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Aim with purpose

Imagine if I picked you up from your house and drove you to the airport so you could catch a flight, but you had not yet decided where to go. You might get lucky and have a wonderful adventure, but chances are that your trip will be costlier and more difficult, and you will waste a lot of time.

Few people would consider heading to the airport without a travel plan, but lots of people travel through life with no clear idea of where they want to go or how they plan to get there. Life is our most important adventure, so it’s critical for you to develop a clear picture of the future you want and create a map to get you there. We are always moving towards something. Be aware of what you are aiming at. Aim with purpose.

The following one-hour exercise, inspired by “Self Authoring” at https://selfauthoring.com/, helped me record a clear vision of the future I want to create and set goals to help make my vision a reality. As you start this process, remember these important elements for success:

Step 1. Envision the future you want to build

Time: 20 minutes

Close your eyes and spend a few minutes daydreaming about your ideal future. Consider all aspects of your life, including career, relationships, health, family, home, location, finances, and lifestyle. Spend some time imagining what your typical day looks like. Concentrate on the end state, not the process of getting there. How many years into the future are you looking? Be ambitious and don’t hold back on your vision. After a few minutes, start writing, but keep daydreaming. Write about your imagined ideal future and describe it in great detail. If you feel blocked, just force yourself to keep writing and let your imagination go.

Step 2. Picture the future you want to avoid

Time: 20 minutes

Now spend some time defining the life you want to avoid at all costs. Fearing this negative vision and associated potential threats will help motivate you to make good decisions. You know your weaknesses and bad habits better than anyone, and you can imagine what would happen if you fail to follow your dreams and instead allow your worst impulses to guide your actions. Imagine falling prey to indecision, vices, a lack of self-discipline, and bad decision-making. Describe this future state in as much detail as possible, considering all aspects of your life, such as work, health, relationships, finances, etc.

Step 3. Set goals

Time: 20 minutes

Goals are the milestones on your map that can help you reach your desired destination. Annually set goals that are SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time bound. Only create goals that you have the power to accomplish; avoid goals that would require specific action by someone else. Create clear and concise one-year goals that are aligned with the future you want to build for each of the following categories: career, relationships, health, finances, learning, and experiences.

Here are examples of my 2019 goals.

Career

Option 1. Identify, research, and test ideas for new startup company by end of Q2. Launch new company in Q3.

Option 2. Identify and research existing startup companies in Q1 and Q2. Contact company founders in Q2 to explore potential opportunities with target companies. Execute employment agreement by end of Q3.

Relationships

Create a date night at least one time per month.

Attend one couples’ workshop.

Schedule one-on-one with a friend at least two times per month.

Health

Exercise 1 hour per day, six days per week.

Meditate 10 minutes per day, six days per week.

Drink no alcohol during the workweek, in the entire month of January, and one additional month during the second half of the year.

Finances

Tally all 2018 expenses and create a monthly budget by January 31.

Learning

Read a book for 30 minutes per day, six days per week.

Listen to educational podcasts for 1 hour per day, six days per week.

Write for 1 hour per day, five days per week.

Experiences

Take at least one international trip for a minimum of seven days.

Final Step. Solicit feedback

After completing the one-hour exercise, schedule time to meet with at least two people you trust and share your written visions and goals. Feedback is crucial because it can help ensure you are not missing anything because of any possible blind spot(s). It also ensures that your assumptions are well-grounded. Ask anyone giving feedback to be as honest and direct as possible. Update your written responses as appropriate after those conversations.

Summary

This one-hour process helps you plan your trip before you get to the airport. By daydreaming and writing detailed descriptions and goals, you can clarify the future you want to build and map the milestones to get to your desired destination. I find it useful to spend a few minutes at the start of each month looking at my goals as a reminder of both my vision and the path I should be taking. Being able to review my goals keeps me accountable and is another benefit of writing them down. Aim with purpose. We are always moving towards something. Be aware of what you are aiming at.

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Sin

“To sin” means “to miss the mark.” And you have missed it.

Weak-willed. Timid. Malleable. You are mediocre.

How did you let this happen? Why do you continue to let this happen?

Your dreams of greatness lie wet and soggy, like a loaf of bread left out in the rain.

You can’t stay on course. Your plans are uprooted like a sapling pushed over by a weak gust of wind.

You live as if you have no power to resist. No will. No agency. No strength. Your moments of resolve break like the weakest link in a chain.

You feel sorry for yourself because you think you deserve better. Have you earned it? Do you deserve more when you are so easily distracted?

A few drops of water extinguish your burning desire to achieve. You recoil at the slightest pain. You’re always seeking comfort. Greatness cannot be found there.

You must push through your weakness of will. Pick up and shoulder the weight of responsibility and do not drop it.

Your weakness is rooted in fear. Afraid of judgement, you contort yourself like a circus performer. Your lack of courage is repulsive.

Fear wraps around you like boa constrictor—squeezing your voice and crushing your creativity. You even fear the judgment of strangers walking near you on the street or sitting next to you in a restaurant. Why? Why do you care more about their opinions than your own?

Why are you so afraid? How long will you allow your fear to rule your decisions?

Was it fear that allowed mediocre people to sculpt your beliefs? You failed to question, probe, and puncture the assumptions and instead accepted and believed out of laziness. Is it really a surprise you were so wrong?

Like a sponge, you soaked up the ideas in your environment without caution or thoughtful consideration. Distorting, bending, and forcing reality to fit your limited ability has disfigured your mind.

Errors of overconfidence and misplaced certainty litter your life with failure. How many times do you need to fail before you learn?

Beliefs were not all you sponged up from the people around you. Constantly seeking affirmation, you began to model their vices: drowning your sense of purpose in alcohol. Desiring, wanting, consuming. Never satisfied. Never content.

The fat on your body testifies to bad decisions. Fuzzy black mold rots your brain as you scroll through useless information, hour after hour.

You don’t have time to waste. You don’t have to live this way; get up and get going.

The antidote to sin.

Don’t act like a victim. Victim mentality will rob you of your agency and power. Take action to improve your situation and be grateful you’re not rotting in the ground.

Embrace responsibility. Own your strengths, weaknesses, and position in life. Take responsibility for your actions and own the outcomes. 

Follow your interests. Build specific knowledge around your interests and find something you love to do. You will gain unfair competitive advantage because your passion will push you to work harder than other people and spur you to be creative and innovative in your field.

Create meaning. Find meaning by shouldering as much responsibility as you can manage, building competence, and contributing value.

Aim with purpose. Identify what you want in the long term and aim for that.

Update your identity. The most important step in building the life you want is to embrace the identity of who you want to become. Identity is shaped by your beliefs, behavior, and worldview. Self-development requires continually learning and upgrading your identity. The stories you tell yourself about your experiences shape your identity and mental state. Your mental state is your reality.

Build daily habits. You need goals to know where you are going and daily habits to help you get there. Get a little better every day. Consistency develops ability. Few things impact the quality of your life more than daily habits. Good habits help you become the person you want to be, whereas bad habits lead to pain, suffering, and self-loathing.

Upgrade your friends. Don’t underestimate the power of the people around you to influence your behavior. The social norms of your group shape your behavior. Surround yourself with people who push you to be better and give you feedback. Direct, honest feedback is hard to find because very few people are willing to tell you the truth. Most people want to avoid conflict, and they don’t want to jeopardize their relationship with you. 

Nobody’s going to do the work for you. You can do better. Dare to be great. Define your future. Take aim, shoot, calibrate, and repeat until you hit the mark. The worst sin of all is to quit trying.

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DO IT

Following a process helps you improve the quality of your decisions. Too often we let thoughts bang around in our heads and never apply a process to structure our thinking.

I created the acronym DO IT (Define Observe Imagine Test) to help me remember the steps. With a little practice, applying this process becomes automatic and you can use it daily for different type of decisions.

Not all decisions are important enough to require all four steps, but I recommend engaging in at least the first two steps for most decisions. Use no more steps or complexity than needed. Calibrate your time investment to the importance of the decision and how urgently it needs to be made. An effective process requires thinking deeply and writing down answers to each step.

Consider these four steps when you are in the process of making a decision.

DO IT (Define, Observe, Imagine, Test)

Step 1. Define

Define the problem or opportunity. Recognize the type of decision you are facing. You may think you do this now, but I bet you don’t. Following your fuzzy intuition without consciously thinking about the nature of the decision does not count. Write down the problem or opportunity using clear and precise language. Clarify the importance. What’s the magnitude? Is it reversible? How much time do you have to make the decision? Do other people need to be involved? Who are they? If you are the only decision-maker, then it’s easier, but multiple parties may need to be involved for a complex decision.

In addition to defining the problem, you also need to define who is responsible for the outcome. Every decision needs an owner who is held accountable and bears the consequences (good or bad) of the decision. No two people are alike in their knowledge, values, and experience. Therefore it makes sense to have different levels and kinds of decision rights. Decision rights should not be based on the rank of the person in the company hierarchy but should be given to the person closest to the problem who demonstrates good judgment and a comparable advantage to make the decision.

This first process step can be accomplished in a few minutes of focused thinking, but you must slow down enough to determine what you are facing before you move on. The time invested in this step depends on the complexity of the decision. Straightforward decisions may take only a few minutes while more important and more complicated decisions will require more time.

Step 2. Observe

After you’ve clearly defined the problem or opportunity, pause again and consider this question: Why do you need or want to solve this problem? Is making a decision about this issue the most important thing you can do now? What are your motivations? How does this decision or opportunity map to your goals? Make sure you are solving the right problem. Before you start digging in to seek solutions, ask yourself, “Am I focused on the right problem? Is this problem even worth solving?” Your time and attention are valuable, and you could be working on many problems.

To determine if this problem deserves your attention now, quickly review your list of priorities. Pausing and asking why forces you to prioritize your time before you blindly stumble into action. This only takes a few moments, but we rarely do it. Practice this process after you complete each task during the day and are preparing to move to the next item on your to-do list.

When you determine a problem is worth your time investment, start breaking down the problem into smaller pieces. Tease it apart. We frequently do not recognize exactly what problem we are trying to solve until we dig deeper. Breaking a complex problem down to its foundation and generating original solutions is a way of thinking from “first principles.” Write down your assumptions, then ask “why?” and keep asking “why” until you have exhausted your ability to answer. There you will find the root cause of your problem.

Step 3. Imagine

Engage in mental time travel and create multiple scenarios of the future. Scenario analysis helps you evaluate your choices. Don’t be lazy. Invest the time and energy to think through and evaluate your options. Before you write a line of code or change a single piece of hardware, make sure you have probed and punctured your best ideas from every angle. Nothing saves time and money more effectively than a well-run evaluation process to vet scenarios. Not every decision needs scenario analysis, but all important decisions do.

Step 4. Test

Test your ideas by getting feedback from customers, partners, or other appropriate stakeholders. Try to disprove each scenario. Without feedback, we are blind and stupid, and we will make the same mistakes repeatedly. Feedback helps you better see the reality of the world and allows you to correct mistakes and learn faster. Feedback provides an opportunity to gain empathy by seeing different perspectives, and it shines a bright light on your blind spots, which can improve your decision-making ability.

