In an ordinary year, yes.

But these days, you’re most likely to spend your time on the beach rather than doing any of the above.

I’m borrowing this term from the management consulting lexicon, but it applies equally well to bankers and anyone else in business: simply put, on the beach time is when you don’t have any real work, deals, or clients, and you’re watching YouTube all day out of boredom.

This is a big problem if you want to leverage your experience to move elsewhere – or if you just want to get a full-time offer in the first place.

So, what should you do when you’re on the beach?

Economic Conditions?

First, note that this problem is not just limited to recessions. Even when the economy is better and deals are actually happening, you still have a lot of downtime (more so in banking than in consulting). Just look at how little I did on Thursday a few years ago.

But when there’s actual work, you usually just want to rest during your downtime – which is perfectly fine.

Got Training?

Ask your Associate or VP what to do when you have some downtime, and he’ll probably say, “Go through your training materials or look at a model and try to learn something new.”

That seems to be the conventional wisdom, and it makes sense at first: if you have some “on the beach” time, why not take the chance to improve your skills?

But there are 3 distinct problems with spending your free time primarily on self-education:

1. It’s not likely to stick unless you learn it under pressure. “Stress is the fertilizer of creativity learning.”
2. None of this self-education will make a strong impression when you write about it on your resume, and it’s not good to discuss in interviews.
3. Your time is better spent elsewhere.

Training Day… Sometimes

This is not to say that you should never learn anything on your own. It just means that you shouldn’t focus on learning advanced/obscure accounting or modeling topics, because that knowledge won’t give you much of an advantage in recruiting.

If you do want to spend some time doing it, you should focus on specific, easy-to-describe tasks that you can bring up on your resume or in interviews.

How not to do it: Spend all your free time browsing random models built by other Analysts in an attempt to find that one secret, super-ninja LBO modeling tip that will ensure that you get an offer at KKR (yeah right).

How to do it: Take 30 minutes of your free time each day and build a standalone operating model for a specific company (ideally, a former, current, or prospective client), basing it on other models at your firm.

Notice the key difference here: in method #2, you’re actually doing something and will therefore learn it more effectively (this is one reason why I designed Breaking Into Wall Street to ensure that you would actually build models yourself as you watch the videos) – and you could even list it on your resume as a quasi-”deal.”

Face Time… Right?

Another common myth is that as an intern or new full-time Analyst/Associate, you should never go home “early” (i.e. before midnight).

After all, you have to pay your dues, right? Leaving before everyone else is unacceptable, even if you have absolutely nothing to do, right?

False.

You have to be intelligent about this one – don’t think that leaving at 5 PM every day is OK, either. When you first start, there certainly is an element of face time and you shouldn’t be the first one to leave every day.

However, if it’s 10 PM and you’ve already asked all the Analysts if they have any work for you and everyone says, “No, nothing that you can help with, go home” then you should take their advice and go home. Staying until 2 AM playing Windows Solitaire will not help you at all.

At first you should scope out your group, and stay as late as everyone else –  but once you learn how things work, you can afford to be more lax.

You should always ask your team and the others in your office if you can help with anything before you take off – but if it’s 10 PM and no one has anything, just go home.

So, What to Do?

Ok, so we’ve been over what not to do when you’re on the beach: spend time learning random models and staying late for no reason.

Here’s what to do when you’re on the beach:

1. Try to find work by being proactive and jumping on projects early.
2. Meet as many different people as possible and especially overlooked people – network, network, network, network…
3. Help out with other areas outside Excel/PowerPoint/running errands (hint: recruiting is huge).

Proactivity

Even when your office is seemingly dead, chances are that deals will come in occasionally… even if you haven’t seen any lately.

“Being proactive” means being the first person to jump on news of any potential deal, client, or even an upcoming pitch (since that could lead to a client in the future): don’t just wait to get staffed on projects.

Don’t go around asking people you don’t know about potential upcoming work: it looks weird. Instead, get to know them first, and then use your relationship to extract the relevant info… if they know who you are and you check with them occasionally on new projects, they’re much more likely to go to you first.

But If There’s No Work, There’s No Work

The only problem with being proactive is that you’re unlikely to go from 12-Hour Solitaire Days to 16-Hour Modeling Days in the span of 10 weeks, or even a few months.

So the best strategy for your “on the beach” time is to get to know as many different people at your office as you can.

