usually a triggering event that initiates patterns like this. Work hard to identify the trigger, and develop a strategy for dealing with it. This could involve installing software that blocks specific websites, or that turns off Internet access entirely. It could be applying strategies from meditation, gently noticing yourself when you get distracted, recognizing it and returning your focus. It could be more extreme, having a rubber band on your wrist and snapping yourself when you get up and break your concentration.

These patterns are not facts of life – they are simply habits, and they can be broken.

9. Create a motivating positive triggering routine.

On the other side, you can deliberately design triggers to tell your brain to engage in your positive routines.

This could involve lighting a candle by your desk. Making a cup of tea. Putting on a specific Spotify channel. Having an inspiring YouTube video queued up. Viewing your overarching goals one more time and reminding yourself why you’re about to start working. Try different approaches and see what works.

10. Set quantifiable goals.

If you don’t know where you’re going it can be hard to drum up the motivation to do this. Set measurable goals so you can monitor how you’re doing. Progress can be motivating.

If you have a collaborative goal setting process with your boss, set stretch goals for yourself that you know will require hard work to achieve. If your company doesn’t set goals for you, don’t use it as an excuse – make them yourself.

11. Find an accountability partner or group.

Many people have experienced the wisdom of having a gym buddy or coach to hold them accountable. Do the same with your work.

Seek out people who you think these ideas would resonate with. Send them this article. Ask to start a group that checks in on each other each day or week. Report on your intensity level, again on a scale of 1-10. This doesn’t have to be formal – a simple group text thread is sufficient.

Start working harder today.

Work should not be your entire life. But for the time you spend at work, you should put everything you have into it. If you do, I’m convinced you’ll enjoy your job more. You’ll likely get promoted. You’ll develop a skill that will likely translate into other areas of your life. And I’m guessing you’ll find yourself surprisingly happier overall.

The post You’re Not Working As Hard as You Can appeared first on Sean Johnson @intentionally.

In the startup world you often hear about the One Metric That Matters, or OMTM. It’s the one metric that defines the health of your business at its given stage, and the metric your team chooses to focus on above all others.

It serves as a rallying cry for the team. Companies are overflowing with data and can quickly become paralyzed by it.

The OMTM gives your team focus. It helps drown out the noise and work on what really matters.

I wonder if a similar approach would help us in our personal lives.

—

Donald Miller tells a story about a funeral he went to. So many people wanted to attend the funeral they had to move it to the town’s baseball field. Nearly a thousand people gathered to pay their respects.

But the guy wasn’t famous. He hadn’t built a company or been on television or cured a disease. He never wrote a book. He didn’t even have a website. He lived in a small town in Texas, and nobody’s ever heard of him.

But he invested in people’s lives. He really got to know them. Spent time learning what made them tick. Helped them however he could. Cheered them on when they won, picked them up when they lost, pushed them when they needed pushing, hugged them when they needed lifting up.

His life didn’t scale. He didn’t think in terms of reaching millions of people or changing the world. He did it one person at a time.

Most likely, he didn’t think about what he was doing as anything remarkable. It was just how he was wired. As Miller says, he didn’t want the spotlight. He WAS a spotlight, shining on everyone else, letting them know the best version of themselves.

—

I was at a wedding this weekend for a friend we’ve known since we moved to Chicago. She and the groom both have small families. But their wedding had over 300 people attend, almost all friends she’s made in the last 5 years.

It’s not because she’s important, or part of the entrepreneurial or city life scene. She’s a hairdresser. But she pours herself out for other people.

She routinely calls us up and says she’ll be in our neighborhood and wants us to go out on a date. She volunteers to dogsit for people on their vacations. She helps people move. She volunteers with homeless organizations and gets to know the people – there were 5 formerly homeless people at the wedding.

A tiny white girl, she moved on her own into a predominantly African American neighborhood widely considered one of the most dangerous in the country, because she wanted to play a part in racial reconciliation. She got to know people. She’d go over to their houses after work and help their kids with homework. She’d make dinner and help out so a mom could go to her second job. Her and her husband are working on building an eco house in the same neighborhood that would let people live there rent free.

The people at the wedding weren’t there because she’s famous or important. The wedding wasn’t elaborate – the reception was in a basement of a community center with no AC and there were almost no decorations.

But when the minister said he could kiss the bride the cheers were the loudest of any wedding I’ve ever been to. When the sound cut off on the PA during the mother father dance, 300 people started singing the words so they could keep dancing.

Every single person there loved her. They loved her because she changed their lives one at a time.

—

The world I inhabit is full of people trying to make something of themselves. And many of us, if we’re honest, measure our lives using things like our income, or the amount of equity we have, or the square footage of our houses, or how many countries we’ve been to, or the number of followers we have on social media.

And deep down we know, as great as those things may be, they aren’t going to be what makes us happy long term. But we do it anyway, because we don’t know what else to use.

I took a course by Michael Gerber a long time ago, and he asked you to imagine you’re in a room, and it’s your funeral. And a recording comes on, and it’s your voice. And you’re telling the crowd about your life. At the end, he asks what you want that recording to say.

But what if you flipped that on it’s head. What if instead of a room you imagined a baseball field. And instead of a recording of you, there’s a microphone in the middle for others.

How many people would be there?

Would it be a couple dozen people? Would you fill the place up?

What sort of role do you have play in someone’s life for them to take a day off from work and attend? What if they live on the other side of the country – would they drop what they’re doing and fly across the world to be there?