Direct, honest feedback is hard to find because very few people are willing to tell you the truth. Most people want to avoid conflict and are reluctant to jeopardize relationships. Thus, you will need to actively seek feedback from people with diverse perspectives and experience. Seek out people who have truly different skills, experiences, and worldviews to expose your blind spots. Challenge yourself to accept feedback from someone you dislike. I admit this is hard to do, but we can learn from everyone.

Make the decision

After you engage in the four DO IT steps, then do it—make the decision. For important decisions, think slowly. Be less impulsive and more deliberate. Your first reaction is usually not the best one. Take time for careful and considered reasoning. Take a break. Set aside time to review and think about scenarios. Grapple with tradeoffs, uncertainties, and risk. Sleep on it to allow your mind to consider your options. Your subconscious mind does more thinking than you realize. Frequently, a better solution will occur to you the next morning.

Don’t let thoughts bang around in your head. Apply the DO IT steps to structure your thinking and improve the quality of your decisions.

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Negotiate job offers

Hate to haggle over money? Worried that you might lose an attractive job offer if you focus too much on salary?

Well, consider this: Research shows you could lose over $1 million over your career if you choose not to negotiate when receiving job offers. Don’t make this mistake. Learn how to negotiate effectively to earn more money and gain the respect of the hiring manager. If you don’t, you’ll make lifestyle sacrifices, be paid less than what you’re worth, and leave a lot of money on the table.

Look at this example of a past job offer I negotiated.

Initial Offer

Base salary = $150,000

Equity = .4%

Performance bonus = $0

Final Negotiated Compensation

Base salary = $200,000

Equity = 1.25%

Performance bonus = 15%

Don’t limit negotiations to salary

Discuss all the details when defining your relationship with the hiring manager and employer. Define expectations and agree on everything up front. You can negotiate salary, benefits, stock options, work schedule, start date, geographic location, vacation days, professional development, success metrics, bonus, expense reimbursements (e.g., cell, commute, relocation), and your performance review schedule.

A productive negotiation is more like a dance than a tug of war. Good negotiation involves both parties collaborating to solve a puzzle, so building rapport and trust are essential. You and the hiring manager should be talking and thinking together to align expectations and define a mutually beneficial exchange of value.

Find ways to be helpful. According to a comprehensive analysis of 28 studies on negotiation, the most successful negotiators cared as much about the other party’s success as their own.

The negotiation sets the stage for how you and your manager will work together and how you will reach an agreement when you have different points of view. No one wants to be taken advantage of or start the relationship on the wrong foot.

Push through fear to prioritize your future

Most people want to avoid conflict. And many of us, myself included, suffer from imposter syndrome, which are persistent feelings of inadequacy and self-doubt despite evident success.

These uncomfortable feelings grow from the root of fear. Never negotiate from fear because fear distorts reality. You may fear that a negotiation will jeopardize the job opportunity, but the opposite is true. You have everything to gain and nothing to lose.

If you express genuine excitement and gratitude for their offer and present your preferences with a positive, respectful tone, negotiating will get you more money and more respect from a hiring manager. Most managers don’t want to hire a pushover who lacks confidence or does not know their value. Remember, they offered you the job because they believe you are the best fit for the role.

Of course, there are always outliers, but do you want to work for someone who would pull an offer because you tried to engage in a fair and reasonable discussion to ensure a mutual exchange of value? If a company does retract an offer because you asked for more, be grateful. You just dodged a bullet. Working for that employer would not likely provide the growth opportunities to guide you toward your career goals.

Let’s examine the three phases of effective negotiation:

Prepare to win

Activate a winning mind-set. Are your beliefs holding you back? Removing limiting beliefs is the most important and most challenging part of asking for more. You must suspend your fears, insecurities, and self-doubt. I know, easier said than done. I struggle with this all the time.

But this is one of those times in your life where the stakes are too high for you to lose the mental battle. Push through your fear. Prioritize your future self and the people you love more than your fear of asking for more. Being well prepared will build your confidence and support a winning mind-set.

Think like a detective. Information is power. Most people don’t invest nearly enough time preparing. The outcome of the negotiation rests on your level of preparation, so do your homework. Conduct research on the company, hiring manager, and salary base rates for your desired position and industry. Conduct a detailed search on the hiring manager and read everything available about their background, work history, interests, and affiliations. I’ve invested many hours looking for clues and prepping by reading a hiring manager’s 1,500 tweets and everything else I could find online. This knowledge will help you craft questions to extract useful information and influence the manager.

I usually invest 8-12 hours preparing for an interview or negotiation. One time, I spent two days driving from San Francisco to Los Angeles and back to accompany the founders of a start-up to a customer meeting in order to better understand the job opportunity.

Understand your leverage. Reflect on how much value you bring to the employer. How unique are your skills and experience? Do you bring key relationships or opportunities? Are you easily replaceable? How urgently do they need to fill the position? Who has more leverage? How badly do they need you versus how badly do you need this job? This consideration highlights why you want multiple offers to give yourself leverage and create scarcity.

“Negotiations are won by whoever cares less.”

—Naval Ravikant, cofounder AngelList & successful tech investor

Set optimistic goals. People who expect more and ask for more get more.Set optimistic but credible goals based on your research. Confidence and self-esteem play a significant factor in negotiation. Think through best- and worst-case outcomes. But write down only your desired salary, work schedule, and other details of the best-case scenario.

Make a list of negotiables and rank them by priority. At the appropriate time, share your prioritized list with the hiring manager to build trust and trigger reciprocity. Rank-ordering helps them understand your interests without giving away too much information. Ask the hiring manager to share their priorities and look for opportunities for mutually beneficial tradeoffs.

Here is an example of how you might rank your priorities:

  1. Salary
  2. Benefits
  3. Stock options
  4. Work schedule
  5. Geographic location
  6. Vacation days
  7. Professional development
  8. Success metrics
  9. Bonus
  10. Expense reimbursements (e.g., cell, commute, relocation)
  11. Performance review schedule
  12. Start date

Prepare arguments and questions. Write out your three strongest arguments about why you are an excellent fit for the job. Anticipate how the hiring manager will respond and identify potential counterarguments. Develop a list of your weaknesses they might identify and turn vulnerability into strength. Proactively talking about your weaknesses can encourage the hiring manager to minimize them and argue the opposite.

Write down “what” and “how” questions to help you identify underlying motivations. For example:

Come prepared to communicate why you want the job and how it fits into your long-term career goals. Writing down your questions, arguments, and counterarguments will ensure you are well prepared.

Give and take

Share information to get information. Be vulnerable and make the first move by sharing your priorities, preferences, and fears. Never lie. Make your authenticity work to your advantage. In his best-selling book Give and Take, organizational psychologist and leading expert Adam Grant shows how the best way to earn trust is to show trust. His research offers a wealth of evidence to show that “Most people are matchers: they follow the norm of reciprocity, responding in kind to how you treat them.”

Put yourself in their shoes. Show that you understand the hiring manager’s perspective, mind-set, and worldview. All of us have a deep desire to feel understood. Your ability to understand their goals, constraints, incentives, and emotions gives you an advantage. People are driven by emotions more than logic. Build rapport and connection to establish trust and uncover useful information. If you prepare correctly, you will understand your counterpart and be ready to ask the right questions.

Show you are listening. Listen actively to words and tone of voice and watch their body language closely. Use your emotional intelligence to read the emotion behind their words. But it’s not enough to see and understand their perspective. You need to acknowledge their situation and show you’re listening. You don’t need to agree with their viewpoint, but you need to understand it. Once they feel you are listening, they’re more likely to be honest and tell you something that may prove useful in the negotiation.

Pay close attention to nonverbal communication. Body language and tone of voice have a significant impact on what is communicated. Notice gestures, facial expressions, tone of voice, eye contact (or lack thereof), posture, and other ways people communicate without using language. If you are speaking to more than one person, notice the dynamic between colleagues.

Maximize your ability to pick up clues and prioritize communication better to understand the emotion and meaning behind words. Get time in person whenever possible or use a video call as a backup.

Preferred hierarchy of communication methods:

  1. In-person meeting (first choice)
  2. Video call
  3. Phone call
  4. Email
  5. Text (last resort)

Listen more, speak less. The listener is in control because a person reveals information when talking. And the listener can guide the conversation by asking the right questions. Avoid asking yes-or-no questions. Instead, ask questions that start with “how” or “what.” Avoid “why” questions because they can come across as an accusation and put the other party on the defensive.

Use silence as a tool. Pause and let the other party fill the silence. Make the hiring manager feel they are in control. Probe and gather information to uncover the unknowns that you don’t expect.

Employ mirroring to build trust. Expert negotiators use a technique called mirroring to build trust and keep their counterparts talking. Mirroring is a type of imitation. You can mirror words, body language, or tone of voice to signal respect and concern.

Repeat the last three words of what your counterpart said in the form of a question, and then be quiet for a few seconds. For example, if the hiring manager says, “this role is critical to ensuring customer satisfaction,” you can use mirroring by responding with…” ensuring customer satisfaction?” The person will instinctually elaborate on what they said to keep the conversation going. Nod your head in agreement and mirror their body language. Mirroring works on a subconscious level because people trust people who are similar to themselves. If you pay attention, you will notice you instinctively do this all the time when interacting with people.

Use labeling to reveal unspoken feelings. By labeling unspoken feelings, you invite the other person to describe what they are feeling but may not be saying aloud. Expert negotiators use labeling to neutralize negative emotions and reinforce positive feelings. If you detect tension, concern, or an adverse reaction during your conversation, use labeling as a tool to acknowledge emotion and help diffuse it.

Use neutral words in the form of a phrase or question to label the emotion followed by a few seconds of silence. This will help disrupt intensity and bring the emotion out into the open. By naming it, you show you understand how they feel. A label is a neutral statement of understanding.

Use phrases like these:

It sounds like you are concerned about …

It seems like you have a different perspective about …

It looks like you disagree on …

Using labels will encourage your counterpart to respond and either agree or disagree with what you say. Once an issue is brought out into the open, you can discuss it and find a solution. Labels help you dig beneath the surface and uncover your counterpart’s behavior and perspective’s emotional drivers.

Create fear-of-missing-out (FOMO.) Convince the hiring manager you are unique and will be hard to replace or find elsewhere. In any negotiation, you need leverage to apply pressure to the other party so you can achieve your goals. Although leverage is never the only thing that matters, it is a powerful tool.

Make it clear you are serious about joining their company and excited by the opportunity. But make sure the hiring manager is aware you have other job offers competing for your attention. Be prepared to honestly answer questions such as “Do you have any other offers? If we make you an offer tomorrow, will you say yes? Are we your top choice?”

Share and gather useful information to inform the agreement. Weave the above techniques naturally into the conversation. Remain flexible and adaptable. And don’t rush the process. Enlist the hiring manager to help solve problems. Be genuine and use persuasion principles outlined in my previous email “How to get multiple job offers” to influence.

Agree or walk

Make the first move. Communicate your salary expectations as a range before you receive a formal offer. This sets a strong anchoring effect that influences the employer’s proposal and the rest of the negotiation. You may be surprised by research that says negotiators who put forward their offer first usually come out ahead. Most people think you gain an advantage by letting the employer make their offer first, but the conventional wisdom you read on the major job sites is wrong and not evidence-based. Overwhelming evidence shows there is usually much more to gain by making the first move.

