<aside> đź’ˇ from "Read Something Great"

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Work on what matters.

Highlights

If you’re thinking about developing yourself to succeed as your current role grows in complexity or across multiple organizations, then it’s far more important to strike a balance between valued work and self-growth.

This is also an important factor to consider when choosing a company to work at! Dig into what a company values and ensure it aligns with your intended personal growth. If a company’s leadership is entirely folks who focus their energy on performant urgency or acts of fealty, don’t be surprised when your success in the company depends on those activities.

Worse, to be a successful preener requires near invulnerability to criticism of your actual impact, and your true work will suffer if your energy is diverted to preening. Typically this means you need to be a vanity hire of a senior leader or to present yourself in the way a company believes leaders look and act. If that isn’t you, then your attempt to exchange your good judgment for company success will end up failing anyway: you’ll get held accountable for the lack of true impact where others who match the company’s expectation of how a leader appears will somehow slip upward.

why it all matters....

If you’re interviewing for a new role twenty years into your career, the folks interviewing you won’t know what your real impact was on any given project you worked on, nor will they know your true contribution to any of the companies you worked at. Instead you’ll find yourself judged by a series of surprisingly subjective measures: your prestige, the prestige of the titles you’ve had and companies you’ve worked at, your backchannel reputation, and how you present in your interview process. If you spend your career snacking, preening or chasing ghosts, it’s possible but relatively unlikely that what you’ve done before will be valued at companies you interview with. Instead, the only viable long-term bet on your career is to do work that matters, work that develops your and to steer towards companies that value genuine expertise.