Principles for Second 10 Years at Work
· 6 min read
Early career focuses on continuous learning, gaining specialized expertise, and building foundational leadership skills, while late career shifts toward creating strategic impact, mentoring the next generation, and leaving a meaningful legacy that shapes industries, communities, or personal networks.
1. Start with the customer
- 1.1 Surface yourself to internal and external buyers and sellers through online and offline platforms
- 1.2 Conduct customer interviews and gather feedback regularly
- 1.3 Empathize with customer pain points and act as a proxy for customers
- 1.4 Predicting and producing what the customer loves is hard, but we can always invent and simplify our product to a better state
- 1.5 Prioritize features and initiatives that provide the most customer value
- 1.6 Measure success with customer satisfaction metrics (e.g., NPS, CSAT)
2. Sharpen your communication skills
- 2.1 Be genuinely interested in people and actively wonder what they are doing/needing/feeling
- 2.2 Practice and rehearse clear, concise writing and speaking until you're fully prepared for interviews
- 2.3 Adapt your communication style to suit your audience
- 2.4 Continuously seek feedback to refine your communication skills
- 2.5 Leverage storytelling to make complex ideas more relatable and engaging
- 2.6 Use examples, metaphors, and narratives to simplify and humanize technical or abstract concepts
- 2.7 Apply communication frameworks like Thank/Reflect/Wish, PREP (Point/Reason/Example/Point), AIDA (Attention/Interest/Desire/Action), and STAR (Situation/Task/Action/Result)
3. Focus on high-leverage, prioritized activities
- 3.1 Score and identify tasks with the most significant impact on key objectives
- 3.2 Use frameworks like Eisenhower Matrix or OKRs to prioritize tasks
- 3.3 Automate or delegate low-impact tasks
- 3.4 Review priorities regularly to ensure alignment with goals
- 3.5 Build flexibility into your schedule by leaving space for unplanned activities, and compensate for intense periods with planned downtime
4. Accelerate learning through high-value channels, execution, and accumulation
- 4.1 Learn by doing, sharing, and documenting: Take on new projects, challenges, and record key lessons
- 4.2 Seek feedback from peers and mentors after each task, and incorporate it into a personal knowledge base
- 4.3 Engage in inter-person communication to uncover hidden, tacit knowledge that is often only discovered through direct interaction
- 4.4 Embrace failure as part of the learning process, fail fast, and capture insights to avoid repeating mistakes
- 4.5 Continuously iterate on ideas and processes, building upon past successes and failures to compound learning over time
5. Ask high-value questions
- 5.1 Challenge assumptions and conventional wisdom with first principles
- 5.2 Guide strategic decisions by focusing on questions that reveal hidden insights and drive long-term impact
- 5.3 Search for who is asking what questions globally to identify the most important questions
- 5.4 Answers are cheap in the age of LLMs. Prioritize asking the right questions