What would the people in attendance say into the microphone? What kind of stories would they tell? How long would it take?

Would their stories be about the multiple you got on the business you sold? Would it be on the appreciation on your house, or on how many retweets you got?

Thinking about your funeral might sound morbid, but I think it’s a good way to get clarity on your priorities. I think the number of people there would make a great OMTM for your personal life.

One of the reasons people talk about exits in their companies is because it’s how they keep score. It’s how they know whether they accomplished their goal, and to what degree their business created value for people.

Wouldn’t the number of people attending your funeral be a good litmus test for how you lived your life?

Of course you’d never know the actual answer, because you’d already be gone. But you could probably make a guess and be reasonably accurate.

If you wanted to double that number, or 10x that number, what would you have to do differently?

What would it take to fill up a baseball field with people who love you because of the impact you made in their lives?

What would change if you made that your OMTM?

The post The One Metric That Matters In Life appeared first on Sean Johnson @intentionally.

I was in a meeting a few weeks ago, and Apple watch came up. Without thinking I blurted out something I never thought I’d hear myself saying.

“I don’t get the Apple watch.”

As the words left my mouth, I immediately realized my error. I apologized to the team, and told them I never want to hear that from anyone in our office.

The error has nothing to do with the Apple Watch specifically. It’s fine if you or I never become an Apple Watch user. But the error is in refusing to explore it.

I’m terrified of phrases like that infecting our company. If phrases like that become the norm, our company would die. If that kind of thinking became pervasive in my life, I’d be finished.

If you find yourself saying things like that regularly, odds are your career isn’t taking off the way it should.

Creativity Comes From Curiosity

Being innovative is largely a function of having a wide antenna?—?being curious, trying new things, working hard to understand them.

Creativity at it’s core is often nothing more than combining multiple disparate ideas in a new way. It follows that in order to be creative you have to have a lot of inputs.

Dismissing a new technology, refusing to kick the tires of a new product, or choosing not to read about new ideas drastically limits your creative potential, your ability to find those unique connections, your ability to leverage insights from other products or industries to solve a problem you’re currently tackling.

Great Ideas Usually Look Stupid Early On

People are notoriously bad at predicting success. Many of the best startups looked like stupid ideas initially. AirBnb was completely ignored in the beginning. Snapchat was laughed at by non-millenials.

Just because an idea seems stupid to you doesn’t mean it’s stupid to everyone. There’s often a group of people who will find the new idea is the answer to a huge problem of theirs. They become the products early evangelists, helping improve the product, telling everyone they know about it, helping increasingly larger groups of people to become acclimated to the new idea.

Ideas that look silly but are given the opportunity to germinate often become transformative, and sometimes even feel obvious in hindsight. Be careful about writing them off too quickly.

Huge Competitive Advantage Comes From Early Distribution Opportunities

The other argument for trying things relates to distribution. There are huge opportunities to leverage platforms and products if you can figure them out before everyone else.

Andrew Chen talks about the “Law of Shitty Clickthroughs”. A new channel or platform emerges, some smart curious people deconstruct it and figure out how to leverage it to their advantage, and reap tremendous results. Other companies notice, jump in, take advantage, an saturate the platform. Over time, the effectiveness of the platform decreases.

If you aren’t curious and willing to invest some time trying things, the likelihood you’ll identify these opportunities is very low.

Create a Kick The Tires Habit

As an partner of a fund that plays an active role in its investments, it’s even more important for me to have a wide antenna. So I’ve tried to bake it into my life in a more systematic way.

One of the habits I’ve developed is to spend 1 hour a week trying new products. Product Hunt is my primary source for this and it’s organizational structure is perfect for a weekly batched task like this.

Any app that lands at the top of the stack for the day deserves a look, regardless of how silly it seems or how much you understand it. There’s plenty you can learn by doing this:

• Do they communicate their value proposition in a unique way?
• Are they doing anything clever with your marketing? With landing pages? With their social strategy?
• Any clever approaches to onboarding? How effective are they at getting you to the aha moment?
• Do they deliver their core experience in a unique way?
• Do they do anything interesting over the weeks following to try to keep you engaged?
• Do they have novel approaches to driving referral?
• If they have a revenue model, how do they try to monetize?
• This hour a week has proven invaluable as we look for ways to help our fund companies get better at what they do.

Don’t Make Statements – Ask Questions

The other thing I try to do is replace statements with questions. Whenever you catch yourself making a statement, particularly one pronouncing judgment or an opinion of a product, try to reframe it as a question instead.

• Rather than saying “I’d never use this”, ask yourself “Who would use this?”
• Instead of saying “There’s no way this gets as many users as X”, ask yourself “How many people would love this?”
• Instead of saying “This will never work”, ask yourself “How could they make this work?”
• Instead of saying “This seems stupid”, ask yourself “Is there an opportunity here I’m not thinking of?”

It doesn’t matter what you think

It’s natural to use your own life as the litmus test for determining what you think of a product. But you have a limited point of view, and without stepping outside of yourself you short circuit your opportunities for learning.

Try hard to cultivate a bigger antenna. Try new things. Explore new ideas. Dig into them and really kick the tires. And ignore the question of whether you’d use the product yourself, instead asking why other people would.

The post The Day You Stop Being Curious Is The Day Your Career Dies appeared first on Sean Johnson @intentionally.