Do things that give you energy - that's where impact lives

Do things that give you energy that you are proud of.

We tend to undervalue the things we're good at. We tend to think work has to be unpleasant. And so if something is easy and fun, we don't tend to think it's valuable. So I think lots of people gravitate in this direction of like, let's go do unpleasant things and grind our way through the career because that's the way to make it. But the reality is you should go do the thing that you feel guilty to get paid for, if there's a thing like that, and do the hell out of it, right? Do it as hard as you can do it.

When you find something that gives you energy, just jump in with both feet. And try to go through that process, and pivot and learn, and pivot and learn and pivot.

You tend to be good at the things you enjoy. You tend to enjoy the things you're good at.

I think the way you get extraordinary returns is you do extraordinary things, right? You have to take bigger risks, and have more interesting shots to have this kind of extraordinary result in your career.

I think there's, at the end of the day, the reason you get ahead in your career is you had a lot of impact. And the reason you had a lot of impact was because you picked something that you're good at that you did with a lot of intensity that wound up having impact, right?

Work doesn't necessarily have to be hard. It often is, but it doesn't have to be. And the best case is that it isn't. The most impact you'll ever have is where you're in that mode where you're just in the flow and doing your thing and you're happy to do it and you can't quite believe they pay you and you don't understand how you're getting away with this, but it's super cool anyways, right?

If you surround yourself with people that give you energy and if you follow the things you're actually curious about, that you're going to be successful in this era.

If you identify your superpowers and work in accordance with them, you will do the best work of your life. You will love it, and you will be great at it, and you won't have that frustration.

I went through my calendar and I changed the colors of all of the meetings on my calendar to red, yellow, and green after I had the meeting. And when I looked back at the last few weeks, it was almost all red and yellow. And I was like, okay, this is really from an energy standpoint, I don't think I love this.

Get really good at figuring out what are the things that you love most about being a product person, and how can you optimize your next role for those things that you love?

When you're passionate about something, you do better work, you do smarter work and you're, in order of magnitude, more productive.

If you truly enjoy your work and what you're doing, it won't feel like a sacrifice. The moment you start having those conversations about work-life balance, you are probably not on that track.

Product work happens at three levels. There's the impact level, there's the execution level, and there's the optics level. My happy place is the impact level.

Our jobs get frustrating when we behave, most of the time, in misalignment with our superpowers and who we truly are at our core.