This is in contrast to what summer interns who are relatively “busy” should be doing: if you actually have work, focus more on getting to know your own team very well.

But if you’re spending most of your time on YouTube, you should get to know as many different people as possible, which will not only help you with getting a return offer or a recommendation, but will also improve your chances of getting work if something comes up.

Ninja Networking Tactics

For a simple but highly effective way of meeting others in your office, try to go to lunch or coffee with 1 new person each day.

If the person is relatively junior (Analyst/Associate), go ahead and set it up yourself – if it’s someone more senior, you may be better off going through his/her assistant instead to actually set up and confirm the appointment (after running it by him/her briefly).

When you get to the end of your “new people” list, start meeting with people again or at least casually chatting with them (no need for formalities).

Your purpose in each of these meetings is simple: make sure they know who you are, and come across as an actual person rather than an Excel monkey.

Yes, you are just an Excel monkey – but senior bankers like to pretend that they like all their junior people as people.

It goes back to the themes we hit on when discussing informational interviews, following up, and even investment banking interviews themselves: set yourself apart by finding what’s unique about your own background and giving them something to remember.

The Overlooked

One of the most overlooked networking strategies is to befriend the overlooked – assistants, production, graphics, the IT people, etc.

This is extremely important because your own fate often rests in their hands – when you have 5 minutes until your MD leaves for the airport and you need page 157 swapped in all 25 copies of your pitch book, you better hope you have some friends in the production department.

Bankers tend to ignore these people or disrespect them – but that’s the wrong strategy.

Yes, getting to know the MDs will help you with getting a return offer, but befriending the overlooked will also help you with getting a return offer or a recommendation – because you won’t look like an idiot when your computer breaks, when you need a rush graphics job done, or when you need pitch books ASAP.

Volunteering to Help in Other Areas

Another commonly overlooked fact: at a bank you do a lot more than Excel, PowerPoint, and research. You help out with recruiting; you sometimes create training materials for interns; and you sometimes help with “internal planning.”

I’m not talking about the back office here, either: even in pure front office roles you do this because someone has to do it, and you’re lowest on the totem pole.

Helping out with these projects is unlikely to help you directly in the short-term (no, you won’t get a higher bonus for “selling” a recruit on accepting his offer), but they can give you many indirect benefits:

1. Helping with recruiting gives you more contacts and lets you meet different people across your own firm and on campuses.
2. If you work on internal materials like training programs you’re likely to learn the concepts much better yourself. Teaching requires a significantly higher level of understanding than copying someone else’s model.
3. Even if “company-wide planning” sounds like grunt work (it is), it puts you in contact with lots of senior people – and it’s always good to be on their radar.

On the Beach Full-Time?

Much of this advice assumes you are an intern who can’t find enough work to do – which is actually quite common, even in boom times.

If you’re a full-timer and you’ve been working for months without doing anything substantial, you may need to consider “strategic alternatives” – like leaving your group, moving to another office, or leaving your company/industry completely.

For the first 2 options (moving to a different group or different office), you need a strong relationship with at least 1 person in the place you want to move to (someone to “go to bat” for you).

These moves are quite tough to pull off, but can work well assuming that you’ve done your research beforehand and you know that your new destination has real activity.

The last option – leaving your company or industry altogether – should not be taken lightly and you should only do it if you’ve realized that finance/business is not for you, there’s something else that you’d much rather be doing, and you already have a clear path to get there.

Tanning Guidelines

When you’re on the beach, the worst strategy is to sit there in your cubicle playing Solitaire or watching YouTube.

But the second worst idea is to waste time on things that won’t make a difference, like browsing random Excel files or staying until 3 AM for “face time” purposes.

Get out of your cubicle, go meet people (both above and below you), be proactive, and think of other ways you can contribute.

Or at the very least, head to the tanning salon and take advantage of your free time to get a decent tan – because you won’t be seeing a real beach anytime soon.

Rather than writing a giant Q&A on all these topics, I’m going to give you a resume/CV template that you can just copy and modify for your own experiences.

You might be thinking, “Wait a minute, if you do this, won’t everyone start using it? Won’t my resume look the same as everyone else’s?”

The short answer is “No” – and to find out why, get the full template, and see the video tutorial, read on…

But I’ll Have the Same Resume as Everyone Else!