In salary negotiations, the initial anchor is the best predictor of the final salary. Waiting for an offer only makes sense if you are very uncertain about value. However, base rates for compensation adjusted for years of experience, geography, and company size are well-known. The credibility of your offered salary range depends on having a legitimate rationale to back it up. Anchors are so powerful that they even affect the judgment of experts who think they are immune to such influence. For example, real estate professionals who believe they are experts on the local market are still heavily influenced by a home’s list price.

Making the first offer also sets the tone and establishes you as confident, well-prepared, and knowledgeable about your value. High anchors direct the hiring manager’s attention toward your strengths; low anchors direct attention to your weaknesses. Making the first move and setting a high anchor also gives you flexibility and room to make strategic concessions, which will make the hiring manager more satisfied with the outcome.

Recruiters will often ask about your salary expectations on your first call. Always offer a salary range (e.g., $103K to $110K) and make your best-case scenario the bottom of the range. Also, use a non-round number for the bottom of your salary range. This implies you have made specific assumptions and method to calculate the number. Make sure that you can explain your beliefs for your salary range and that your proposal is designed around the base rates for the role, geographic location, and company size. I recommend setting the low end of your salary range not more than 10-15% above the top of the industry-established salary range you uncover in your research.

What do you do if an employer beats you to the punch and gives you an offer or shares the salary range before you share your salary expectation? First, recognize that you are being anchored. Second, make sure you express your enthusiasm and gratitude for their offer. But avoid getting sucked into a compromise and don’t let it influence your response. If their offer is far off the mark, ask them to explain their reasoning or tell them their initial offer is so far off that you don’t feel it’s a fair or productive place to begin.

Next, respond with your predetermined salary range based on your research and goals. Don’t just state your desired salary. Justify your expectations by explaining your strongest arguments regarding how you will provide value. And express your needs based on your situation. For example, be honest about a large student loan or family members you are financially responsible for supporting. Then pause, be silent, and wait for them to respond.

Negotiate the whole deal at once. Resist the temptation to tackle one issue at a time. For example, don’t agree to a salary first, then move on to other topics. Negotiate multiple issues simultaneously, not serially. Consider the value of the entire deal at once. Don’t fixate on salary or any single point. If you get stuck on one issue, deflect and redirect the conversation to consider other negotiables. This strategy will help you and the hiring manager grapple with tradeoffs and problem-solve together. Use the word “fair” to put them on the defensive and gain concessions. Ask them to explain why they think their offer is “fair.” Focus on the most critical elements of the deal. But don’t over-optimize and haggle on every minor detail. Also, avoid giving ultimatums because they can come off the wrong way and box you into a corner.

Don’t split the difference. Meeting in the middle often leads to a bad deal for both parties. Solve the puzzle with the hiring manager to address each party’s priorities and constraints but stand firm on your most important goals. Expert negotiator Chris Voss believes strongly in this principle. He wrote a book, Never Split the Difference, about his life’s work as a veteran FBI negotiator and founder of the Black Swan Group, a consulting firm that trains Fortune 500 companies to handle complex negotiations.

Push boundaries to understand the territory. Getting the hiring manager to say “no” to a request is helpful because it makes them feel in control and secure and helps you recognize where the boundaries are. Don’t be afraid to find the edge. If necessary, force them into a “no” by mislabeling an emotion so they can correct you. For example, you may say, “It seems you can’t make compromises on this issue.”

Conflict brings out the truth. At some point in the discussion, you are likely to hit a core disagreement. When you hit a wall, seek advice to help problem-solve. Tell the hiring manager you value their opinion and ask an open-ended question related to what they would do or recommend if they were in your position.

Understand the power of the person you are negotiating with. Are they the decision-maker or do they need to get approval? How much influence do they have? Do you trust them, and do they have a vested interest in hiring you? You’re generally not negotiating with one person. Usually, a team is involved, even if the rest of the people are behind the scenes. The amount of flexibility a hiring manager has to negotiate often depends on the company’s size and how their budgets are structured. Large companies tend to restrict the flexibility of the hiring manager, while start-ups and small businesses are usually more flexible and will make accommodations if they believe you are the best person for the role.

Speak in a calm and positive tone. Strive to come across as easy-going, good-natured, and solutions-oriented. Avoid aggressive confrontation. If you feel attacked, pause and avoid responding from anger. Instead, ask a question so they can elaborate. Don’t be defensive or reactive. Reserve your direct, assertive voice for when you need to push back. It will have more impact if you reserve it for only the most critical points of the negotiation. And don’t forget to smile.

Imagine you’re negotiating on behalf of someone you care about. If you have trouble advocating for yourself, imagine you’re in charge of getting a job for your spouse, sibling, or friend. How hard would you negotiate in that situation? You might assume that you’re the best advocate for yourself, but research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology shows that many people—especially women—tend to do better when negotiating for someone else.

Summarize your understanding. Summarize what you hear and ask the hiring manager if your understanding is accurate. They can correct you if you have not described the situation accurately. By getting them to say, “That’s right,” they feel understood and affirmed, and you are more likely to make progress. And if you are unsure whether they are fully transparent and honest, you can use summaries to get them to reaffirm their agreement.

Agree or walk away. Hopefully, you can agree on essential terms after working together to define a mutual exchange of value. However, if you are stuck and not making progress, you must always be willing to walk away. If not, you are very unlikely to get what you want.

People sense desperation, and many hiring managers have incentives to get the most for the least, so they will exploit any weakness. Create a deadline to push the process forward to help get unstuck. Often a deadline will rush the other side to be more impulsive. If appropriate, you can also share the terms of a competing offer and say, “I’d rather come to work here. Is there anything you can do to make this an easier decision for me?”

Make sure to get details of the final agreed-upon offer in writing.

Next steps

After you have received one or more job offers, you will enter the final step of making a decision. To figure out whether a decision is good or bad, you need to understand what could be gained or lost and the likelihood of each job offer leading you closer to your goals. Instead of relying on tried but not-so-true tactics like pro and con lists, you need to pull out your full arsenal of mental models and decision-making tools.

To learn more, sign-up for the “High-Performance Playbook” email series (it’s free), where I share the best evidence-based strategies, tactics, and frameworks to advance your career and make more money.

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How to beat robots and build wealth

Career decisions determine where you invest the majority of your time. These important life decisions have a huge impact on your well-being and quality of life—and your risk of being replaced by a robot.

In the industrialized economy of the 20th century, most people learned a skill and then worked the majority of their careers at one or two companies. That industrialized economy required scale and specialization, so large companies were organized around manufacturing and office jobs. Hierarchies were created to manage large groups of people while creating incentives for advancement.

The information economy of the 21st century is decentralized and global. Widespread access to personal computers and the internet has democratized knowledge so that anyone in the world with an internet connection and a desire to learn can build skills and contribute value to the global economy. The advancement of new technology will require workers to continuously learn new skills. Working as an independent contractor and / or working for many different employers is becoming the norm.

Skills needed in the job market are changing rapidly. Artificial intelligence (AI) and automation is accelerating and will replace most jobs that are repetitive or don’t require creativity. Many doctors, lawyers, investment advisors, taxi and truck drivers, accountants, cashiers and most service workers will be replaced by robots and software. Any job that is not creative or complicated is at risk.

However, I’m not yet convinced that our main problem will be robots and software taking jobs from humans. Historically, we do a poor job of imagining the jobs of the future because we are blind to the new industries, technologies, and services that will be created. In a very short period of time, we have seen personal computers, the internet, cable tv, mobile phones, and cloud computing go from science projects to mainstream, essential infrastructure. The largest tech companies in the world, including Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple, and Alibaba, did not even exist when I was born. And I’m not that old!

Our main problem is that our educational system was not designed for a global information economy, and our broken system is not equipped to handle the massive retraining effort needed. Most colleges today don’t prepare graduates with the necessary skills for our current economy. As highlighted in this article in The Atlantic, companies have been complaining for years about the lack of skilled workers, even though millions of people are unemployed or looking for full-time work in the U.S. New models of education are needed.

Although our current system is not yet designed to address the scale of the problem, access to knowledge and training has never been more available to anyone who is self-motivated enough to pursue it. Also, low-cost computing power and the internet provide a path to go around the traditional gatekeepers in many industries, such as media, music, art, publishing, and technology. Here are a few ways to build wealth while pursuing the career you want and ensuring robots will never replace you.

Constructing Your Future

Follow your interests. Build specific knowledge around your interests and find something you love to do. You will gain unfair competitive advantage because your passion will push you to work harder than other people and spur you to be creative and innovative in your field.

Pursue highly technical or creative work. Creative work equals job security. Anything not creative can be replicated and replaced by AI. Specific technical knowledge cannot easily be duplicated.

Invest in continuous learning. Technology advancement will impact every industry. If you are not constantly learning, you will be left behind. Seek out roles and opportunities that accelerate learning. Gain an advantage by building a personalized learning system that keeps you on the cutting edge of knowledge in your field.

Get equity to ensure financial freedom. You will not gain wealth by getting a paycheck. Start your own business or get stock options or restrictive stock units in the company you join.

Move to a hub where your industry is centered. Leverage network effects by building relationships and living in a location where your industry ecosystem is strongest. For example, if you are in tech, move to San Francisco. New York is the best place if you’re interested in fashion or finance. If you want to pursue acting or music, go to Los Angeles.

Seek leverage and compounding value. The information economy has dropped the cost of entry to almost zero. Software and the internet provide a multitude of opportunities to help you make money while you sleep. Find ways to contribute value to the world that do not require you to work by the hour.

Work for people who will help you grow. You work for a person not a company, and your boss will likely determine your growth and satisfaction. Don’t work for people who are not invested in helping you grow, even if the company is great.

Create a decision-making process. Career decisions require identifying and weighting decision criteria. List up to five criteria to evaluate and test potential scenarios. Weight the decision criteria based on importance. For example, if I were evaluating new job opportunities, I would use the following five criteria.

After writing down your decision criteria, assign weights to each criteria on a 0–100 scale based on importance. Maybe the most important is interest level and you assign 30 points, while the least important is location that gets 10. The sum total of the weights should equal 100. After establishing your weighted decision-making criteria, apply a score between -10 to 10 to each criteria for each job. For example, if one job opportunity had a short 20-minute commute I would give it a score of 8. Compared to another job that a  one hour commute I would give a score of -9. This process will help you determine a total score for each job, but don’t get caught up in being too precise. Remember, it’s a tool to help you grapple with tradeoffs and think better.

We live in an unprecedented time of opportunity and prosperity. However, you need to work hard and make smart decisions if you want to participate in this abundance. No one is going to look out for your interests or care about your future more than you do. Find something you love to do that is creative or highly technical and then invest lots of time learning to be the best in the field. Prioritize learning over short term financial gain and find ways to create leverage and compounding value over time. Use criteria and a structured decision-making process for important career decisions to ensure you are on the path to financial freedom. Build specific knowledge in highly technical or creative work and you will not be replaced by a robot.

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Culture of envy

Envy causes pain and unhappiness and can even lead to emotional or physical violence. We slip into envy when we resent others for their achievement or good fortune. There are two types of envy. Malicious envy wants the person who has found good fortune to suffer and to be stripped of their achievement, status, or possession. Benign envy can be a motivational force to push you to work harder to succeed.

