Ramit Sethi explains why people, especially women, apply for lower jobs and negotiate less than they should. He walks through concrete examples of self-rejection and gives email templates to help you stop underselling yourself and aim higher.
As young people, we have a great sense of entitlement, don't we? By age 30, I should be flying around with CEOs on personal jets. But interestingly, there's another phenomenon that many people don't talk about, and that is that when it comes time for us to ask for something, we often undervalue ourselves. Now, women do this more than men. It's quite a dramatic thing when it comes to women who in general negotiate far less, negotiate for less, and ask for different types of jobs than men. But it's present with both of us. We had a coaching client, very interesting. She'd worked at her job for about four or five years. She was quite good at it, and her boss knew it. And when she went to apply for other jobs, she instantly went to look for associate and assistant manager jobs, not manager jobs. Right? Not the appropriate level of what she should be looking at. Now. Why is this? We waited a week to see what was going on, and it turned out that she simply didn't think that she was qualified for it in her mind. She was not a manager. Okay? She was certainly not a director in her mind. Even though she'd been working at this job for four or five years and she was very qualified for it. Yes, it would have been a bit of a reach. But what I want to talk about today is not undervaluing yourself and instead aiming a little bit higher than you might be more comfortable with. Now, why is this? Why do we undervalue ourselves? The first reason is we don't know the lay of the land. So if you're going into a job without understanding the difference between a director and a manager or an associate and a manager, you're just going to pick a random thing. You're actually going to go by what they say in their job description, but they're not the ones who you should be following. You should actually be thinking of yourself. Where do I want this dream job to take me? What do I think I'm qualified for? And then I'll see which one it fits best under, under their rubric. So we don't understand the lay of the land. It's important in our research phase to know the difference between associate manager, director, all of these different titles. There's a couple other reasons. We're scared. We think that if we ask for something higher, they're going to summarily reject us and not consider us for anything else. So we'd rather aim low just. Just to get our feet in the door, then aim for what we believe we deserve. Okay. And the third reason is that we've never been taught how to systematically climb our way to our dream job. Many of us simply go laterally. Like our coaching client who simply was going to go from A to A at a different company when she really should have gone from A to A plus at a different company. That's the way a dream job is built and a dream career. Now you see this in your own language too. Imagine that you've gone through my Earn1K program and you're trying to earn a little bit of money on the side. You're a freelancer and someone says, what's your rate? And you say it's $50 an hour, but I could probably do it for 40. Okay, how about you do it for 30? Okay. The point is, if you don't ask solidly, know confidently that you deserve it. People are easy, easily going to nickel and dime you. That happens all the time. Another thing happens in emails. I see this probably 15 times a day from emails that come into me and people say, hey, I know you probably don't respond to all these emails. Hey, I know you probably won't read this, but stop rejecting yourself. Don't write with a presumption that someone doesn't care about you. Because guess what? Then I don't care about you. Because the type of people that presume I don't care about them probably don't deserve to be cared about. That's the blunt truth. When you write in, you start off confidently. Hi, my name is Ramit Sethi. I'm a recent college grad and I did this and I noticed that blah blah, blah about you that I think is really interesting and on and on. Now we have scripts that you can use. Just rip them off and use them. But you'll notice in all these scripts that we're never self deprecating, we're never coming off as unconfident. We're always showing people that we're confident and we deserve the chance to talk to you. Why aim high? Why aim high with the title you're going for with even the company that you're targeting? Well, the first is that if you aim high, you just may get it. You would be surprised how many people make huge discontinuous jumps in their career because they simply took a chance and applied to something higher than they normally would. There can be a multitude of reasons why a company would accept you, maybe even if you don't have the right experience. We've talked about positioning, how positioning is so critical. It's as important, maybe more important than experience. It may be that they just need to fill that role. Whatever the case, let them make that decision. But you make your decision to apply aggressively. And the second reason to apply aggressively, to aim higher than you normally do, is for positioning. You don't want to be the person who's 32, 33, and applying to the same positions as someone who's 24. You don't want to do that because guess what hiring managers start to think about? They start to say, this person's a loser, and I can cut their rate by $25,000 or $5,000. Okay? If you are doing that, if you're not showing this kind of trajectory now, again, in that trajectory, there can be ups and downs. You might be laid off. You might have a downward move for a little while, but upward trajectory, then you're this. And people like this get taken advantage of. And I do not want you to be the average performer. I want you to find your dream job. So simply aim high. When you do this, the effects can be dramatic, and they can be compounded over the course of your entire career with money, with promotions, with titles, with positioning. Aiming high can compound over your entire lifetime. When it comes to your career, don't undervalue yourself.