I expect that around 10,000 people will see this article in its first week of publication. It’s a bit depressing, but of those 10,000:

• Only around 1,000 will actually read this entire article.
• Only 100 will download the template and think about using it “some point.”
• Of those 100, 90 will forget they downloaded it and only 10 will actually use it for their own resume.

Even if someone gives you all the answers, only 0.1% will actually take advantage of it (this goes back to a consistent theme on M&I: don’t overestimate the competition).

And if you are worried, just change around the fonts, margins, or other formatting.

Ok, let’s get on with the template and video now…

• University Student Investment Banking Resume Template – DOC
• University Student Investment Banking Resume Template – PDF

Note: You should always submit your resume in PDF format unless they tell you otherwise.

Here’s the tutorial video (if you’re reading this via email, you’ll have to click through to view this article):

• View Large Version (strongly recommended)
• Download the MP3

For those of you who don’t like to watch or who can’t watch, here it is in text:

Overall

Notice how this is very compact – investment bankers only spend 30 seconds reading your resume, so you want to hit on the key points rather than overloading them with irrelevant information.

Avoid 0.25″ margins and size 8 font unless you absolutely can’t fit everything – try to use 0.5″ margins at a minimum and preferably at least 0.75″ (like you see here).

Decreasing the font size is better than decreasing the margins if you need to fit more information on the page – but again, you should make sure everything you include is both necessary and useful.

We have 4 main sections: the Header, Education, Work & Leadership Experience and Skills, Activities & Interests.

All the entries are right-aligned for the dates and locations – to do that, you go into “Styles” in Word and create a New Style with right-aligned tabs (just watch the video to see how to do this, it’s really hard to explain in text).

1 Page Only, Please (With Some Exceptions…)

Before anyone mentions it – yes, I know Australia is an exception to this rule and resumes there often go on for 2-3 pages even for entry-level positions.

For the rest of the world, however, it’s a much safer bet to stick to 1 page unless you are applying to Managing Director-level positions (and if you’re reading this website, that’s not you).

Header

Center the header, make sure your name is in bigger font than the rest (so they remember who you are), and write your address, phone number and email address right below that.

There’s not much more to it than that – keep it short, don’t include stars or symbols, and please, keep photos of your pet rabbit off your resume (I’ve seen all of the above before…).

There are some regions where it’s acceptable to include your own photo here, so go ahead and do that if it’s common practice.

Note: Never include your picture on your resume in the US, even if one of your “interests” is “professional modeling.”

Education Section

If you’re still in university, this should always be at the top – I can’t think of a good reason why it would be anywhere else.

The key points: where you go to school, what your major is, graduation date, and GPA/SAT score.  Honors, Relevant Coursework, and Research are actually all optional, but they’re good to include if you have something business/finance-related to write about.

You absolutely need to include your GPA, even if it’s “bad” (below 3.5) – otherwise they will think it’s “really bad” (below 2.0). SAT scores are more optional, but I would leave them in if they’re over 1400 in the old system or over 2100 in the new system.

If you’re outside the US, you would write your grades in your own system here – in the UK, for example, you might write “Earned 2.1 cumulative average.” Class rank is also fine if you don’t receive official “grades.”

If your GPA is poor then you can “hide” it by also listing:

• Major GPA
• 2nd/3rd Year GPA (this is more of a stretch and only works if you can show a strong improvement trend)

You can also list study abroad or summer program experiences here – these should be included as separate education entries if you have the space.

Don’t include high school unless you just got to college and have no real experience yet – or unless you went to a top school with a lot of alumni in finance (Andover / Exeter in the US).

Don’t include clubs, activities, or certifications here – those should be in one of the 2 sections below this instead.

Work & Leadership Experience – The Rule of 3?

You should aim for between 2 and 4 major work experience entries. Don’t make a laundry list of all 27 different clubs you’ve been in, because there’s no way you had major accomplishments for all of them.

Think about what a banker reading your resume would want to know – here are a few examples:

• You had an internship at an asset management firm and then at a hedge fund – and you also started your own business fraternity. Each of these should be an entry, and you should devote most of your space to the internships.
• You worked at a boutique bank over the summer, and have spent 20 hours/week on a Varsity sport at school – these should be your major entries (yes, sports are fine to list under “Work & Leadership Experience” but in this case you definitely want to focus on the boutique bank).
• You were in 4 clubs at school and also had an internship at Goldman Sachs (in any group). DO NOT write about each of these as if they were equal – Goldman Sachs is exponentially more important than your clubs, so spend half your resume on GS, pick the 2 activities where you contributed most, and write a few lines about each of them.