Natural-born talent is not equally distributed. No matter how hard I work, I’ll never beat LeBron James at basketball or world champion Magnus Carlsen at chess. I’ll never be able to sing and entertain a crowd like Bruno Mars or solve complex physics problems like Nobel laureate Donna Strickland.

But talent is not all that is involved. The effort people invest in pursuing their interests or passion is not equal. In the early days of Microsoft, Bill Gates worked almost around the clock and sometimes would not leave the office for days at a time. Lebron James invested thousands of hours practicing basketball, developing his body, and studying the game. Donna Strickland spent decades studying the physics of lasers.

The birth lottery plays a significant role in your health, intelligence, physical ability, family support, and the opportunities that are available to you. All these factors can lead to different levels of value people contribute to society and to different levels of rewards for their contributions. The result is lots of opportunity for envy.

Humans have struggled with envy for a long time. It’s one of the seven deadly sins in Christian teachings. In the Hebrew Bible, envy is the motivation behind Cain killing his brother Abel. Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam all feature prominent warnings about the dangers of envy.

Today we are seeing a backlash against competent, educated, wealthy, and successful people. Billionaires such as Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffet, and Bill Gates are frequently vilified on mainstream and social media. This trend is disturbing. Their businesses have created massive value to society, and their companies employ over a million people. In addition, Gates and Buffett are voluntarily giving away almost all their wealth to help solve the world’s biggest problems. Bezos is investing billions in space exploration, which will convey massive benefits for society and the development of new technology.

There’s not a fixed pot of money. Unfortunately, there are people who hold a wrong assumption that those who have more have taken it from those who have less. Accumulation of wealth is not zero sum. Poker is a zero-sum game because the amount of money in the pot is fixed. Therefore, the person that wins the game is taking money from the players that lose. Life and business do not work this way. Businesses such as Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and Microsoft contribute to lower prices for consumers, employ people, and contribute value to society. Microsoft sells software that supports the growth and success of thousands of businesses, nonprofits, and government agencies.

The vast majority of millionaires in the United States earned their wealth. They did not inherit it. An article in U.S. News titled 7 Myths About Millionaires highlights “a 2017 survey found that 88 percent of millionaires are self-made. Only 12 percent inherited significant money (at least 10 percent of their wealth), and most did not grow up in exclusive country club neighborhoods.”

Don’t allow envy to breed discontent, resentment, and bitterness. Here are a few questions I ask myself to overcome envy when it arises.

  • Do I want to switch places with this person?

We don’t get to pick and choose parts of someone’s life. You can’t pick the NBA success and skip the hours of physical training or the relentless media attention. You get the good with the bad. I have yet to meet someone who I would be willing to trade places with.

  • Has this person worked harder or contributed more value to the world than me?

My honest answer is usually “yes.” Once I acknowledge the contribution and effort of a highly successful person, I am motivated to work harder.

  • What am I grateful for?

Answering this question immediately reframes my perspective and allows me to feel gratitude for all the prosperity I enjoy.

Use benign envy to push yourself to work harder to succeed. But let’s stop malicious envy. In addition to helping lower the temperature in our public conversations that decide how we govern our communities; we will help ourselves by reducing our emotional pain and resentment.

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How to evaluate job offers

I hate the idea of backtracking and wasting time. Have you ever accidentally gotten on the wrong train or bus and traveled for a while before realizing you were going in the wrong direction? If so, you understand the anxiety and frustration. Getting on the wrong train or bus may only waste 30 to 60 minutes of your time, but accepting the wrong job offer can cost you six months to a year of your life.

Because job decisions involve so much uncertainty and tradeoffs, the ideal job-decision tool would be a crystal ball. Then you could peer into your future and see the outcome of your choice. But since you don’t have a crystal ball, how do you make a decision?

The stakes are high. Where you decide to work has an outsized impact on your happiness and quality of life. And the person or people you work for and with have an even greater impact than the company you join. These decisions affect where you live, how much free time you have, the quality of your relationships with friends and family, your health, and what type of house you buy.

When you accept a job offer, you are committing significant time and energy. And you’re closing the door to other opportunities, at least temporarily. Often, it takes three to six months to ramp up in a new job before you hit your stride to make significant contributions or understand whether you are a good fit for the role, team, and culture. You don’t want to waste time and deal with the consequences of quitting suddenly just because you didn’t make a good decision. 

Invest time evaluating this critical decision. Leverage over two decades of scientific research into the predictors of a satisfying life and career to help you assess your job offer.

The best predictors of job satisfaction:

Use thinking tools to evaluate job offers

You may be thinking, “Those factors make sense, but how do I practically apply them to my job decision?”

Use the evaluation criteria and thinking tools discussed below to help you grapple with tradeoffs and clarify your thinking. To figure out whether a decision is good or bad, you need to understand what could be gained or lost and the likelihood of each possibility unfolding.

Thinking tools provide shortcuts to higher-level thinking, forcing your brain to think about a decision from different perspectives. They also allow you to engage in mental time travel and imagine your future in the job to uncover risks and weigh options. 

Think deeply, write down answers, and take time for careful and considered reasoning. I recommend investing a minimum of three hours of focused, undistracted time using the thinking tools below before soliciting feedback from trusted friends or advisors.

Avoid pro-con lists

Before I share my recommended thinking tools, I want to tell you about a common tool you should avoid: pro-con lists.

Pro-con lists suck because they:

Instead of pro-con lists, use the following tools and mental models to improve your thinking and evaluate your options.

Use the job decision scorecard

I created the job decision scorecard based on scientific research and other important factors to help me think through and evaluate job offers. Use this tool to assess a single job offer or compare multiple offers.

The scorecard includes:

Evaluation criteria

Adjust weights based on importance. Not all criteria are of equal importance. Adjust weights on a 1-to-10 scale (10 = most important) based on your preferred level of importance of each criterion. For example, you highly value having a supervisor you enjoy working with, so you assign a weight of 9 for the “Supervisor” category. Since you care less about “Perks” (e.g., gym membership, meals, cell phone), you assign a weight of 2 to this category.

Score each job offer. Add a score for each criterion on a 1-to-10 scale (10 = most favorable.) You will receive a total score adjusted by assigned weights. For example, if one job opportunity includes a 15-minute commute, I would give it a score of 9 in that category. I would give another job with a one-hour commute a score of 2.

Add confidence levels. Consider all factors and add your degree of certainty and likelihood of success. Are you 80%, 50%, or 20% confident this job provides the best next step in your career? Use a 1%-to-100% scale in Row 20 on the job scorecard template.

Instructions to complete the job decision scorecard

Step 1. Make a copy of the Google sheet to enable editing and data entry.

Step 2. Adjust weights in column B on a 1-to-10 scale (10 = most important) based on your preferred level of importance of each criterion.

Step 3. Score each job offer on a 1-to-10 scale (10 = most favorable) for each evaluation criteria. You will receive a total score adjusted by assigned weights on Row 21.

Step 4. Add confidence levels using a 1%-to-100% scale on your likelihood of success (e.g., 80%, 50%, 20%) on Row 22.

Don’t get caught up in being too precise. Remember, it’s a thinking tool—not a crystal ball. It can help you grapple with tradeoffs but can’t precisely predict the future, no matter how accurately you score it.

Engage in mental time travel

Envisioning positive and negative future outcomes helps you identify obstacles, predict reasons for success and eliminate regrets. Research shows that anticipating the ways things might go wrong helps you more successfully reach your destination. You can produce 30% more reasons for why something might fail when you engage in mental time travel to identify obstacles to the desired outcome.[1] Use the following steps to facilitate your mental trips.

Apply mental models

In the summer of 2016, I went through the startup accelerator Y Combinator (YC.) One of the most valuable aspects of that experience was “office hours,” when I met with a YC partner and got feedback about a specific problem or decision. I gained new insight as the partner helped me view my problem through a different lens. Mental models can function like a YC partner or advisor, forcing you to see a problem from a different perspective and teaching you how to think better.

Mental models make decisions less risky by helping you better understand the reality of the world around you. We all have models in our heads based on our genetics, experiences, and backgrounds, but we need a toolkit of models to make good decisions. Relying solely on one model is like seeing every problem as a nail and solving every problem with a hammer.

Get feedback on your job decision

After you invest time alone using thinking tools, ask two to three trusted friends who know you well to provide feedback on the job offer. Also, seek feedback from a coach or two to three people in the field you want to enter. Feedback will give you an outside view to ensure your enthusiasm for the opportunity is not blinding you to negative consequences or other options. Be aware of the bias of the people giving you feedback. Sometimes you will receive feedback that conflicts. Your job is to synthesize the input and decide what to disregard.

Choose wisely

Don’t rush your decision. Sleep on it to allow your mind to consider your options. Your subconscious mind does more thinking than you realize. After investing time using thinking tools and seeking feedback, you are ready to make your choice and commit. Don’t accept the offer if you lack conviction. Remember, “Hell Yeah or No!” It may be better to invest your time exploring other options and building skills rather than job hop as there will be a significant time investment before you and your new employer know if you will be a successful match. If you decide to accept, commit fully and start planning for success.

To learn more, sign-up for the “High-Performance Playbook” email series (it’s free), where I share the best evidence-based strategies, tactics, and frameworks to advance your career and make more money.

[1] Deborah Mitchell, J. Edward Russo, Nancy Pennington, “Back to the future: Temporal perspectives in the explanation of events,” Journal of Behavior Decision-Making 2, no. 1 (January 1989): 25-38.

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Treat mental fitness like physical fitness

Do you dedicate time to improving your mental fitness? Most of us believe we should take active steps to improve our physical health, dedicating time to exercise and making an effort to eat healthier food. However, many of us don’t think much about enhancing our mental fitness.

Go to bed smarter than you woke up.

Mental fitness requires exposing yourself to new ideas, considering opposing viewpoints, and learning new skills. Interest and inspiration sparks learning and motivates us to act. It awakens our inner creativity, shaking us from our apathy and triggering our desire to grow. Curiosity and a desire to gain understanding activates learning.

Learning takes effort.

Muscles grow stronger when you stress them until they fatigue. Your brain grows stronger through practice, repetition, and exposure to new ideas. Making the effort to learn leads to knowledge.

When you pursue a goal or explore an interesting topic, you are emotionally invested in the outcome — no one has to force you to learn. The emotional investment helps motivate you to do the hard work of gaining proficiency and competence.

I love learning but hated school. I felt like I was being told to memorize a lot of information but had no idea how it applied to me. My teachers did not show me how I could apply concepts I was learning in algebra and geometry classes to help solve problems in my life.

Unfortunately, few people actively pursue learning after their formal schooling ends. They may learn as a consequence of performing their jobs or being in relationships with people, but they are not seeking out methods and practices to improve performance.

You can’t just wait for inspiration to strike. You must seek it out. Expose yourself to inspiring people and place yourself in challenging situations. Look for books, podcasts, blogs, lectures, videos, and performances that will inspire you and help you learn. A lot of people in the world are doing amazing, inspiring things — actively search for them.

Be selective.

Time is your most valuable resource. We are drowning in social media and 24-hour news. Don’t waste your time consuming information that you will not care about next year. Focus your attention on topics you are interested in and want to master.

Read a lot.

According to a 2015 article by Kathleen Elkins on the Business Insider website, a study of 1,200 highly successful people showed that reading was a common pastime and a practice they use to educate themselves. Successful people would rather be educated than entertained.

