CAREER SPECIAL ...A word from the wise

A word from the wise

Follow these career lessons and learn from some of the most accomplished bosses

Success comes with hard work. And successful people can teach you a lot about failure, getting up again and everything in between. Since they have had such accomplished lives, we can all learn some valuable lessons from these people at the top:

Step out of your comfort zone

Vimeo CEO Anjali Sud learnt to seek opportunities out of her comfort zone. Sud said that her father, an entrepreneur, who immigrated to Flint, Michigan from India, told her that she should live outside of her comfort zone.

She says that it’s guided her throughout her life. “Leaving home at 14, going to Andover, where I didn’t know really anything, I was definitely outside my comfort zone then. In many of the roles I’ve had at Amazon and certainly at Vimeo, I’ve been in situations where it wasn’t like I had the playbook and I knew exactly what to do. When you are pushed outside of your comfort zone, you get off that learning curve so much faster and you develop as a leader so much faster,” she says.

Striking a balance

Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes learnt how to balance ambition with reality. Hughes helped his Harvard roommate Mark Zuckerberg develop Facebook in its early years. In 2012, he used some of his fortune to buy a struggling magazine. Hughes wanted to make the highbrow liberal journal a mainstream success, and his efforts to do so resulted in $25 million, spent over four years, and the loss of most of his editorial staff.

He wrote in his book Fair Shot, what this failure taught him.“Just because an idea is bold does not mean that the means to achieve it need be. A prosaic and incremental approach can be a more effective way to put poetic ideas into practice.”

Surround yourself with positive vibes

Edible Arrangements founder Tariq Farid learned to not engage with those who wanted to see him fail. Farid moved to Connecticut from Pakistan when he was 13, and his family had very little money. The combination of having a different ethnicity and economic background from other kids in the neighbourhood led to some bullying. It was useful to him as an adult. “If you want to focus on pessimism, if people want to focus on negativity, then you get negativity.

But if you want to focus on what you can do not only to better yourself but to better your community and the people around you, then you will succeed,” he says.

Avoid second-guessing

Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards learned to not second-guess herself when an intimidating opportunity arose. Richards is in her last year as the head of the women’s health organisation. Throughout her career, she’s never shied away from defending causes she believes in, regardless of the opposition’s power or aggression. Her best advice is, “This is the only life you have, so do what you have always wanted to do. And whatever it is, never turn down a new opportunity. When you are thinking about starting a new business or changing jobs, ask yourself, ‘What’s the worst thing that can happen?’, because usually, once you can imagine that, it’s not that bad.”.

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