Together or Separate?

You’ll notice I grouped “Work Experience” WITH “Leadership Experience” here – that’s because you probably have a few internships and also a few activities you spend a lot of time on. Grouping these together under one heading saves space and makes your activities seem more like “work experience.”

But let’s say you had 4 investment banking internships (summer and part-time) – in that case, I would probably just call this section “Work Experience” and focus on the 3 most recent ones.

If you’ve had absolutely no real internships or other work experience, you should still call this section “Work & Leadership Experience” to give the impression you did.

Structure of Each Entry

There’s this idea floating around that you should have 3 work experience entries, and then 3 bullets within each one of them – in principle this sounds reasonable, but in practice it can be difficult to include exactly 3 bullets for each entry.

The better way to approach this: decide on a Project-Centric or Task-Centric structure for each entry, and then write everything based around one of those.

In both cases, you start out with a Summary Sentence stating what you did and the major results of your work (if you know them).

For an investment banking internship, the Summary Sentence might be “Worked on 3 live deals and created valuations using public company comparables, precedent transactions, and DCF analysis; worked with clients to develop management presentations and Executive Summaries.”

For a marketing internship, the Summary Sentence might be “Worked with 2 major clients in media & entertainment industries and developed advertising campaigns to promote new seasons of top-rated network TV shows.”

Project-Centric

The Project-Centric structure starts off with the Summary Sentence and then goes into “Selected Project Experience” (or “Selected Client Experience” or “Selected Transaction Experience” or “Selected Investment Experience”).

Use the Project-Centric structure for:

• Investment banking/private equity/hedge fund experience
• Consulting (any kind)
• Anything else involving specific clients or companies – equity research, wealth management, law, accounting, etc.

Pick the 2 or 3 best projects (for internships, these will likely be the ones you did the most work on) and then give a single bullet or two describing what you did for each one (more on that below).

Listing just 1 project or client looks weird – but don’t list 8 different projects either, as you want to focus on the most relevant ones.

If you’re listing these for an investment banking internship, you should use titles such as:

• Pharmaceutical Company’s Potential $150 Million Acquisition of Biomedical Devices Company
• Technology Company’s $250 Million Initial Public Offering

For anything on the buy-side (PE, HF, VC), you might use:

• Potential $1 Billion Investment in Manufacturing Company

And for experience outside finance, you would use similarly descriptive titles and avoid naming specific companies unless whatever you worked on was announced to the public.

Task-Centric

The Task-Centric structure is not that much different – we still have a Summary Sentence at the beginning, but we separate the work by tasks and responsibilities rather than by specific projects or clients.

This format is best for part-time jobs (you worked as a sales rep at Radio Shack one summer – not your “part-time job” at Lazard), activities, and anything else outside finance – like research or engineering.

If you can re-position what you did to make it sound like specific projects then you should definitely do so – but if it’s a stretch, don’t bother.

Kevin said this doesn’t work as well for management consulting, but it definitely helps with finance because bankers look at it quickly and say, “Aha! It looks like they worked on deals!”

Ready, Fire, Aim: How to Properly Structure Your Bullets

Each bullet you write on your resume needs to do 2 things:

1. Say, specifically, what you did. Numbers are good, as is the proper lingo. “Valued client using DCF, liquidation analysis, and public company comparables” is better than “Valued companies.”
2. Give the results of what you did – and yes, I know that you don’t always have them. Numbers are good, but even something qualitative like “Resulted in private equity firm proceeding with additional due diligence” is better than nothing.

The order here doesn’t matter that much, so go with whatever sounds more natural – if you give the specifics first you should use a semicolon to separate it from the results.

If you go with the results first, you should use “by” to separate each part, as in “Supported senior bankers’ effort to negotiate 5% lower price for client by creating merger model to analyze best-case, average, and worst-case scenarios.”

If you have an extremely lengthy description, then it’s fine to include the specifics all on one line and then make a separate line for the results.