If you don’t like to read, then listen to audiobooks and podcasts. Choose quality over quantity. You don’t have to finish a book or podcast that does not capture your interest. Move on and start reading or listening to something else.

Read or listen actively when you are alert and focused. If I try to read in bed before going to sleep, I rarely finish more than two pages before the book smacks me in the face. Reading while sitting in a chair in the morning works better for me.

Schedule time for reading. You won’t finish many books if you prioritize other activities and think you will just fit reading in when you have time. I read for 30 minutes as a part of my morning routine.

Compound your knowledge.

Compounding interest works in economics because you earn “interest on your interest” and your money compounds over a long-time frame. You can get a similar exponential return on learning by investing a small amount of time every day to add new knowledge. The more you read, the better you get at it. You will start to read faster, and your knowledge will compound.

For example, if you read 30 minutes a day you will read 183 hours over a year. The only way I’m able to dedicate that much time for reading is by building it into my morning routine. Reading the book Waking Up, by Sam Harris, and practicing meditation inspired my morning routine and has reduced my tendency to react to challenging situations, improved my focus, and given me a more relaxed start to my day.

Take notes.

You don’t get a lot of benefit from reading if you forget what you read. Write down important ideas and key insights as you read, and you will learn more and remember more about what you read.

I tend to forget things, so I take notes as I read instead of waiting until the end of the chapter or my allotted reading time. I prefer to use the Notion app because it is searchable and organizes my notes. However, using pen and paper helps reinforce learning, so use a notebook if you prefer. Notes provide a nice summary of all the ideas and insights you have learned.

Create a schedule to review your notes.

Reviewing your notes will maximize retention. Spaced repetition, as explained in this article on the Farnam Street website, is a learning technique built on reviewing previously learned material at increasing intervals of time. It has been proven to significantly improve learning.

You don’t have to spend a lot of time to practice spaced repetition. A typical schedule to review your notes may be one day after reading, then one week, then two weeks, then one month, then six months, then one year. Invest a few minutes per session to review notes. After I started taking notes and reviewing them, I noticed that I retain a lot more information than in the past.

Share your knowledge with other people.

Teaching other people forces you to internalize learning at a deeper level. Test your knowledge by first writing down your concept in a way that you could explain it to an eight-year-old child. This article on the Farnam Street website labels this technique the Feynman technique, named after the brilliant Nobel-prize-winning physicist, Richard Feynman. This process will help identify gaps in your existing knowledge and help you learn faster with better understanding.

My recommended books and podcasts

I go out of my way to listen to people and ideas that challenge me. If I’m learning about a new topic or want to achieve a greater depth of knowledge, I seek out experts in the field that hold opposing opinions — especially controversial ones. Ideas rooted in truth always hold up to deep skepticism and scrutiny. Here are a few book recommendations, and the podcasts I listen to on a weekly basis.

Books

One of many insights I am learning from reading these books is that the most effective intervention point to impact change in the world is at the level of the individual.

The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (new abridged version with volumes 1, 2, 3)

Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Blitzscaling by Reid Hoffman

Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

On Writing Well by William Zinsser

How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan

What You Do Is Who You Are by Ben Horowitz

Beyond Good And Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche

Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker

12 Rules for Life by Jordan Peterson

Good Profit by Charles G. Koch

Podcasts:

I spend a lot of time (1 to 2 hours/day) listening to podcasts. I listen at the gym, while walking my dogs, commuting, doing dishes, and waiting in line. If I’m not working or talking with someone I’m most likely listening to a podcast. I take notes while listening, typically I use use voice-to-text to record my notes quickly using the Notion app because I’m usually not in a position to write them down.

Personal Development, Psychology, Improving Society

Naval

Making Sense (Sam Harris)

The Jordan B Peterson Podcast

Conversations with Tyler (Tyler Cowen)

The Tim Ferriss Show

The Knowledge Project (Shane Parrish)

The Portal (Eric Weinstein)

Derek Sivers

The Arthur Brooks Show

Akimbo (Seth Godin)

TED Radio Hour

Hidden Brain

Freakonomics Radio

Technology & Startups

Y Combinator

a16z

Greymatter (Greylock Partners)

Masters of Scale (Reid Hoffman)

This Week In Startups (Jason Calacanis)

AGI Podcast

How I Built This (Guy Raz)

Political

Quillette

The Ben Shapiro Show

Miscellaneous

The Joe Rogan Experience  includes lots of diverse, interesting guests but I usually don’t listen to interviews with comedians/entertainers or the mixed martial art (MMA) show episodes.

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Write down your decisions

Write down and track decisions to improve your judgment over time. If you are not evaluating your decisions, how do you know you are making the right choices? Good outcomes are not a good indicator of a good decision. How much was due to luck? Making good decisions requires practice. If you don’t track and evaluate your decisions, you don’t have a feedback loop or a way to improve. Discipline and humility are required.

At work, writing down and sharing decisions also prevents problems by ensuring all people involved in the process are aligned. You don’t have time to read the notes from every meeting, so sharing decisions in writing provides an efficient way to communicate key information and flag problems before they grow bigger.

Recording your decisions also keeps you honest. Our memories are unreliable and susceptible to distortion. Most of us can retrieve only 50% of the information we learned an hour ago. Don’t believe me? Take this quick test: Do you remember how many email messages you sent yesterday? Most likely not—unless you are intentionally tracking and recording the results.

Poor memory leads to hindsight bias, which is remembering events as more predictable than they were at the time we made the decision. Hindsight bias makes us think less critically and become overconfident in our abilities.

Staying accountable

Tracking decisions keeps us accountable. Who was involved in making the decision? What were the factors and assumptions driving it? You don’t need to write down every small decision you make. However, every important decision should be written down.

Set a quarterly review cycle to evaluate important decisions with your team. What decisions did you get right? Why? What mistakes did you make? A review allows you to reflect on your mistakes and why you made them, which ultimately allows you to improve.

Write down and track your decisions to improve your judgement and learn from mistakes.

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Have fewer opinions

We are not experts on most things, so why does everyone need to have an opinion on so many issues? It’s very difficult to convince yourself of a new idea if a contradictory idea is already anchored in your thinking. We are too frequently blinded by our own opinions, but we can design decision-making processes to overcome this bias. Such a process can help you avoid painful mistakes and gain an advantage, but this effort takes humility and can be difficult.

As you get older, you realize how much you got wrong in the past. Most of the beliefs and opinions I held most deeply in my twenties and thirties were wrong. In fact, it would be an easier exercise to identify what I was right about than to try to count all the ways I was wrong. I see the error of my past ways more clearly now because I’ve learned more, seen more, and thought more. Exposing yourself to different viewpoints and engaging in a little bit of self-reflection can reveal how easy it is to trick yourself.

Cultivate nuance

It’s highly unlikely you’ve studied most issues or problems enough to have an informed opinion, but jumping to conclusions too quickly can be the path of least resistance. We make instant judgments and quick decisions because uncertainty is both uncomfortable and mentally demanding. Our brains use lots of energy to process conflicting information, which is what we get when we engage in nuanced thinking or look at a problem from multiple points of view.

To efficiently navigate life, we like to make instant judgments. We categorize information as true or false. We label people as friends or enemies. Making quick decisions had evolutionary advantages in helping humans avoid predators and poisonous snakes. However, relying on quick judgments and opinions is not the most effective way to make important decisions. Delay forming an opinion until you have reviewed all the important facts and heard from all key stakeholders. This process forces you to be patient. Important questions rarely have black-and-white answers, and important decisions require self-reflection and input from others.

Here are a few ways to stop yourself from being too rigid in your thinking.

Good ideas survive deep skepticism and intense competition. Stress-testing ideas exposes their weaknesses and highlights their strengths. You gain confidence in the truth of an idea by trying to disprove it.

Be humble, expose yourself to diverse viewpoints, and have fewer opinions.

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Tell a better story to make more money

I decided not to go to college because I believed it would slow down my rate of learning. Although I was hungry for knowledge and loved to learn, I hated sitting in a classroom. So instead of following a degree plan, I followed my curiosity and designed my own educational track based on my interests. 

Following my interests led me on many adventures. I studied meditation in India, led teenagers on 40-day backpacking and climbing expeditions in Alaska, worked on a farm, built and remodeled houses, and started a business making commercial composting equipment. My learning and development accelerated because I was fully engaged and interested in what I was learning.

But when my business failed, I was twenty-eight years old and had to get a job. And although I had a diverse set of useful skills and experiences, I didn’t have a college degree. I was scared that no one would hire me or that I would be stuck in a job I didn’t like. I needed to learn how to effectively tell my story to influence people to hire me—even when I didn’t meet the minimum requirement for a college degree. Necessity can be a powerful motivator.

Instead of allowing others to see my resume as the record of someone lacking education and blowing in the wind trying out different jobs, I anchored my story on my unique background. Using the threads of intense curiosity and drive, I stitched together my narrative and emphasized my rare skill combination (construction trades and taking my startup idea all the way through manufacturing composting equipment.) My experiences leading expeditions in Alaska and starting a business from scratch highlighted the desirable traits (self-starter, ambitious, responsible, problem solver, high integrity, effective communicator, self-aware) that employers want.

That experience taught me how the power of a well-crafted story can flip a disadvantage into an advantage. Learning to tell a compelling story enabled me to beat the competition — and the college requirement. I received multiple job offers and took a position as executive director of a professional training organization that aimed to design, build, and renovate housing for a clean energy future. And although I was only in my late-twenties, I successfully negotiated a path to a $175,000 base salary within 18 months of being hired. 

Your story is your most valuable asset

If you learn to craft a clear and compelling story, you can earn more money and land a job that gives you a sense of purpose. Effectively telling your story is key to persuading, influencing, and inspiring the people you want to work with. Don’t settle for making less money in a job you don’t like because you don’t know how to communicate your strengths and your potential. Your story matters. Get the job you want by learning to tell it well. 

Over the last 20+ years, I’ve interviewed and participated in hiring dozens of smart, qualified people with talents and skills in engineering, marketing, design, sales, and operations. Job candidates who could not tell their story effectively were at a big disadvantage. 

Humans love stories. We’re all storytellers and consumers of stories. Every decision you’ve ever made was influenced by a story, and we use stories to create and extract meaning from our experiences and to understand who we are. Stories are stronger than steel, more valuable than gold, and more powerful than nuclear weapons. They provide the foundation for us to build trust and collaborate. Without stories, money, government, religion, companies, and culture would not exist. Stories build connections and are one of our most important innovations.

Whoever tells the best story wins

Your story can help you stand out from the crowd. The job market has gotten more competitive, and many companies are quickly moving to a distributed workforce. You are no longer competing only with people who live within commuting distance of an office. Now you compete head-to-head with a global talent pool, many of whom are willing to work for less money. 

Recruiters and hiring managers are busy, so they don’t invest a lot of time reviewing your resume and application materials, which tend to be impersonal lists of credentials and work history. However, you can grab their attention by crafting an impactful story mapped to the job selection criteria.

You don’t convince people to hire you with facts. Adding more skills, certifications, or success metrics to your resume is not the most effective way to help you stand out and influence decision-makers. You convince them by changing how they feel and react to you. You don’t change minds without winning hearts. 

