I’m pretty confident you only need two things. Feedback and humility, and they work best together.
I was listening to a podcast recently about the concept of “limitarianism” entitled Imagine there’s no billionaires in which the political philosopher Ingrid Robeyns laid out the ways in which, truly, every billionaire is a policy failure. Nobody accumulates great wealth without some sort of dependency on society — whether that’s tax breaks, lack of worker regulation, or some other “pro business” (but anti-society) law.
The truth is that people don’t achieve success by themselves. Luck, nepotism, and cultural capital play a huge part in what most people would deem success. That’s not to say that it’s not possible to increase your serendipity surface, though.
What I like from this post by Josh Swords is that he centres agency in his “career advice” which is achieved by seeking feedback and getting better demonstrating humility and working in the open. Powerful stuff.
I’m pretty confident you only need two things. Feedback and humility, and they work best together. Feedback shows you what to work on, and humility lets you actually hear it.
So find your weakest discipline and work on that. The fastest way is to get feedback from someone you admire and then act on it. Don’t wait for the perfect plan, doing something is almost always better than doing nothing.
Find a mentor, be a mentor. Lead a project, propose one. Do the work, present it. Create spaces for others to do the same. Do whatever it takes to get better.
And do it in the open. A common mistake is assuming work speaks for itself. It rarely does.
But all of this requires maybe the most important thing of all: agency. It’s more powerful than smarts or credentials or luck. And the best part is you can literally just choose to be high-agency. High-agency people make things happen. Low-agency people wait. And if you want to progress, you can’t wait.
Source: people, ideas, machines
Image: CC BY-NC Focal Foto