Skills, Activities & Interests

Surprisingly, this is the one section where you see the greatest number of mistakes and outright silly writing. Let’s start with the list of common mistakes:

• Leaving it out entirely (only do this if you’re much older).
• Going on for too long (10+ lines).
• Failing to list useful/interesting Skills, like Language abilities, and instead listing every single club you were in since age 5.
• “Fluent in English” – Except your resume is already in English, so I’d be really concerned if you didn’t know the language…
• “Proficient in Microsoft Office/Excel” – This might have been impressive in 1992. Not so much today.

Keep this section simple and list any language proficiencies first, followed by technical skills (real ones, like programming languages), and then you can list your financial modeling/CFA courses next, followed by a line or two on more minor Activities, and then your Interests at the end.

This is a more subtle point, but when you’re picking your Interests try to list interesting Interests. Don’t just write “Running” – write that you “Competed in marathons in 13 countries across Europe and North America.”

Even though this isn’t “work experience,” the same strategies hold true – be specific, focus on what’s memorable, and try to go in-depth with only a few areas rather than giving a laundry list with minimal details.

Coming Up Next

This is just a template, and it’s just for university students. Future articles in this series will cover templates for MBAs, people who are already working, and then we’ll get into sample resumes you can use for specific situations – like an investment banker applying for private equity positions.

If you’re going to work 100 hours per week, you need to be positive about what you do every day… right?

Wrong.

All you have to do is give the appearance of a good attitude – and here’s how you do that:

Wait, Really?

You might be able to maintain a genuinely good attitude throughout your 2, 3, or however many years you’re in the industry.

But in many cases, you just can’t do that:

1. You get stuck in a terrible group, or your group changes and your life goes down the drain.
2. You find an exit opportunity and are planning to leave early, or you simply stop caring because you know something better is down the road.
3. You get tired of what you do and the job becomes repetitive – but you need to stick around until you find what to do next.

#1 and #3 are the most common scenarios and the most desperate situations because you don’t have a backup plan – whereas with #2, at least you can move to another job if you get fired.

#3 is especially common between Year 1 and Year 2 if you’re an investment banking analyst – that’s when most people get tired of the routine and all deals start to look the same.

Appearances vs. Reality

Senior bankers say “a good attitude” is essential because they are interested in maximizing profit and minimizing annoyances and problems.

“A good attitude” just means “1) This guy/girl gets his/her stuff done without mistakes, which helps me make more money, and 2) he/she doesn’t bother me at all and is usually pretty sociable if I go over to the bullpen to talk to him/her.”

Oddly enough, young bankers have the most trouble with the second part of that statement – winning friends and influencing people.

Here’s how you can buck the trend and succeed where others fail:

First Impressions

The most important point with the game of office politics is your first impression.

If you pull this off correctly, you’ll only have to work hard for a month or so – enough to give everyone the impression that you’re a hard worker.

A poor first impression is almost impossible to overcome, but a good first impression is very difficult to screw up.

In your first few weeks (or first 1-2 months if you’re a full-timer), you want to volunteer as much as you can for projects, helping the older Analysts, and making other peoples’ lives easier.

Even if it causes some temporary pain, it will allow you to slack off later on – and on top of that, it also gives others at your bank the impression that you’re always busy.

Working Smart vs. Working Hard

This is one area where MBAs tend to be far savvier than undergraduates – and one area where I’ve seen many Analysts who didn’t know any better get abused.

You could make people think you work hard by actually working hard the entire time, pulling all-nighters each week, and trying to make your life as terrible as humanly possible.

Or you could just make people think you work that hard without actually doing so.

If you want to work smart rather than work hard, you need to use 3 main strategies: learn to act, under-promise and over-deliver, and let everyone know about it.

Acting 101

If you constantly look stressed out and tired, then other banker swill assume you’re always stressed out and tired.

If you’re like this naturally, you’ll have no difficulty here: just be yourself.

For everyone else, pay attention to the full-timers around you, determine who The Star and The Defeated One are in your office, and try to make your attitude a cross between the two of them: you want to look tense at all times, but you don’t want to be quite as depressing as The Defeated One.

But don’t become The Star – or your progression toward not trying hard would be halted.

Under-Promise and Over-Deliver

Once you have everyone thinking that you’re working 24/7, you need to take advantage of the fact that you’re not really that busy and under-promise and over-deliver.

The worst response to new work is, “I’ll get this to you right away!” and then to drop everything you’re doing to rush around and finish it – especially for anything that’s not urgent.

The better response is, “I have these 3-5 other projects due tomorrow and the day after – I’ll take care of this as soon as I can.”