Instead of providing a list of achievements, provide a memorable story that shows how you overcame a challenge or resolved conflict and describe how you were changed as a result. Your stories can help build trust and connection with your audience. 

Nike does not pound you with facts about how many athletes wear their shoes. Instead, they showcase the personal stories of professional tennis star Serena Williams or golfer Tiger Woods, describing how they overcame adversity and rose to the top. 

How to craft a good story

All humans tell and appreciate stories, but not everyone is born with the storytelling gift. Fortunately, storytelling is a skill you can learn. There’s a proven formula, which is known by authors, corporate marketers, Hollywood filmmakers, and gifted public speakers. Great stories have a particular structure that elicit an emotional response in a listener or reader — making them more meaningful, memorable, and impactful. To elicit this response, you must reveal information in a particular sequence.

A story consists of a character (you, in this case), in a circumstance, facing a challenge and a choice that leads to change—whether it’s a slight change in perspective or a life-altering transformation. The purpose of your story is to get your message noticed—and believed. Best-selling author and professional story advisor Bernadette Jiwa shares the following principles and story framework to illustrate how to create compelling stories.

Three storytelling principles

5 Cs Story Framework

Use the following structure to outline your stories.

Tailor your story to the audience

Even if you follow Jiwa’s principles and use the 5 Cs story framework, your story won’t be effective unless you tailor it to your audience and what they are interested in hearing.

If your audience is a hiring manager, reverse engineer your desired job by mapping your stories to the job selection criteria. Select five stories to showcase your skills and experience for a specific role (e.g., software engineer, account executive, operations manager.) To select the right stories, start with the selection criteria for the role you want. Most jobs list qualifications and responsibilities, typically from most to least important.

If you are applying for different roles, you need to adapt your stories appropriately. For example, if the role involves managing people, showcase a story around your communication skills and leading by example. But if you are applying for an individual contributor role, use a story highlighting your initiative and conscientiousness.

In addition to mapping your stories to relevant job qualifications and responsibilities, I recommend crafting stories that highlight the traits listed below. When I’m reviewing applications and interviewing candidates, I prioritize these traits and ask myself these questions about a candidate.

Write down your stories to gain leverage

Use writing as a tool to help you think and communicate more clearly before you head into a job interview or other situation where you may be telling your story. Clear writing becomes clear thinking, and writing helps you formulate, organize, and edit your stories into a clear and persuasive form before you talk with decision-makers, who will have limited time to engage with you.

Often you will not have the opportunity to speak directly with all the decision-makers, so look for other ways to share your written stories more widely. Include relevant stories when answering or asking questions through your email or other communication during the hiring process.

Share your stories online through a personal website, blog, and social media and make sure that potential employers know where to find these sites. Create a personal website to showcase a portfolio of your ideas. Portfolios are not just for designers or artists; knowledge workers who create online portfolios showcasing stories of how they think and solve problems will have a big advantage over the competition. 

Writing that showcases your domain knowledge and experience is not only useful when you are applying for jobs, it can actually attract opportunities. Anyone who understands sales knows it’s easier to sell something when the buyer is coming to you. Become a magnet for potential employers through your writing, whether it is online or in traditional publications. If you’re job hunting, want to make more money, or you are not happy in your current job, invest the time to craft better stories.

To learn more, sign-up for the “High-Performance Playbook” email series (it’s free), where I share the best evidence-based strategies, tactics, and frameworks to advance your career and make more money.

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Don’t trust your gut

The more complex the situation, the less you should trust your intuition, which is your brain’s attempt to make decisions based on patterns it recognizes from a lifetime of experiences. Unfortunately, our brains can’t process the level of complexity around us, and our intuition can be dangerous when detached from data and analysis.

In data we trust

Use computers and data to support decision-making and evaluate scenarios. Collect and analyze as much relevant data as possible. Beware of small sample sizes and extreme results as the data may not be representative of the situation.

It’s easy to misinterpret data and see patterns that don’t exist. In statistics this is called “regression to the mean,” a common statistical phenomenon that can mislead us. The nature of the problem will direct you to the appropriate type of data and the best collection method. Fortunately, a computer can evaluate a massive data set in seconds.

Bias, optimism, pessimism, or bad information can skew our interpretations of events or the world. Our veil of ignorance prevents us from seeing reality accurately, but most of us are convinced we are right and other people are wrong. Our preconceptions can cause us to trust bad intuitions, overlook or dismiss crucial information, and make bad decisions.

I’ve noticed that the top experts in a field often admit there is a lot they don’t know or understand. That’s because the more you know about something, the more likely you see how much you don’t know. We don’t even understand consciousness or how our own brains work, and we have barely begun exploring the oceans or outer space. To say we have blind spots is a massive understatement.

But don’t ignore your instincts either

Intuition does have a role in decision-making, although you do not want to trust it blindly. Don’t ignore your instincts but do assume they are wrong and try to disprove them. Pay attention to your intuition because your brain is sending you a useful signal that something is important here, which will open a path for further questioning and discovery.

How to follow

Ignore this rule when facing ethical decisions on how to behave properly. Your gut usually knows right from wrong in those cases.

Use data and analysis to help you make better decisions. Don’t trust your gut.

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Let the best ideas win

Good ideas survive deep skepticism and intense competition. Stress-testing ideas exposes their weaknesses and highlights their strengths. Innovation happens when people are encouraged to put forward their best thinking, no matter their status, power, or tenure.

I heard Eric Schmidt, former Google CEO and chairman, speak at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. He attributed a lot of Google’s success to the company’s practice of letting the best ideas win. Google embodies this ethos and approach to innovation in X Development, its semisecret innovation lab that works on moonshot technology, such as Google’s self-driving cars. The lab celebrates failure and gives bonuses to teams that successfully kill their own projects by disproving their hypotheses.

Easy to understand, difficult to implement

Most of us enjoy seeing our ideas adopted and don’t like watching them be criticized. When you combine this self-protective tendency with the hierarchies that develop in organizations, you can unintentionally protect bad ideas. You have likely witnessed a situation where no one wants to criticize an idea because it’s a pet project of someone who holds power in the organization.

Surrounding yourself with people who think like you blinds you to flaws in your thinking. The search for truth, knowledge, and innovation requires a free and open exchange of ideas. Seek out people with diverse viewpoints and invite criticism. Allow the best ideas to grow and let the bad ones die. Natural selection has been implementing this principle since life on earth began.

Learn to embrace failure and argue constructively

Innovation requires failure. British inventor Sir James Dyson spent 15 years creating 5,126 versions of his dual cyclone vacuum cleaner before he found the right design. Criticize ideas—not people. The competition of ideas only works if people share their best thinking, and people won’t speak up if there is a chance they will be attacked or disrespected. Not all ideas are going to be good. However, people need to feel safe and supported so they will share their ideas. Find believable people who disagree with you. Understand all ideas should be considered but consider the presenter’s track record and experience. If you don’t have direct experience with a topic, then don’t offer strong opinions. Consider a person’s believability when evaluating the worth of their opinions.

Here are a few practical ways to let the best ideas win.

There’s usually an exception to every rule. Ignore this rule if there is not enough time to implement an idea before the company dies.

Good ideas survive intense scrutiny. Encourage everyone on your team to put their best ideas forward. And let the best ideas win.

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Make fewer decisions

Create habits and automate decisions to save time and energy. Every decision we make throughout the day requires attention and carries an opportunity cost; thus, creating decision-making systems can make you more productive and less frazzled. Once you build a habit, you make fewer decisions.

“We don’t rise to the level of our goals. We fall to the level of our systems.”
—James Clear, author of Atomic Habits

Habits are actions we repeat until they become automatic. Life would be unproductive and unnecessarily stressful without habits. According to a study by Duke University researchers, habits account for 40% of our decisions.

Do you remember the first few times you drove a car? How much attention did you pay to every movement and decision? Yet after years of driving, many of us text, listen to the radio, eat, and talk on the phone without thinking much about the actions it takes to actually drive the car. I’m not recommending distracted driving, by the way, but lots of people successfully do lots of things every day while they are driving. That’s because the steps needed to drive become habits, freeing up energy and attention to focus on additional actions.

Create habits to think less. Habits reduce cognitive load and save time by reducing stress and providing structure. Do you really want to spend several minutes every week examining the calendar of everyone on your team to determine the best time for your weekly meeting? No, you don’t. That’s why you set up a recurring calendar invite at the same meeting time. You may be surprised by the number of ways you can apply this strategy to reduce friction and cut the number of decisions you need to make.

Habit loop

I recommend the book Atomic Habits to learn how to build good habits and break bad ones. In his book, author James Clear explains how all habits proceed through four stages.

  1. Cue: triggers your brain to initiate a behavior based on information that predicts a reward (e.g., money, status, food, sex, praise, approval, sense of satisfaction)
  2. Craving: links to a desire to change your internal state
  3. Response: transforms your action into a habit
  4. Reward: satisfies your craving and desire, which is the ultimate goal of the habit[1]

When you understand how the habit loop operates, you have a better chance to design good habits through experimentation and repetition. Design good habits by removing impediments to a desired behavior. Break bad habits by adding friction to a negative behavior. Follow these six steps to create good habits.

Habit design

Step 1: Make the new habit part of your identity. The most important step in creating a new habit is to embrace the identity of who you want to become. Identity is shaped by our beliefs, behavior, and worldview. Self-development requires continually learning and upgrading your identity. For example, I’m almost always on time for meetings. I’ve internalized the value of respecting other people’s time so punctuality has become a part of my identity.

Step 2: Use “inversion” to identify and remove obstacles. Inversion is a thinking tool that allows you to flip a problem around and think backward. Inversion looks at the problem in reverse and involves identifying all the things to avoid. Inversion doesn’t always solve the problem, but it helps you think more clearly about removing unnecessary obstacles. For example, you want to be more productive and notice that you are more likely to get tired in the afternoon if you eat a heavy lunch. But when you eat a salad or something light, you are less tired and more productive, so you begin to eat a lighter lunch, removing the impediment to your productivity. Inversion removes obstacles.

Step 3: Start with baby steps. The best way to start a new habit is to make it easy to follow. Motivation and willpower are useful for getting started, but they are unreliable. Don’t make the mistake of setting goals and expectations too high. Build habits from the ground up and don’t impose big challenges. You are building new neural pathways in your brain, and you want to eliminate all friction and resistance. Repetition and consistency are more important than pushing yourself to do more. If you want to write more, start by writing one sentence every day. If you want to meditate, start by meditating for one minute every day. For reading, start with one page a day. This may seem too easy, but resist the temptation to do more in the beginning.

Step 4: Make very small improvements every day. Start small and make tiny improvements each day. If you started by reading one page per day, advance to two pages the next day and to three pages the day after that. Continue increasing daily, and you will be up to 30 pages a day in a month. But make sure that you’re not pushing yourself too hard too quickly. As you increase the number of pages read, you’ll need to find the right amount so you can accomplish your goal without failure.

Maximum motivation occurs when we face a challenge that is not too difficult to manage but not so easy that it bores us. The point is not to see how many pages you can read in a day, but rather to develop a habit of daily reading that you can follow for the rest of your life.

Step 5: Be consistent. The key to creating a new habit is doing it every day. Repetition and consistency are critical. The amount of time you invest is less important than repeated, deliberate, daily practice. Never miss two days in a row. Missing one day every once in a while will not have a big impact, but missing two days in a row will have a negative effect. This principle applies to any new habit.

