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A woman named Dana recently emailed me asking if humble people can get ahead. Here's what she wrote. I'm struggling with an unfair work situation. When someone like me works very hard and is honest and humble about their efforts, they don't receive the recognition or compensation they deserve. Meanwhile, other people contribute less but are more vocal or effective at promoting their work. And they seem to get more credit rewards and faster promotions. This is what happens in my industry, and I'm struggling to navigate it. What should I do? Well, Dana, I have an answer for you. And today on Help Wanted, I'm going to deliver it. Not just an answer for Dana, but actually answers to three people who recently wrote me with really interesting, compelling questions that I think you're going to rel. So this episode of Help Wanted is like a mailbag edition where I am answering your questions. We're going to talk about three things. Number one, how can humble workers get ahead? Number two, how to approach your life goals. And then number three. Well, number three is technically about how I structure my content so that I know how to share the stuff that's going to be most impactful. But I think that this is an answer that can really scale out to anything that you do because in some way or another, no matter what you do, you have to get your ideas in front of people and you need to figure out how to refine them so that you know that the thing that you're delivering is the thing that's going to land. All right, you ready? Let's start with Dana's question. Like I said, Dana had asked, she's humble and honest at work, but these people who are self promoting are getting ahead faster than her and she wants to know what to Dana, you're right. That sucks. In a perfect world, hard work and humbleness are handsomely rewarded. And it is okay to be frustrated that we don't live in that perfect world. They're not. Humbleness and hard work are not always rewarded. But here's a word of caution, Dana. If you sit around waiting for that perfect world to emerge, you are going to wait forever. That is why when I face a frustrating situation, I try to drain the emotion from it. It's more useful to look at it. A logic puzzle so here are three great questions to ask about any frustrating situation. What are the unchangeable facts? Question number two, what is a reasonable explanation for those facts? And then question number three. If you can't change those facts, and you can't, then what else can you do in your situation? Dana, I think that here are the answers. Number one, what are the facts? The facts are that at work, promotions are not solely tied to hard work. Self promotion is rewarded and humbleness is often overlooked. Number two, what is the reasonable explanation for that? Well, companies don't want to punish humble hard workers, right? That wouldn't make any sense. So why is self promotion so valuable? Maybe managers are too busy to keep track of everyone individually, so they operate off the information they have. And the loudest people are often the most noticed. And or here's another explanation. Managers want to promote people who are motivated and eager. Self promoters give off that vibe. Humble workers just may appear aloof or unready to take initiative. And now number three, what to do about this? The point isn't to be self promotional, Dana. The point is to make sure that your manager knows and appreciates your work and sees you as ready for more. That means, yes, doing some self promotion. Think of it this way. If your work is better than your colleagues, then you will easily outpace them as soon as you start speaking up. All right, that was question number one. Now let's move on to the second thing that a reader and listener asked me. Reader and listener. I'm saying reader and listener because I get questions from two kinds of folks. They are listeners to Help Wanted, but they were also readers of my newsletter called One Thing Better, which you can get at OneThingBetter email. That's a web address. Plug it into a browser. One thingbetter Email. That is what I'm actually reading for you today. Every Thursday, I'm reading my newsletter, A Companion to Help Wanted, right here on Help Wanted. Okay. Anyway, so this question comes from Paul, and Paul wrote me this. I follow a lot of thought leaders and I hear contradictory advice. Some say to have a specific vision for my life. Others say to be more open minded and embrace a world of possibilities. How do I square these two? Paul, you make a great point. I tend to fall into the latter camp. I love the advice that Malcolm Gladwell once gave Me self conceptions are powerfully limiting. He said. If you define yourself too narrowly, you will miss all the opportunities that fall outside that narrow view. But I get it. That can also sound chaotic and directionless. So here's what you need to know. These two ideas are not actually different. They're two parts of the same life. You can have a vision and remain open to exploration. How you embrace the possibility of revision. Life is like being lost in the woods. If you stand still or walk in a circle, you will get nowhere. So you must pick a direction and go somewhere. But along the way, you will pick up new information. You'll find a stream or meet other people or see out over the distance. And then you'll ask yourself, do I keep going in the same direction just because it's