Here are a few things that, in my experience, can make you feel like you’re playing the game of your career on easy mode. They still take plenty of effort, but they make that effort go further, so you end up moving quicker than people around you who are working every bit as hard.
I wanted to write this because most of the career advice I come across is either too generic to be much use or comes from someone trying to sell you the one thing that happened to work for them. I've had a strange enough path of my own, and enough help from people who knew better than me, to end up with a handful of things I'd be happy to pass on. I'll go through them in the order of impact they've had on my own life, though what works for me might not be the same for you. More on that later.
I’ve been very, VERY fortunate in my life to find some incredible mentors. By mentor I mean someone capable and well-meaning who is invested in you going well, who you trust enough to call when you’re stuck, and who has no real reason to help beyond wanting to. It’s no exaggeration to say that having access to people like that has changed the direction of my life.
A mentor does a few things for you that turn out to be pretty fundamental to a successful career. The first is access to what’s called tacit knowledge. This is the deeply personal sort of knowledge that only comes from experience, the thing people often mistake for intuition. You’ll have sat with someone who can look at a problem and tell you, do this and here’s what happens, do that and you’ll get this instead, while you’re left wondering how on earth they know. That’s tacit knowledge at work. It’s different from the declarative knowledge we get taught in school, the facts and frameworks you can write down and revise for an exam. The declarative kind is exactly what a machine can be trained on, while the tacit kind still lives in people’s heads, which is why finding someone who has it is such a rare and valuable shortcut.
The second thing is that mentors open doors. Age is no guarantee of experience, but youth guarantees that some people will doubt you before you’ve said anything. Nobody likes to admit it, but we are hardwired to judge a book by its cover. I can think of countless networking events where I’d start talking to someone and watch their eyes drift across the room, already hunting for the person with a bigger wallet or a more useful address book. I believe this to be a key part of why my first business ultimately failed. I had a solid logical case for what we were selling and almost no ethos, the credibility that Aristotle set alongside logic and emotion in his famous triangle of rhetoric. What a good mentor can do is stand in as a proxy for that missing credibility. When someone respected is willing to vouch for you, people lend you a trust you haven’t yet earned on your own.
What took me a while to put into words is how you get someone to agree to this weird sort of social contract. It mostly comes down to checking your ego at the door. Mentors are drawn to people who are curious and easy to teach, and the quickest way to put one off is to spend every conversation trying to prove yourself. Most people get this backwards. They walk into a room with someone they admire and try to show how much they already know, when the thing that makes an experienced person want to help is the sense that you’ll take what they give you and run with it.
The way you do this, especially when you’re young and have limited experience, is simple. Ask good questions, then shut up and listen. Let other people be the most interesting person in the room. If you play this correctly, you’ll have plenty of time to assume that role yourself later. What goes around, after all, does in fact come around.
Two more below. The second is about why you can't work any of this out inside your own head, and the third is about the advice most likely to send you the wrong way, which usually comes from people who care about you. Plus the practical guides on the big career decisions, for the price of a coffee a month.
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