Optimize for learning velocity, not job titles

My advice to people is go get a job which will make you the fastest learner in the field of product management. That is what will help you a lot. No course, no degree, none of those things will help.

Graham was discussing how in rapidly growing companies, skills become obsolete quickly due to constant change, using a visual gesture to indicate a steep upward growth curve.

What you know today is way less valuable than what you can learn by tomorrow. If you're inside of a company where the growth curve is like this, what you know today is irrelevant.

Always be working back from, in one year from now, what will I wish I had been learning today? Two years, five years?

My role at LinkedIn was really explicit. I even told my manager this when I first came in, 'I'm here to learn to be a better founder.' So there were a lot of things when I started connected, which I didn't know how to do very well, I didn't understand growth. I was fair to middling at pricing. I really didn't understand how to build a subscriptions business and how to price it.

I wouldn't have gotten those opportunities if I just let them promote me or I followed a strategy where I was just focused on trying to get the biggest title. Instead, I was focused on those learnings and those experiences.

I really look at it from the lens of learning. What can I learn here, and how am I growing and developing? So there might be an argument for you to stay at a job for two decades. If it turns out that every single day you're being really challenged, you're learning new things, you're deriving a lot of meaningful enjoyment out of your work.

You follow people. You learn the most from people... You want to follow somebody who's either the best product thinker or the best engineer or the best salesperson. And so that you will learn the skill of how to be the best at that.

Skills can't be taken away. A company can fail, but if you learn a skill, you will always have that skill.

Jump into new things, give it six months. If it's not the thing, no problem. You just built a ton of new skills that's going to come in handy, I promise you that. Keep going.

Someone who's always learning is always going to exceed someone who's the expert today. You can have the most impact, the job you know the best, but then you stop learning. And if you're learning all the time, you're not necessarily having impact.