The benefits of a bear market:
- Go all out in networking. Each conference, each meet-up, show up. In bear markets, people are much more accessible. All it takes is finding the right person.
Finding a “Great” Mentor:
- Go to coffees, hop on calls, and send good follow-up emails.
- Ask smart questions, do your homework, and always be on time.
- Read continuously, send authors notes on their work, and remember that no one is immune to kind words.
Help Others Without Expectation:
- You are more likely to move toward your goals by helping others toward theirs, rather than waiting for them to help you with yours.
- People, including the rich and powerful, crave access to information, unique perspectives, or insights that are unique to your corner of the world. They know that all it takes is for one idea to change your life.
- Give. Give. Give. It’s the key to building relationships.
Find Problems to Solve with People and Potential Managers
- Find opportunities to solve pain points for others by asking probing questions:
- What’s a bottleneck in your business at the moment?
- What are areas in your business that have been overlooked?
- Is there anything that’s keeping you up at night?
- What is the “least” solved problem on your plate?
- What’s taking up most of your focus at the moment?
Play for Keeps
- If you want to learn fast and become smart, respected, and successful quickly, you have to have something at stake. You need a reward for victories and pain for failures.
- Set high goals and short deadlines. Find jobs with compensation structures that are based on your success and your progress.
How Much Better Can You Be?
- When choosing a career, look up. Look at your ceiling. See how high you can go, and if you plan to work your ass off - do it somewhere with room to rise.
- Seek accountability and responsibility, you’ll be rewarded and celebrated.
- Seek out a career that will let you be proud of your work. This looks like having the autonomy to do the job that you believe should be done.
Get Close To The Revenue
- Universal skills that are always important for a company:
- More sales
- Lower costs
- Better products
How to Determine What you Want To Do With Your Life
- A long-term plan is not a necessary element for success. A long-term perspective is.
- You must be aware of how your current decision will impact your possibilities and potential in the future (e.g., second-order thinking).
- It matters much more who you work with than what you work on.
How to Learn:
- Take the leap. You learn fastest by doing, trial and error. As opposed to spending months reading theoretical articles about a space you want to enter.
- Spend 1-2 minutes reflecting after every call, after every compelling article you read, etc. Implication synthesis will help you more than just inhaling and memorizing information.