Vivian Tu recommends keeping a "brain book" email folder of your wins and numbers to pull from during raise talks. The highest-paid employees aren't the smartest, but the ones people like and remember. Being visible and likable to your manager matters more than raw competence.
What can someone do to be really smart and intentional about getting a raise? Make yourself a brain book. It's a folder in your email. Anything that good, good that happens to you, put in that folder. Because that way, when you go and you have to write those really annoying self assessments, you can go back and literally look through those emails and be like, oh, remember that time I did that one thing and that thing and that thing. And now you have quantifiable results to that you can point to. The second piece, there's a study and it shows that the smartest person is not the one that gets paid the most. Right. But the person that is paid the most is the person that is essentially Mr. Or Mrs. Congeniality. You need to be liked. You need, and not so much like you have to be agreeable and likable, but like people have to think of you. You gotta be top of mind. You gotta be top of mind.
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