How to, mostly, guarantee success in your career

Over my career so far I have done a lot of different things. I've written code, designed PCBs and MRI machines, run Google ads, been out on the road doing sales and managed teams doing all of the above. Overall, regardless of the job at hand, I think I've found a few ways to ensure I do fairly well.

I've mostly worked for or started 'technology' companies of some description but in a wide range of fields. I've spent time on everything from hardware to software and marketing to sales. I've worked in academia and for other people. Regardless of setting or size, two things seem to be as close to universally true as things come.

First, become very good at learning new things quickly. Second, learn how to find problems and get comfortable leaning in to fix them.

If you can work out how to do these two things you're career is likely to be both successful and interesting. Both of these things are hard to learn well. Both of these things can be uncomfortable. That's the trade off here.

Learning how to learn

In 2012 I started a PhD in design and optimization of MRI gradient coils. I started this PhD right after finishing my undergraduate degree in engineering. I knew very little about MRIs, numerical simulation or computational electromagnetics when I signed up. Almost five years later, I became 'Dr Smith' and knew a lot about all of those things.

Lots of people ask me if I feel my PhD was 'worth it'. Sometimes this is because they're considering doing one themselves, other times it's because they look at what I do now and how different it is.

The thing I learned, more than anything specific about MRIs, was a set of skills on how to jump into a field I knew nothing about and become confident in it. More than that, I learned how to do that on my own with very little guidance or structure.

For that alone I think a PhD was worth doing. I also happened to love the work I did but that I see as a nice bonus.

That's not to say I couldn't learn things before then. I have always had a drive to understand how things work and just enough confidence to think I can understand them. What five years of independent research taught me was that with enough focus and time you can learn just about all that humanity knows about a given topic. Yes, that band gets very narrow the more you dig but being able to go from zero to one on a new skill is immensely valuable no matter what you're working on.

Perhaps its useful to think about what the opposite of this skill looks like. I have met a lot of people over the years that go through a 'learning phase' and then stop developing from that point. People find a niche they are comfortable in and stay there. They may find ways to become more efficient in that niche but they plateau. These folks tend to get stuck.

You might read all of this so far and think "well I am not really in a position to go and do a PhD Elliot, this is not very useful advice." That's very fair and honestly I wouldn't suggest that you do. While a PhD was the way I learned these things it's not the only path.

Broadly speaking you need the following things:

• The ability to work on things for a long time without giving up
• The ability to hold your work against some objective standard and iterate on it
• The ability to seek out the current best practices and enough skepticism to question why
• Either enough self confidence, discipline or naivety to stick with it during the time you know you are bad but haven't yet become good
• An acceptance that you are about to start a thing that you are going to be bad at

Books like Cal Newport's Deep Work can provide some structure here but there are plenty of roads to success. Depending on your situation this is likely going to mean that time in your day is going to be reserved for practicing something new.

Not everyone has that luxury but again, that's the trade off. I won't pretend you can read one blog post a day on a new topic and become an expert in a year. You need to put in the reps to get good at things. You also need to be realistic with yourself about what you are going to trade off in order to find the time. It might be sleep, time with hobbies, your lunch break or something else but nothing here comes for free.

The last thing I will say on this particular topic is that you do not learn from just reading things. You need to do the thing. You could read a thousand cook books and still be a terrible cook. You could read every blog post on hacker news about the latest and greatest way to build single page apps in React and still make terrible websites. Learning comes from burning toast and shipping crappy things knowing you're dedicated enough to making them better.

Finding and fixing problems

Learning things is all well and good but you need to learn the right things. Generally, you're going to take a few big bets in your career about what to be good at. That can be a pretty wide set of things but it can't be everything. You are going to be hired for a specific thing, that's step one and largely something you can find advice about elsewhere. What I think is often overlooked is what you can do once you're on the inside.

It should be obvious from the title of this section but people who know how to find and solve problems that are impactful to the business tend to do well. They also tend to be great people to work with. Importantly, you need to do this strategically.

In any given business there are going to be a lot of problems. They range from the very small (some link on our internal docs is broken) to the very large (we're selling to a market that is disappearing). Your job, if you want to do well, is to find problems that are big enough to be meaningful and problems you're willing to commit to solving.

Working out what is meaningful to the business is a skill. Rarely are problems that well signposted. Luckily we already covered 'being good at learning things'. The first thing you should be learning is how the company you work for runs. Top to bottom, inside out. Even if you only do the things on your initial position description I promise you'll do better if you spend the time learning how your business runs.

The process of learning about the business tends to involve a lot of reading and a lot of talking to people. You should start with the people closest to you. Your manager's problems or your colleague's problems are great ones to solve.

I am not advocating for doing other people's work for them. You should be looking for problems that are sitting there being somewhat ignored. They might be ignored because they are mildly hidden or they may be ignored because they are annoying to solve. I have seen a lot of problems fall into the latter category. One afternoon of sitting down and manually adding data to a spreadsheet might be enough to fix a problem that's been slowing teams down for years.

If you spend the time looking for problems you're going to find them. Probably more than you have time to solve. Given that, you're going to need to be selective. In doing so I would personally suggest you preference problems that help people you already work with, ideally ones with about sixty percent overlap with your current skills. This gives you a chance to help your immediate colleagues and an opportunity to apply you learning skills to fill in the last forty percent.

Importantly, you need to find and fix problems for this to work. If you are known as the person that points out problems all the time that will pretty quickly start to work against you. If you spot a problem you feel ill-equipped to solve on your own, the best thing to do is try and find out who in the business might be able to help.

Presenting a plan can be as good as presenting a solution if it really is something you don't know how to fix and can't see yourself learning fast enough.

In amongst all of this you also do need to do your day job. It is pretty rare to be hired as a 'just fix stuff' role so I certainly wouldn't suggest trading off your core responsibilities in order to focus on fixing issues. This is part of the reason why its often good to start close to home, time spent making your team more efficient is less likely to be seen as a 'distraction' than time spent fixing problems for another department.

You should also be prepared that if you get good at this then your job will likely change. If you are known for fixing things, you will probably be asked to fix more of those things. Do make sure you pick things you're happy to keep fixing. Also be prepared to have your position change to 'person in charge of keeping this thing fixed'. Be aware that in making that change you may be leaving your old team behind. Make sure that's something you want to do and that you're not leaving them with a mess to clean up. That's no way to make friends.

Bonus: Remember sometimes things will still fail

This last point, perhaps too important to just be a bonus is one that is maybe hardest to learn. Sometimes you can do everything right and for reasons outside your control things will not go well.

You might work somewhere that hates people working outside their JD and solving a problem makes you look bad. You might fix problems but your company goes out of business. You might learn things but still make mistakes.

There's a reason this post has the word 'mostly' in the title. There's only so much in your control. You need to play the long game. If you do the above two things for a long time you'll likely do well in the long run. You may well have a bunch of negative outcomes along the way.

Remember, even if you spend a lot of time working, even if the company is one you started, it isn't you. You can only do so much to stack odds in your favor. There's still a lot left up to chance.

I've had plenty of set backs over the years but being willing to learn and happy to find and solve problems has meant that those years have been well spent. I've got (hopefully) another 35 years of career ahead of me and here's hoping the trend continues.