3 High Leverage Career Skills (From a Principal At Amazon)
- High leverage = more output for less input
- Themes: leverage & career capital
3 High Leverage Career Skills
1. Start a Brag Document
Make a text document you can access from anywhere.
Every time you do something impactful, write a paragraph with details about when it happened, when it happened, and who was involved.
This is high leverage because it takes very little time to record, yet you keep the reference forever. You now have plenty of stories for resumes, interviews, promotions, and performance reviews.
Don’t record anything that isn’t noteworthy, impactful, or can be easily looked up.
2. Get and Stay Good at Interviewing
Active listening is key to being a good interviewer and a good listener.
3. Learn when to say no
Get better at saying no by understanding when you should say yes.
You need to say no more.
Because most work is not impactful.
Say no 10x more than when you say yes.
Say yes when
- There’s an outsized benefit to saying yes vs the effort you put in.
- If there’s big benefit for the person who’s asking
- If you have the bandwidth and it’s really easy. Use sparingly.
When there’s high impact for you or others.
Can you add it to your brag document? Say yes.
Book Reference
So good they can’t ignore you by Cal Newport