Three Pieces of Career Advice That Changed My Life
Looking back over my career to date,
I can identify at least three clear influences that forever altered my career
path. In retrospect, it's interesting to see how different the context was for
each: parental advice, a passage in a book, and a persistent boss. Despite the
contrasts, all three share one thing in common -- reinforcing the importance of
knowing what it is you ultimately want to accomplish, and being open to
allowing outside forces to help clarify, reinforce and facilitate the path to
making it happen.
Here are the three pieces of advice
that helped shape my career:
1. You can do anything you set your
mind to
As a child, I can't recall a day
that went by without my dad telling me I could do anything I set my mind to. He
said it so often, I stopped hearing it. Along with lines like "eat your
vegetables," I just assumed it was one of those bromides that parents
repeated endlessly to their kids. It wasn't until decades later that I fully
appreciated the importance of those words and the impact they had on me.
Today, the question I'm asked most
often by students and interns is how best to achieve their career goals. As
simple as it sounds, the short version of my response is that you have to know
what it is you ultimately want to accomplish (optimizing for both passion and
skill, and not one at the exclusion of the other). As soon as you do, you'll
begin manifesting it in both explicit and implicit ways.
Without question, this first
principle has been the most consistent driver of my own career path over the
last 20 years.
2. Everything that can be converted
from an atom to a bit, will be
In August, 1994, I signed up for an
Aol account. I'll never forget my first "a-ha!" moment online which
occurred soon thereafter. It came through witnessing the power of collective
intelligence on a Motley Fool message board. There, a community of engineers,
logistics experts, and individual investors from all over the country had
joined together to reverse engineer the cost basis to manufacture what would
eventually emerge as a hit computer peripheral product. I remember thinking to
myself, "This is going to change everything."
About a month later, I was reading "Being Digital" by Nicolas Negroponte after seeing a rave review in Wired
Magazine (for historical context, it was the print version). In the opening
chapter of his book, Negroponte posited that by virtue of the ensuing digital
revolution, everything that could be converted from an atom to a bit would be.
Having just started as an analyst in the Corporate Development group at Warner
Bros, it didn't take much to realize this coming transition would have material
implications on the studio and the entertainment industry in general.
In light of those experiences, when
the opportunity arose to write the first online business plan for Warner Bros,
I quickly volunteered; this despite the fact that at the time, most if not all
of the investment focus was on CD-ROM. The first draft of that online plan was
completed in December, 1994. It would ultimately be approved several months
later and thus began my nearly two-decades-long career in digital media.
3. Do you want to push paper around
or do you want to build products that change people's lives?
I started at Yahoo in May, 2001, as
co-head of the Corporate Development team. By virtue of the breadth of the role
and the company's operations, and Yahoo's influential position within the
digital ecosystem, the job provided me a front row seat to a period of
extraordinary transformation within the consumer web industry.
Roughly a year after I started, Dan Rosensweig
joined as Yahoo's new COO. In addition to being an experienced web operator,
Dan is one of the most effective sales people I know. I learned this firsthand
after he tried recruiting me to an operating role on his team literally every
time I saw him over the first year of his tenure. Though I'd politely decline
each time -- telling him I was happy having the opportunity to work directly
with the CEO, founder, and other executives in a strategic capacity -- he never
stopped persisting.
Then, almost a year to the day he
started, Dan said, "Jeff, you've always told me that your lifelong
ambition is ultimately to reform the education system in the U.S. Let me ask
you something: Do you think you are going to be better prepared to make that a
reality by pushing paper around, working on strategy, and doing deals; or by
moving in to operations and building teams, inspiring people, and developing
great products that change people's lives?"
Suffice it to say, I accepted on the
spot and haven't looked back since.
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