How to impress your boss, with Michael Williams and Ramit Sethi

What would you say for people who are at a job, they've been there for a year or two or three and they've, you know, you get into a certain kind of pattern. It's one thing to walk in with fresh eyes and you made a very specific and smart decision. What if you've been there a few years, what would you do? What would you recommend for them to over deliver at work?

Well, the first thing is I want to find out what my boss's priorities are. So what is that number and whether that's one thing or three things going more than three might be a little, might start to get a little broad. But I would find out what those are and then look within the organization of. Let me state that I haven't been in a job for a long time, so take that for whatever it's worth. But look in the organization at what the major influences are on that metric or whatever that goal is for you. And then what surprises me that I see a lot of people not doing is then, okay, what am I actually bringing to that table? So what are my strengths and how can I then optimize around those strengths to take those influences and maximize their impact on the number that I'm going after? So that's very, it sounds really, really good in theory, but I relentlessly try to tie everything I do every day to whatever the primary goal is. And you know, I did it, I did it there. Even today, you know, is this the biggest, is this the biggest influence I can be working on right now?

If you don't run a million dollar business, what's the takeaway here? What do you need to know if you have a job or it's, you know, whether it's your workouts or your personal relationships, what do we need to know about this mental change along the way?

There's no. I used to believe that there was an end point, that at a certain point I would be good or I would be successful or I would be happy with where I was at. I think for a lot of us you're never going to be completely happy with where you are now. I'm not saying that you won't be happy in the general sense. I'm saying you're going to feel that slightly uncomfortable nuisance that there's someone who's a little further along the line or there's someone who's benching a little bit more than me.

Let's talk finally here about people in their careers. So we've talked about that stair step model of growth and all the challenges and yet the promises that come along with it. Let's say that someone is in the early part of their career, maybe they're 25 to 35, you know, they've had a couple jobs, they're doing well. But they hear your story about getting 1000% ROI, getting three awards, et cetera. And basically you wrote your own ticket, you got so much attention. You could say I want this, I want that and you would just get it. What are some ways that they can get those discontinuous jumps in their career?

So there's a lot of people telling you what you should do, really. And I'm going to follow it up by telling you what I think you should do. But the fundamentals in any given career, in any situation, there are fundamental, the basic level of things and then there's like the advanced stuff. We get so distracted by the advanced tips. The advanced stuff, the big jumps come as a result of simply focusing on the basics, you know, showing up on time, saying thank you. When you start to really focus on that stuff, the other stuff starts to happen. Now there's also, so, so people are also, you know, they're chattering in here, oh, you should, you know, do the social media website, blah, blah, blah. So like I see and I did it myself. Tons of stuff that didn't really resonate with me, that didn't, I wasn't going to keep up, but I did it because I felt I should. Any rule that someone tells you there is someone successful that is doing the opposite.

Yep.

And so you have to, you know, be okay with really giving us honest self assessment about what you A want to do and B, what you can do or what you're good at and then just optimize everything else around that. I'm, I'm not gonna, I'm just not gonna blog for my business. So I started going to conferences instead. I'm not a hard nosed negotiator so I'm just going to try to take a collaborative approach and I became okay with not necessarily getting the 100% greatest deal in the world. And so if you, I think when you do that you, you, you start to see the opportunities. If you keep your focus on that, you know, whatever, like that one number or whatever, and you focus on those fundamentals, optimize around your strengths, then those big jumps start to appear and then you have to actually do it. So you have to be, you have to be ready to take a risk, but you have to be taking those risks smartly. So if you're in a job and there's certain parts of the job that you're not good at, but there's certain parts of the job that you are really good at. I would try to optimize around, and again, I don't. I've never spent a lot of time, so I'm not sure how you might do this, but I would try to optimize around that stuff that I'm really good at and focus on just nailing the basics and through that process again, those other results, I think, will start to appear.