What do you know today that you wish you knew when you started your career ? Nothing !

This is perhaps the most common question I get asked by people in their early years in the workforce. I have asked some version of this to my seniors too when I was starting out.

Someone asked me this today morning and I figured maybe it’s a good idea to put this into a post.

Fair warning – My answer might not be the most helpful 🙂

And that answer is : Nothing !

I of course learned a lot of valuable lessons along the way . But looking back – I highly doubt my younger self would have acknowledged or acted upon any of those things because it would have been so counter intuitive, and I would have fought it will my energy 🙂

That’s the honest truth in my case. I am not saying young people today can’t learn those things and put them to good use. But when I discuss these things with them – my default expectation is just that they listen to my words and think about it. I have no expectations that they will follow through. I actually think it’s better that each person collect information and then choose what to do themselves, and not just randomly accept what worked for someone else will work for them too.

With all that said – here are a half dozen things that might have helped me if I realized sooner

1. Make peace with the role of luck in life. There are many people I have worked with who had better skills than I did – but didn’t get the opportunities I got. There are also a few who got much better opportunities than I did who I didn’t think were smarter than me – and they advanced farther than I did. It took me some time to make peace with that – and I learned to not let it affect me.

2. Sucking up is not a sustainable career strategy. It does work from time to time – but eventually you get exposed for your lack of ability and will take the fall. Corollary – don’t assume that someone got their break by sucking up all the time. Most of the time we don’t have enough information to know why they succeeded and just use “they must have sucked up” as an excuse to not think of where we need to improve.

3. I don’t have the time for that is not a real excuse . We will always find time to do things we love. I loved to sleep 8 hours till I realized I enjoyed training my dog. I didn’t feel bad when I slept an hour or two late because I enjoyed spending that extra time with my dog. We also find ways to not do things we don’t find interesting – even if they are important like say working out , or up-skilling at work.

4. If no one heard it – that there didn’t fall in the forest. This was perhaps the hardest lesson for me to learn. I always believed that working hard and delivering results is all it took. People above you are busy and have a lot to think about. They won’t always know what you are good at or what you have accomplished if you don’t tell them. The nuance is that if you over do the “look – I am awesome” thing, it will backfire badly too. Finding that right balance – is key. Personally I still think understating works better than going overboard – but it all depends on the context.

5. There are many roads to success – but not a lot of roadmaps. It’s easier to think linearly and narrowly, and often get upset when we miss a near term milestone we had so carefully planned. I was quite convinced that definition of success for me was to progress in a technical career path. I did that quite well – and then my mentors nudged me to try sales and management and so on. I didn’t have to sacrifice being an engineer to become a good GM. First ten years out of college – I was convinced that all sellers were liars and crooks. I didn’t realize how wrong I was till I took on a sales target and figured out you don’t have to lie to sell something. The problem with multiple roads is that you won’t realize it in time unless you have good mentors who can help you think through your options. One more thing along these lines – your definition of success will change over time given most of us tend to under estimate what we can accomplish in the long term.

6. Qualify, Compromise and replan as needed . Younger me had the complete opposite idea – I just wanted to double down on everything I set my mind to. And I have a very rigid idea of what I wanted to accomplish with specific timelines. I also got hugely frustrated when it didn’t pan out like I wanted. Eventually I learned that it’s a lot easier if I critically qualify everything before I decide to double down. I also learned that decisions are always based on imperfect information available at a point in time – so use some principled compromises (which means decide upfront what will make you give up) and be ready to pivot (or stop) when needed. Picking the right battles to fight is something I still haven’t quite mastered – but I am a lot better at it today than when I started.