gotten me this far or do I revise? Revising doesn't mean changing everything about your life, nor does it mean that the previous path was wrong. It just means redefining what parts of you are most important to you now based on whatever new information and interests you have. The point is that you have to keep growing, but you don't have to lock yourself into a direction. You can do both. You can have a plan, and then you can have a plan to abandon the plan. All right, and here is the third question that I got. This comes from Divya. Divya wrote me. I've been invited to speak on stages lately, and despite strong feedback, I'm my own toughest critic. When you give keynote talks, do you ever worry that your core message won't land? And how do you pressure test it against time? That was Divya's question. And for context, in case you don't know, this is something I do a lot of. I have a pretty active business in which I travel around giving keynote talks, mostly to corporations and to trade associations. I talk about how to thrive in times of change. So I'm on stages a lot and I am thinking a lot about how to make sure that that product, the product of me speaking to an audience, is the most impactful. All right, so that's the context for Divya's question. Divya, I love this question because the answer applies way beyond speaking. What you're really asking is, how do I know if something is good, if an idea is good before other people hear or see it? And here's my answer. I do not debut ideas. I graduate ideas. Here's what I mean by that. I never try out a new idea for the first time on a stage in front of a lot of people. That is too high risk. So instead I debut ideas on LinkedIn or Instagram. Those are low stakes venues and I get instant feedback. If an idea gets a good response, then I might quote, unquote, graduate it by, say, expanding on it in my newsletter. And if that gets a good response, then I might graduate it some more by weaving it into something that I say on a podcast, whether it's on Help Wanted or when I'm a guest on someone else's podcast, or maybe during a Q and A session on stage when I can just be, you know, riffing a little bit more and a little more informal. After my talks. After I give a talk in front of an audience, I often hang out and chat with the people that I just spoke to. And the reason to do that is one, it's fun, but also because people often say to me, hey, my favorite part of your talk was whatever, whatever they're going to say. And I listen really closely in those moments because I want to know, are they complimenting a certain segment of my talk? Are they not complimenting another segment? Are they really into something that maybe I just said during the Q and A? Over time, this helps me refine my talk. I keep people's favorite segments, I drop the stuff that nobody's really commenting on. And sometimes I graduate material from my Q and A into the main talk. By doing this, I am constantly evolving and pressure testing my material. Consider it. I post 260 times a year on LinkedIn, that is to say, every weekday. I write 52 newsletters a year, and my standard keynote talk only contains seven big ideas. So what it really means here is that the strongest ideas will survive their way to the top. Despite all this, I still often worry that my material won't resonate or that something that worked with one audience will flop with another. But you know what? That's life. I just keep reminding myself everything is a work in progress and whatever happens today will make the next talk even better. So those were three questions from readers and listeners and my three answers. And you know, it's interesting, I hadn't thought about this, but as I was just sharing the conclusion of that last answer there, Everything is a work in progress. I realize that that basically is the answer to all of these questions, isn't it? Right? Can humble people get ahead? You know, it's a work in progress. You've got to make sure that you maintain whatever qualities are really important to you, but that you also adapt to the needs and realities of your environment. And you make sure that the people who hold your fate in their hands, that they know how great you are and that you're top of mind to them. And Paul's question about whether or not to pick a very specific path and stick to it or be open to changes, well, that's also about Everything is a work in progress when you we as people, our lives are works in progress. And then of course, the content question is really just a matter of always testing new ideas, seeing what works and knowing that whatever product you are putting out there, even when people pay me a lot of money to stand on a stage and give a keynote talk, that that thing is a work in progress, it will always be able to get better and it always should. Nothing is fixed. Reid Hoffman, the co founder of LinkedIn, has this great line. He says that we all live in permanent beta, which is to say that we should think of ourselves as a product that is always in beta, that is never finished. That the point of it is to be constantly testing it and pressure testing it and finding flaws and then learning something and building it back into the product. That when we discover these things that aren't perfect, that's not a problem. That is the feature. That is what we do. That is how we improve. That is the only way. Help Wanted is a production of Money News Network. Help Wanted is hosted by me, Jason.
