Instead of seeking job security, aim to become replaceable by systematizing your role and upskilling your team. Once your unique counterfactual impact wanes, find a new challenge where your skills are essential again. This cycle ensures you are always creating value that wouldn't exist otherwise, maximizing your career-long impact.
Related Insights
This "counterfactual" test helps assess your true impact. If someone equally qualified would immediately replace you, your unique contribution is low, even in a seemingly high-impact job. The goal is to find roles where your absence would create a genuine void, as that represents your true marginal impact.
Borrowing a concept from real estate, constantly ask yourself: 'What is the highest and best use of me today?' This framework encourages you to leverage your cumulative experience to make significant, non-linear career leaps, rather than just taking the next logical, incremental step.
True long-term career growth isn't about climbing a stable ladder. It's about intentionally leaving secure, successful positions to tackle harder, unfamiliar challenges. This process of bursting your own bubble of security forces constant learning and reinvention, keeping you relevant.
Don't wait for a promotion or new job opening to grow. Proactively identify other teams' pain points and offer your expertise to help solve them. This proactive helpfulness builds relationships, demonstrates your value across the organization, and organically opens doors to new skills and responsibilities.
A linear career path is not required for success. Businesses ultimately value high performers who demonstrate an ownership mentality and consistently drive impact. Focusing on helping the business win creates opportunities to move across roles and industries, making your journey more valuable.
Creating a long-term career master plan is often counterproductive, leading people onto generic conveyor belts like consulting or banking. A better strategy is to consistently choose the best opportunity available at the moment. Optimizing for the right things in the short term allows for more powerful, organic compounding over time.
Instead of aiming to be the best in one narrow field, build a more antifragile career by becoming 80% competent in several different domains (e.g., design, sales, engineering). The unique intersection of these skills makes you the "only" person who can solve certain complex problems, creating durable value.
Instead of just climbing the corporate ladder, define an ultimate career objective (a 'North Star'). Then, strategically choose roles—even uncomfortable or lateral ones—that deliberately fill the specific knowledge gaps standing between you and your long-term goal.
In fast-growing companies, your role constantly expands. To keep up, you must delegate responsibilities you've mastered (your 'Legos') to tackle new, larger problems. Hoarding tasks you're good at will ultimately limit your career growth and bury you under a pile of work you've outgrown.
Traditional career paths are like climbing stairs—steady but limited. A more impactful path involves 'J-curves': taking on roles you feel unqualified for. This leads to an initial dip in performance and confidence ('the fall'), but ultimately catapults you far beyond where the stairs could have taken you.