After which, of course, you proceed to deliver the work tomorrow or the day after in a shorter timeframe than you originally promised.

Let Them Know About It

Once you’ve made sure that you always appear stressed out, but miraculously come through in record time with your work, you need to let the senior bankers know about it.

You can’t be too obvious – don’t go around saying, “Well, I just pulled 2 all-nighters this past week…”

The best way to do this is with late-night emails. If you’re about to email your team at 8 PM, save it until 3-4 AM instead so that they say, “Wow, he/she must have been at the office really late!”

If you get home “early” (9-10 PM), then log in remotely later on (caution: some banks don’t let you do this) and send out your emails right before you go to sleep.

Two points to be careful of here:

1. You need to mix up your routine every so often – don’t always send out your “team update” email at 3:15 AM. Vary the email send times between “early” (9 – 11 PM range) and “late” (2 – 4 AM).
2. This is more difficult to pull off at larger banks and offices, because some senior bankers actually stay quite late and can observe who’s there and who’s not. And sometimes if the staffer has no life, he/she will walk around at midnight to see who’s still there.

And that’s how you work smart so that you don’t have to work (as) hard.

Gravitating to the Right People

Once you’ve made everyone think you work hard all the time, you need to make sure you’re working with people who don’t take the job that seriously.

If you’re an Analyst, gravitate to the softest-spoken Associate(s), and if you’re an Associate, find the VP who’s most disillusioned and therefore cares the least about work.

This takes some trial and error, and that’s why you need to observe what’s going on around you and get to know full-timers who will give you the real story on who’s good and who should be avoided.

There’s no single rule for “the best people,” but here are a couple types you should definitely avoid:

1. Former consultants. Since consultants don’t actually do anything useful, they spend all their time in investment banking solving problems that don’t exist and making you do unnecessary work.
2. Summer Associates who have never worked in finance before. I’m sure all the Summer Associates reading this right now are wonderful, but most of the other ones I’ve seen tend to come in with a “I know everything because I paid $100,000+ for a prestigious MBA program” attitude.
3. Anyone who’s 35+, doesn’t have a family, and has been in banking for life. These people are like miniature versions of Patrick Bateman, so avoid them unless you want to end up hacked to pieces in someone’s bathtub.

Winning Friends

Once you’ve given the impression that you work hard all the time and you’ve surrounded yourself with the right people, it’s time to make them like you even more.

The best way to do this is through small talk. When a senior banker gives you work, don’t just accept the assignment and scurry off to go do it – say “Ok, sounds good” and then take a few minutes to chat with him/her about a completely unrelated topic.

It doesn’t matter what it is – baseball, travel, the news, or the client’s clueless CFO are all fine.

The point is to bond with the senior banker in question by quickly chatting about a common interest, which accomplishes 2 objectives:

1. He already thinks you’re busy all the time and will be amazed that you could take a few minutes out of your all-nighters just to speak with him – he must be your favorite!
2. You reinforce how much you “like your work” because you’re saying, “You know, I’m really busy – but I enjoy doing this work so much that not only will I happily do it for you later on, I can even take a few minutes right now to chat because I’m going to like doing my work so much later tonight.”

Most people are 100% business-focused when speaking with senior bankers, but that’s exactly the wrong approach.

Why So Many Tricks?

You might be wondering, “Wait, why are you suggesting all this deception? Why do I need so many tricks? Isn’t honesty the best policy? What if I just work hard all the time?”

First off, being 100% honest is not the best policy – unless you want to be abused and work more than everyone else.

You could work hard all the time, but there are 3 good reasons to avoid this:

1. As with anything else, the learning curve in investment banking flattens out after about 6 months and you don’t learn much past that point.
2. If you’re constantly working at 100% capacity, you will never have time to find exit opportunities – or apply to business school, or do anything else outside work.
3. The marginal improvement you’d get in your bonus and/or recommendations from working at 110% capacity rather than at 70-80% capacity is not worth it (Would you want to work an extra 20 hours per week for a bonus that’s $10,000 higher? That’s about $10 per hour…).

You don’t have to follow the steps I recommended above. If you want to be The Star and you truly love to stare at Excel and PowerPoint every day, then feel free to work at 110% capacity.

For the rest of us, though, winning friends and influencing people by slacking off and pretending to work hard is a better bet.