Getting ahead
After I wrote the Details post yesterday, I was mulling over the tension between the desire to get ahead vs love for the work (or perhaps better put, dedication and focus and a drive to doing things well). Yesterday's example was about being in the details to perhaps take risks others prefer to avoid. There are other things people don't want to do that can be your advantage.
Over my career, I've had the chance to mentor a lot of people, either as a direct or skip-level report, or more informally responding to someone who sought me out. Even if it's not how they put it, usually what they are looking for is help figuring out how to get ahead. Or how to get a role like the one I seem to be having so much fun in[1]. There's a certain vibe in the culture today that to me feels like many folks are more dialed into "getting ahead" than they are willing to sweat the details.
[Hard to read NGram: "getting ahead" (red) vs "sweating the details" (blue)]
I laughed seeing the above, but to be clear - I wouldn't put a lot of stock in the graph (tempting as it is to infer a lot from the meteoric dotcom fueled launch post-1995 of the red line into the super-capitalist era of "getting ahead"!). There are too many confounding variations in Ngrams-- so I won't be "getting ahead" of myself here...
Aside from whatever the trends are today, the larger insight is this: if you do what _everyone else does (including reading what everyone reads, and avoiding the same "grunt work" everyone else avoids, and so on) - you won't be able to get ahead. Differentiated is easy to say and hard to be. The guaranteed path here is to work harder and smarter than many other people are willing to. To work smarter requires getting into details to have context to know what's "smart". If I can take a moment to be encouraging here - no matter what you read about how hard people work, or what a grinding "tech culture" we have today: the reality does not match the rhetoric. If you want to get ahead, the shortcut is to take the harder, less trodden path. Be different.
I realize this advice runs counter to current fashion. One more nuance: I'd argue for adopting both a strong -differentiated- work ethic and a strategy of not moving with the herd all the time. Be your own captain when it comes to where to spend invest your (finite, limited) time. There's an art to avoid being pigeonholed into a part of a job that won't get you ahead but needs to be done. Don't be excellent at those tasks!
[1] Appearances can be deceiving...
