Aug 5, 2026
Long range career advice. (Won't help you get a job tomorrow, this is a ~10-20 year thing)
You want to run two processes. Your main loop:
1. Knock on doors, many outside your league, and get yourself in a room with the most competent people who will have you.
2. Work your ass off to be reliably useful to them. Like, really, _really_ hard. However hard you think you're working to be reliably useful, work ten times harder. Also, be cheerful.
3. Every once in a while pop your head out and go to step 1.
Your background loop: look around for weird asymmetric opportunities. A startup to found/join, a project to hack on, an angel investment into a friend's company, whatever. When your heart sings, jump on it. (You will fail a lot but that's fine so long as you handle failure well, I'll cover that in another post)
In exchange for working really hard you get two things. First, knowledge/experience-- you learn a ton. Second, relationships-- ppl will remember how great it was to work with you. Knowledge and relationships with competent ppl create crazy asymmetric opportunities. You then jump on those. (There is a lot of twitter slop about compounding, well this is what career compounding looks like.)
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Now some failure modes. Do _not_ do this:
"I deserve much better than this company/role, I'm just going to begrudgingly collect a paycheck" --> first, you deserve what the market clears and that's that. Second, if you act this way you'll only hurt yourself. Your colleagues will remember you as a grouch and it will wreck the compounding loop. Third, it's a very unpleasant state to be in, and you should choose not to be in it.
"But I work at Home Depot, what's there to compound?" --> that's extremely shortsighted. Maybe you do a super good job helping a customer who then has an open spot and remembers you. Maybe your store manager becomes a regional manager and calls you. Maybe years down the line your quiet peer is looking for a partner to start their own store. Maybe none of this happens, but it doesn't matter because empirically ppl who try hard to be useful wherever they are tend to do great, and people who don't, don't. (Home Depot is a metaphor, obviously)
"I hate this place, I quit! And anyway they're a faceless corporation that will lay me off any time." --> don't do that. The company may be a faceless corporation, but your colleagues are not faceless. They bet on you, hopefully you did a great job, and now they depend on you. Leaving is never easy, but do it in a way that respects the trust ppl put in you.
"Everyone around me is an idiot, I hate this!" --> maybe they are, or maybe you're not ready and some day will discover you were wrong about this. In any case you can learn from everyone and everything. So do that and be useful, don't break the compounding loop because opportunities will surprise you and things are often not what they seem.
“_I_ should have been promoted not that other guy/why is my manager layering me, screw this!” --> every time that happened i eventually understood I deserved it, you probably do too. Don’t hold grudges, do your best to figure out how to learn from this and move on, it will make sense eventually.
P.S. it helps if you’re a little talented.