Step 6: Focus on long-term benefits. Focus on small, incremental improvements over time. When I consider incorporating a new habit into my life, I ask myself the following question: Can I do this every day for the next three-plus years? Unless your new habit becomes part of your identity and lifestyle, it will not stick. This is why most people fail at dieting. They may lose weight in the short term, but they will most likely regain it because they cannot sustain the diet across time.

Start by inventorying your day

Look for where can you eliminate friction and add habits that will save you time and energy, thus helping you make better decisions? Little decisions may seem trivial, but when you automate dozens of small decisions, they have a big impact on your productivity. What habits can you build to automate decisions and be more productive? Once you build a habit, you make fewer decisions.

[1] Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones, by James Clear, Penguin Publishing Group, 2018.

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Busting the myths about work and success

I have a confession to make. When an idea hooks me, I get obsessed. My appetite for experiences and information related to that idea rivals a half-starved bear coming out of his den after hibernation.

For the past two decades, I’ve been obsessed with understanding how to earn lots of money while doing something to contribute value and help others. This quest led my many entrepreneurial adventures, and I experienced making millions of dollars as I worked on a mission I believed in. And I also experienced becoming disillusioned with my work, questioning my beliefs, and losing millions of dollars in the process.

So I began digging into research on job satisfaction and probing the profiles of hundreds of successful people to look for patterns to help guide my future path. The results surprised me. I discovered I had made mistakes because I believed too many popular myths about work and success. I’m willing to bet you also believe one or more of the myths I list below.

If I’m wrong, stop reading. But if you hold any of these misconceptions, you may benefit from what I’m going to share.

Myths

Reality

Best predictors of job satisfaction

Factors that optimize productivity

Time spent does not equal value

Keys to success

Skills beat credentials

Navigating the minefield of outdated information and myths about how to be successful at work can be challenging. Writing about this topic forced me to wrestle with my own ideas and understand what I think. My goal was to inform my own career decisions. Now I want to share what I’ve learned.

Money buys freedom

Money doesn’t solve all your problems, but it allows you to pursue your interests and spend more time with friends and family.

Financial insecurity triggers fear and anxiety. Fear influences your choices and feeds like a parasite on your energy. The fear of losing your income lurks in the back of your mind like a squatter living rent-free in your head.

You’re not going to have freedom from financial stress until you have enough savings to support your current lifestyle for at least one year without working.

I didn’t understand how much fear influenced my choices until we sold our company, which provided enough money to support myself for a few years without working. The sale did not give me enough money to retire, but it gave me freedom from financial stress and the ability to focus on what I wanted to do next.

The relief from anxiety was just one of the benefits. Financial freedom unlocked creativity and transformed how I viewed risk and decision-making. More savings allows you more opportunities to take more risks. If you never take risks, you will never stretch yourself to realize your potential. Your job and career choices determine your financial independence. No one can tell you exactly what to do because your path will be unique. But you’re not the first person to face this challenge, and clear patterns have emerged to help you avoid wasting time and make better choices.

To learn more, sign-up for the “High-Performance Playbook” email series (it’s free), where I share the best evidence-based strategies, tactics, and frameworks to advance your career and make more money.

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Always take the red pill

Always seek out the truth even if it contradicts the beliefs you hold. Self-deceit and ignorance can harm you.

In the science fiction movie The Matrix, Morpheus (played by Laurence Fishburne) offers Neo (played by Keanu Reeves) a blue pill and a red pill and the opportunity to understand the true nature of reality.

“You take the blue pill, the story ends. You wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.”

As Neo reaches out to pick, Morpheus says,

“Remember, all I am offering is the truth. Nothing more.”[1]

If we don’t allow ourselves to see reality, we will make poor choices.

Ray Dalio swallowed the red pill and offers them to his employees. Ray founded Bridgewater Associates over 45 years ago. One of the top investment management firms in the world, Bridgewater manages over $160 billion in assets. Ray credits Bridgewater’s success to building the company culture on radical truth and radical transparency. They believe learning compounds when you get feedback and hear what everyone else is thinking. All 1,500 employees are expected to speak their mind. They prefer not to live in the fog of not knowing what people think. No matter what their status in the organization, employees are expected to speak up and share harsh truths.

A good example of taking the red pill comes from an email sent to Ray from an employee named Jim Haskel. The email highlights the direct honest communication expected at Bridgewater. Remember, Ray is the founder and CEO of one of the most successful companies in the world.

Ray,

You deserve a “D-” for your performance today in the meeting . . . you did not prepare at all because there is no way you could have and been that disorganized. In the future, I/we would ask you to take some time and prepare and maybe even I should come up and start talking to you to get you warmed up or something but we can’t let this happen again. If you in any way think my view is wrong, please ask the others or we can talk about it.[2]

Jim

Here are a few practical ways to take the red pill.

There’s usually an exception to every rule. Consider alternatives if pursuing truth results in breaking the law or physical violence. To improve your judgement and be wrong less often. Always take the red pill and seek out the truth.

[1] The Matrix, produced by Joel Silver, written by Lana Wachowski and Lilly Wachowski, production company Warner Bros, 1999.

[2] Ray Dalio, TED Conference 2017, “How to build a company where the best ideas win.”

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Get multiple job offers

In 2019, I experienced a roller coaster of highs and lows. I shut down my start-up after investing three years and most of my savings into the company. This failure triggered feelings of self-doubt but provided painful lessons. At my low point, when I was uncertain how I would crawl out of the deep hole I had dug for myself, I feared I would be forced to take a job I didn’t like.

But I invested the time and energy to engage in self-reflection and learn from my mistakes, and I bounced back before the year’s end. In fact, I found myself riding high after receiving four competing job offers from Silicon Valley technology companies.

When my start-up failed, I was anxious and worried about getting a job before my bank account was fully depleted. To pay a mortgage in San Francisco, you need to make a base salary of at least $150,000 if you want to enjoy a normal social life without adding a roommate. 

But I didn’t want a job just to pay the bills. I wanted a fulfilling job to guide me toward my long-term goals.

In order to make the right career choice and gain leverage in my negotiations, I needed multiple job offers to position myself for the best opportunity. So I designed my job search to align the timeline of the offers.

I knew the spray-and-pray strategy of submitting multiple job applications online was a losing approach. So I used the principles of persuasion and the process described below to help get four competing job offers and land a great job leading business development for a start-up building wireless technology to automate factories, industrial processes, and smart cities.

Getting multiple job offers completely restored my confidence and helped me gain significant leverage in my negotiations with the four companies. 

Job seekers have an advantage

Qualified job seekers are well-positioned to secure multiple job offers because companies are engaged in fierce competition to hire and retain the best talent. Their growth and success rely on finding the right people, and the demand for qualified, skilled workers outstrips supply. Technology advancement and automation are rapidly changing the skills needed in the workforce, and this trend applies in start-ups, large corporations, construction, healthcare, and other skilled trades. As highlighted in this article in The Atlantic, companies have complained for years about the lack of skilled workers.

But even though you may have an advantage over the employer, you must overcome two significant obstacles to get the job you want:

Having options will allow you to evaluate which opportunities provide the best path to financial independence, fulfillment, and your desired lifestyle. 

Use principles of persuasion to influence decision-makers

Backed by over 60 years of scientific research, Dr. Robert Cialdini, social psychologist and foundational expert in the science of influence, highlights powerful psychological principles that direct human behavior. In this email, I summarize how to use these principles to land the job you want. To dig deeper into these ideas, I recommend reading Dr. Cialdini’s best-selling books, Influence: Science and Practice and Pre-Sausion which has sold millions of copies.

When applying for jobs, you can leverage social proof to stand out from the crowd and build trust quickly. When a recruiter or hiring manager faces uncertainty due to a large pool of unfamiliar candidates, they consciously or unconsciously look to social proof as a filter to help them efficiently screen job applicants. 

To utilize social proof, seek to get introduced through mutual connections; highlight your awards or past employment at a high-profile company known for strict hiring criteria; or bring attention to your affiliation with a school, social club, or religious organization you may have in common with the recruiter or hiring manager. 

As adults, we look to authority figures because they typically have more experience, access to better information, or more power. Job titles are a label and symbol of authority because we assume those titles were earned with years of work and achievement. Credentials and clothing are other examples of authority symbols. What we wear is not just ornamental; it also communicates status and position. This explains why bankers wear suits and why judges, police officers, and doctors wear uniforms. And that’s why you don’t go to a job interview in shorts and an old T-shirt.

Establishing authority requires showing that you’re a specialist or expert in a particular subject matter or skill set. You can read 100 books on a topic without anyone recognizing your expertise in a field. But if you write one book on that topic, you share your knowledge and demonstrate your credentials. This explains why writing a book is a universally recognized way of establishing authority and expertise.

But you don’t need to write a book to demonstrate authority. Just use the read, write, teach formula. It doesn’t cost money, and you don’t need permission from anyone. Read books on a niche topic related to your desired field. Show and share your knowledge by developing and sharing content online. Write blog posts, create videos, host a webinar, develop a case study, create infographics, share book summaries, build presentations, post frequently on social media, or write a short e-book. All that’s required is a sincere interest to learn about a niche topic and the time to develop the content. And you don’t need a large audience to see it. Your target audience will be the people involved in hiring at the companies you want to work at.

People are more motivated by the idea of losing something than by the thought of gaining something of equal value. Whenever freedom of choice is limited or threatened, we desire those things more than before. This explains why fear-of-missing-out (FOMO) drives everything from investment decisions in Silicon Valley start-ups to the run on toilet paper and firearms when the COVID-19 virus hit.

Create the perception of scarcity by getting multiple job offers to make yourself more attractive, accelerate the hiring decision’s timing, and gain leverage to negotiate a higher salary. Trigger FOMO in the minds of hiring managers. When an employer knows that a candidate has multiple job offers, the candidate becomes more valuable because their potential availability is threatened.

People also tend to like others who are similar to themselves. Do your homework on your target contacts; run a Google search to learn more about their backgrounds and read everything they have written or created online, including social media posts, videos, and articles. Look for ways you can highlight your similarities in background, lifestyle, opinions, interests, hobbies, religious beliefs, or personality traits. This may appear trivial, but it works.

Familiarity also affects liking. Although often unconscious, we tend to act more favorably toward people we met previously or the ones who were recommended by someone we know. Getting introduced to a hiring manager through a mutual friend can give you a significant advantage because it leverages the liking bond between friends. This explains why, when we meet someone new, we usually share the name of a mutual friend near the beginning of the conversation if we know someone in common.

In addition to leveraging familiarity and similarity, offer authentic compliments and positive praise when they are deserved. Positive comments make us like someone more. We are all suckers for flattery and tend to fall prey to compliments. Of course, a compliment needs to be genuine. But most of us like people who provide positive praise even if we know they want something from us.

Companies trigger a feeling of obligation by giving away free samples of food, personal care, and household products. Some companies, such as Amway, designed their entire business model around the reciprocity rule. Amway grew their door-to-door sales into billions in annual sales revenue by leaving a bag of free household products (e.g., detergents, shampoo, window cleaners) and then returning to the home a few days later to pick up the samples and take orders.

