Career success starts with self-knowledge

You need to take responsibility for your career and where you want to go. And this is on you. And so the reality is you can let somebody else do it and you can try to morph yourself to fit other people. But I will tell you, you will be way better off if you spend the time to figure out who you are and find a job that matches who you are.

The moment you are comfortable doing nothing, you know who you are again, and you can actually figure this out.

Whether you are focusing on things you control or whether you're focusing on things that are beyond your control. Second, what's your relationship with change? And third is how you see yourself.

The speaker is referring to a 1-5 rating scale for evaluating product management skills across different competency areas like data, communication, and strategy.

If you think you are four on data, figure out who. And you may be four on data out of five in data. Within your organization, start benchmarking yourself with the best in the industry. You'll automatically see that your scale drops and as your scale drops, you start seeing what you need to improve and do.

Figure out what is the story that you are telling yourself because those stories are defining you at a basic level, which is then very hard to correct through frameworks and structures.

You can't improve on every single area. That's what overwhelms you. You need to pick which is the area which is the maximum leverage for you and improve on that particular aspect and then move on to the next area.

Determine very early in your career if you truly want to be a C-level someday because it's almost like if you're ambitious and successful, you enter product management, it's almost an expectation that you would become that and you'd never really challenge or question yourself.

Don't dampen who you are and your strengths, just continue expanding. Whenever you run into a problem, just add more to the things that you can do, the tools that you have, the way you can express yourself.

I had realized this subconscious limiter that was limiting my success in the job, which is, I was trying to conform the job to the things I thought I liked to do.

I think a lot of people are very intentional in the micro. They think about their next job, their next title, how much salary and equity there is... but they're very unintentional about the macro. What's the big picture? What do I care about as an individual?

If you teach your kids to be curious, to be independent, to be self-confident, you teach them how to think, I don't know what the future holds, but I think that those are going to be skills that are going to be important in any configuration of the future.

Every book you read makes your brain poorer to read the next book. That's the purpose of books.

Your listeners are spending time focused on like, 'Well, one day I will be X. I will be that vice president. I will have more money. I will have built something. I will have started a company.' But they don't think about what happens next, and when it happens, when they succeed, their North Star, their entire way of wiring their career, themselves, it has been around getting to that place.