Leveraging mentors to uplevel your career

If you give me feedback, I'll be like, 'Hey, thank you so much. This is super helpful,' because people are like, 'Oh, he actually likes the feedback.' Now, inside my heart might be melting. I'm like, 'Oh, I thought I got better at this.' But externally, I'm like, 'Hey, thank you,' and I mean it.

Sometimes I tell the PM like, 'Hey, don't just show me the one you just did. When are you going to do your next strategy? Can I join you then? I just want to sit and watch you write down the outline and just understand your thought process.'

My approach is typically I'll say, 'I'm giving myself three months, six months.' Every week, I'm going to do something related to learning strategy. And I do that for six months. You do it enough that you get over the hump and then actually develop the skill.

A lot of learning happens through the iterations and not by seeing the final product. That's the benefit you also get at a company that has great product management.

For the EQ stuff, it was the most frustrating learning for me. For the IQ stuff, within six months, sometimes three months, I can see clear progress. But then with the EQ stuff, it's things I've been working on for years.

When people tell me, 'Hey, I'm going to a interview at this company.' First question I ask is, 'How many mock interviews have you done?' And the answer typically is zero. I would recommend people to do dozens of those mock interviews.

You want to basically practice so much that even at your worst, you're good enough. I've always felt like most interviews, I literally did my worst. It's just that it was good enough to pass. You're so stressed out, you don't relate to the person, et cetera.

Once I have this outcome, I work backwards to figure out how am I going to do that. What I do then is I start asking questions and then I find the best people in the field and I just go talk to them.

Once you get that foot in the door and you get some advice that's useful, the key is to circle back with them at a later point and show that you've actually made good use of the advice. I think that's the thing nobody does.

You should make the smallest ask possible, which is the opposite of what 95% of people do. 95% of people is like, 'Hey, I've never met you, but I heard your talk. Can we set up a call?' That's like a big ask.

Jules is discussing how personal strengths can become weaknesses depending on the situation, with "strengthen" being a typo for "strengths."

Strengthen and weakness, it's not a binary thing. It's like the same thing, but it's a dial. In some context it's good, in other contexts it's serving you.

What's something that a lot of people say you're good at, but you think it's not a big deal or it's not that important? Actually, that's how you know it's a strength.