Whenever you reach out to a recruiter or hiring manager, consider how you could be useful to them. What unsolicited favors or gifts could you give? Could you introduce them to someone they would appreciate knowing? Perhaps you can forward them an article on a topic they may be interested in or related to their business. Can you provide information that may prove helpful in their product development and marketing plans? Don’t expect anything in return, but don’t be surprised if giving something of value unconsciously triggers reciprocation in others.

By asking targeted questions or making small requests, you may get the hiring manager to make small, voluntary commitments. For example, you can ask about the hiring decision timeline and when they will get back to you. This may prove useful when trying to align the timing of multiple offers.

Listen closely to what the recruiter and hiring manager say in your conversations. Use their statements to activate the consistency principle to reinforce your position and influence their decision. Also, uncover public statements made by the company’s representatives and weave those into your discussions to trigger the consistency principle and support your perspective.

Take steps to align multiple job offers

Persuading decision-makers that you are the best person for the job is essential. But you also need to align the timing of the job offers. It doesn’t do you much good to get another offer two weeks after you start a new job. Getting the timing right is tricky because each company has different priorities and a different hiring timeline. You need to run a tight process to maximize your leverage and ensure each company moves along at the same pace. It seems very simple on the surface, but if you don’t consciously focus and time your outreach and interviews, the offers won’t converge on the same timeframe.

The critical distinction here is between serial and parallel job hunting. In serial job hunting, you engage with one company at a time, one after the other. In parallel job hunting, you meet with multiple companies at a time and run multiple processes at the same time. Running a sloppy process yields bad results, so pay attention to this process.

Follow these steps to align multiple job offers.

Step 1: Build a list of target companies. Identify, research, and prioritize target companies.

Create a spreadsheet of companies and capture key information (e.g., company description, website, location, number of employees, target contacts.) I recommend starting with a list of at least 20 companies, and you should not limit your research to companies that have open jobs. You want to include the best companies that align with your goals, and companies are always on the hunt for talent. It may be worth your time to contact them even if they’re not advertising an open position that matches your experience. Add decision-making criteria to help you prioritize the list. For example, if I were evaluating new job opportunities, I would use the following criteria. 

Include as many evaluation criteria as appropriate. After establishing and adding your decision-making criteria to the spreadsheet, add a score on a 0-to-10 scale based on importance. Put a 0 (least favorable) score to 10 (most favorable) under each criterion for each job. Add confidence levels (e.g., 80%, 50%, 20%) on your likelihood of success. See Table 1 for an example.

For example, if one job opportunity includes a 15-minute commute, I would give it a score of 8 or 9 in that category. I would give another job with a one-hour commute a score of 1 or 2. This process will help you determine a total score for each job, but don’t get caught up in being too precise. You will not yet have complete information about the job opportunity. Remember, it’s a tool to help you grapple with tradeoffs and prioritize your outreach. Identify your top 5 to 10 companies on the list for further in-depth research and initial outreach.

Table 1. Evaluating target companies

 Eval Criteria 1 (e.g., Interest)Eval Criteria 2 (e.g., Job description)Eval Criteria 3 (e.g., Impact)Eval Criteria 4 (e.g., Learning opportunity)Total ScoreLikelihood
Company 186242010%
Company 225431450%
Company 357482470%

Step 2: Create or update job application materials. Invest time to update your resume, social media profiles (e.g., LinkedIn, Twitter), and stories before you start reaching out to target contacts. Tailor your stories to the qualifications for each job and use the principles and the 5 Cs story framework shared in my last email, “Tell better stories to make more money.” In addition, I highly recommend writing a 500-word article or blog post on a topic related to your target industry. This will help you establish authority, show your ability to communicate ideas clearly, and get the recruiter and hiring manager’s attention. Include a link to your article in your initial outreach email.

Step 3: Kick off outreach campaign. Start with your top 5 to 10 companies. Reach out to contacts in your network who can potentially make introductions into your target companies. Simultaneously email a personalized note to your target company contacts and include links to your LinkedIn profile, resume, and article. Don’t delay your outreach while waiting for an intro from someone in your network. Initiate outreach to all your top target companies on the same day to align timing and follow-up. If one of your contacts later gives you an introduction, it will reinforce your potential value and bring attention to your original email. I recommend a minimum of two follow-up emails if you don’t receive a response. Each follow-up email should be spaced five to seven days apart and should briefly highlight a different story and include interesting new information about your background.

Step 4: Schedule interviews. Group interviews as tightly as possible. Due to the different company hiring timelines and priorities, this will be challenging. Ask each recruiter or hiring manager to share their process and timeline for the hiring decision. Use the scarcity and social proof principles of persuasion discussed above to help drive timing. For example, as long as the timelines are not significantly different, you can mention interviewing with several companies and say that you hope to make your final decision by X date.

Next steps

Use the principles of persuasion and run a tight process to get multiple job offers. And don’t settle for a company’s initial offer. You will never have more leverage than you do at the moment you receive an offer, so that is the best time to negotiate.

To learn more, sign-up for the “High-Performance Playbook” email series (it’s free), where I share the best evidence-based strategies, tactics, and frameworks to advance your career and make more money.

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Build high performance teams

A group of people will be smarter and stronger than any one individual. Our prosperity has been built on this principle. Cooperation requires a common goal. Banding together to fight off predators. Hunting animals faster or stronger than you. Aligning to fight off other tribes. Born vulnerable, our ancestors were unlikely victors. Lacking the lion’s strength, the rhino’s protective thick skin, and the cheetah’s speed our odds of survival looked grim. People cooperating resulted in the winning survival strategy to overcome the dangerous forces of nature.

We not only survived but prospered and evolved to become the apex predator. Cooperation continues to be the organizing principle of our institutions. Business, religion, government, and sports all involve groups of people cooperating and aligning around a common aim.

Startups and professional sports involve groups of highly skilled people in pursuit of a common purpose. And they have a lot in common. Both are highly competitive stressful environments with large financial investment at stake. Winning requires peak performance. Recruiting top talent is essential to achieve success. Strong group identity creates shared norms, values, and behaviors. Culture, strategy, and grit make the difference between winning and losing. Both employ technology to obsessively track metrics to learn faster.

With all of these similarities, why don’t knowledge workers train like professional athletes? Science has taught us a lot about how to optimize human performance. Professional sports teams take a holistic approach to optimize performance of each player. They seek out unfair advantage wherever possible. Nutrition, sleep, mental training, physical conditioning, and specialized coaching. Frequent feedback loops are used to accelerate learning.

Your brain performs better when you sleep well, exercise, and maintain a healthy diet. As a knowledge worker, your habits impact your performance. Exercise provides the single most effective way to improve your cognitive ability. Cognitive decline begins in healthy educated adults in their twenties and early thirties. Increasing blood flow to your brain on a consistent basis prevents cognitive decline. Exercise also reduces stress, increases your energy, prevents injury, strengthens your immune system, and combats disease.

Insufficient sleep leads to getting sick and making mistakes. If you sleep less than seven hours a night you accumulate sleep debt which impacts your brain function and immune system. Your attention, response time, creativity, decision making ability becomes compromised.

Eating a healthy diet improves your performance at work. Companies gain productivity due to healthier employees and reduced sick days. Maintaining healthy eating habits boosts your immune system, improves mood, controls weight gain, and combat disease.

High performance cultures are built on high performance habits. Peak performance requires proactively designing your culture around rapid learning, trust, accountability, and habits to improve mental fitness. Habits to improve mental performance are not limited to sleep, exercise, and diet. Mental fitness also requires exposing yourself to new ideas, considering a diversity of viewpoints, and learning new skills. Your team’s learning accelerates through consistent daily practice and feedback. Design daily habits around these principles to build a high-performance team.

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Rules for decision making

Without rules we risk getting jerked like a puppet, simply reacting to conditions around us. Rules for behavior and communication allow us to work together more effectively, and rules can also help you make better decisions. Just as programming languages provide instructions for computers, decision-making rules become the operating logic of your company. Rather than issuing top-down, centralized mandates, providing decision-making rules will empower the people closest to the problem to decide how to proceed.

How you act and communicate with the people you work with will determine your company culture. Using rules, you can embed the actions you want into your culture. Decision rules provide a structure so you can navigate uncertainty and increase your chances of success.

Rules must be memorable and clearly explain the desired action. If you forget the rules or don’t understand them, you won’t use them. Rules work best if you use them daily, reinforcing their concepts.

Follow these eight rules to make smarter decisions and be wrong less often.

Don’t get jerked like a puppet and react to conditions around you. Use decision rules to program your culture and make better decisions.

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Opportunity cost

You make dozens of decisions every day. And every decision you make has a cost. By deciding to pursue one thing, you’re saying no to something else. At work, if you decide to participate in a meeting, that timeslot is filled and you can’t spend the time focused on a creative task. You can’t do everything. Life requires tradeoffs.

Opportunity cost is the cost of not pursuing alternative opportunities. The higher the value of what you could be doing versus what you actually are doing, the greater the opportunity cost.

It’s easy to recognize opportunity cost when it’s staring you in the face—like moving to a new city, changing jobs, or planning your next vacation. But most of us don’t consider opportunity cost in our decision-making process for the majority of our decisions.

We know money is not infinite, but we often treat time, energy, and attention as if they are. Your time is limited. If you choose to spend an hour on something, you can’t use it for anything else, so making smart decisions about your time is critical.

Do you stop to consider multiple scenarios of how you could spend your time before scheduling a meeting, attending a conference, pursuing a potential customer, or deciding to build a new product feature?

What are the costs of spending too much time on nonessential busy work? Such as cleaning up your email inbox or spending time in non-essential meetings.

What are the costs of signing a contract with a customer? Are there higher-value clients you won’t be able to serve because you’re too busy serving a lower-value customer? You want to choose your customers carefully.

One of the most extreme examples of opportunity cost is the decision to start a company. I love creating and building businesses. But startups require a tremendous commitment of time and energy. The potential rewards are large if you succeed, but the opportunity cost is huge if you fail. If you’re an employee of a company and the business isn’t doing well, it’s much easier to go to work somewhere else. It’s worth it to start your own company. But you should consider the opportunity cost before jumping in blindly.

Here are a few useful ways to consider opportunity cost.

  1. Do fewer things better. Tradeoffs imply that in order to become good at a few things, you’ll be mediocre at a bunch of other things. That’s okay. Focus on being excellent at a handful of things and consider dropping or outsourcing some of the other stuff. Doing fewer things also allows for breathing room. If you’re too busy, you could miss out on great opportunities. But it’s also hard to say no to good opportunities. Be ruthless and say no to almost everything. This frees up time and creates space to pursue a great opportunity.
  2. Create a minimum of three imagined scenarios. For important decisions, develop at least three different potential solutions or scenarios with a detailed list of benefits and consequences for each scenario. Consider not only what you’ll gain from each scenario, but also what you will lose. Assume each scenario is wrong. Try to disprove them!
  3. Choose a high aspirational hourly rate for yourself. No one values your time more than you do. Your aspirational hourly rate doesn’t have to be consistent with what the market is paying you today. Factor it into every decision. I set my hourly rate at $1,000 an hour. This usually forces me to outsource most things so I can focus my time and mental energy on higher-value work. This means delegating tasks whenever possible and minimizing time doing busy work, errands, and household chores. Having a $1,000-per-hour opportunity cost helps motivate me to focus on what’s important.