TLDR
An accelerated young professional is a young professional who is capable of rapid growth and adaptability. This framework is built upon my own experiences to create a systematic, reproducible way of becoming one. The five main qualities are as follows:
- Efficiency: Set goals, work hard and meet them.
- Learning: Curiosity; obsession; make mistakes, learn from them.
- Environment: Seek safety; seek opportunities; seek mentorship.
- Challenge: Critical thinking; courage; honesty.
- Awareness: Self awareness; confidence; prioritization; adapt.
N.B. The TLDR is not enough to fully understand this framework. The nuances behind its application and how the various parts interact are where the real value lies.
Preface
This is a post that I’ve thought about writing for some time now, but I never felt that I was far enough along to be able to complete it. I also wasn’t sure that posting something like this would be beneficial to myself, or potential readers. It wasn’t until my fellow colleague and mentor, Chris Swan, told me to “just write it,” that this all came together. As I formalized my thoughts the main purpose of this became clear, I’m no longer writing this to tell my story but rather, to identify the key factors it takes to recreate a story like mine.
The key factor of an accelerated young professional
The key factor in what creates an accelerated young professional is how they use their time. Time is a finite resource which we use for everything that we do. Experience is the result of spending time. A young professional is inexperienced because they haven’t spent their time on anything yet. However, that means they still have the luxury of being able to choose how they spend it. One who acknowledges this luxury can then leverage it.
The accelerated young professional is one who searches for improvements which add value over time, rather than incremental immediate improvements. While incremental improvements can still be useful, they don’t add compounding long term value, thus they should be saved for later.
The qualities of an accelerated young professional
In addition to the basic skills and qualities that make you fit in your profession, I believe there are a certain set of skills that are required which allow a young professional, regardless of the field, to begin operating at a higher level of effectiveness earlier in their career. I do believe that there’s more, but I’ve specifically refined my list based on a number of factors.
Personal experience:
Everything that I cover is something that I’ve experienced to be true. Maybe a statement is not true in all circumstances, but I do my best to cover what I believe to be the requirements for making it true. There may be some requirements which are trivial to me that I have overlooked, I would appreciate your input if I have missed something.
Common Opinion:
Is this a common opinion? My goal with this article is to cover the things that I think are unique and different. If they are obvious statements, then they aren’t going to bring value to the reader. That is, my list should be slightly controversial. It’s not meant to cover the common individual’s path to success, but rather indicate a path to accelerated growth.
Cohesion:
The qualities should be reproducible, in some capacity. It should create a framework which feels complete. Some qualities in this framework do interact, and I’ve covered the most common cases that I experience towards the end. Moreover, I think the cohesion of this framework is where the real value is. Individually, these skills and qualities are useful, but when used in combination they compound in value.
#1 Efficiency
It’s almost a given that if we want to be effective, we have to be efficient. Efficiency in short, is the art of achieving the same result with less effort. However, it doesn’t mean you put in less effort. One will always be outperformed by another with equal efficiency and greater effort. Likewise, one will also be outperformed by another with equal effort and greater efficiency. If you strive to be the most effective you can possibly be, you need both. If you want to get ahead of the pack, you need both. Ultimately, we are all human, and we have limits. Working too hard results in the degradation of efficiency, thus we have to be observant and treat our efforts as a resource.
Being efficient is a skill, it can be utilized to accomplish greater goals, or it can be used as a way of reducing the need to commit to effort. If you resonate with the latter, then this article probably isn’t for you, and there’s little need to continue reading.
The advice of “work hard, work efficiently” is quite dry, however there’s no greater advice I can offer. How much you can accomplish is directly proportional to the two; there’s no way around it. Though, I do think the other observations that I’ve made about my growth are far more interesting, and I encourage you to read on.
#2 Learning
Learning is the second category an accelerated young professional must master. In the acceleration of learning, we raise our current career ceilings earlier, creating room for opportunities. The type of person who works to live, as opposed to one who lives to work, will be sufficient with minimal learning. However, one who wishes to rise above and beyond, should strive to become knowledgeable across a broad set of topics, and they should pursue several deeply.
As a young professional, I don’t think being knowledgeable is very important for success early on. You can’t be expected to know everything at the start of your career; you build knowledge over time. However, contrary to that, intelligence is important. Intelligence comes in two parts, the first being acquiring knowledge (i.e. learning). To acquire knowledge we must consume and then understand, both of these are trainable. The second part to intelligence is applying that knowledge effectively. This is harder to train, but I cover some of the strategies under “Challenge” and “Awareness” later on.
Before an aspiring young professional can explore those topics deeply, they should first master the way they learn. Curiosity, obsession, and the ability to work hard, make mistakes, and learn from them are essential. Furthermore, they must know how they learn best, the format of knowledge consumption most suitable to their learning style, and how best to approach and ponder thoughts which they consume.
For myself, knowledge consumption looks like a massive graph - my “world view” as I call it. Every single idea has a home in that graph, and my job as a learner is to try to relate every single piece of new information to things which I already know. This makes it easier to relate topics which I am learning to that which I already have a deep understanding of. Oftentimes, it leads to the formation of ideas which appear later on in the topic, before I’ve even learned them. This also helps me to recover old thoughts and ideas which were once lost. It is because those ideas fit into my world view, that I can restore them to where they belong. When something old doesn’t fit into my current world view, I can immediately identify that which needs to be relearned or reviewed.
In addition to this, I know myself well enough to know that note-taking only hurts my learning style. Writing down my personal thoughts is ineffective in two dimensions, and as my world view grows, notes become impossible to keep up to date. Instead, ideas become ingrained, and my notes remain high level bullet points which act as a cue to recall a train of thought. Even when I was in school, the only time I would write a note would be the high-level topics of a course when prepping for exams. These cues are enough for me to recall everything I might need to know for the exam. When studying, I may add a few sub-bullets to ensure that I recall certain subtopics which I know I might forget easily.
With all of this being said, there is more to my learning than what I can cover here, and the reality is that everybody learns differently. While my strategy for learning may not be relevant to you, I hope to indicate the level of awareness that is required in order to efficiently learn as a young professional.
Once a good understanding of how one learns is attained, the rate at which they learn is then only held back by curiosity, obsession, and how hard they work. The harder you work, the more you make mistakes, and the more mistakes you make, the more you can learn from them. It is important that mistakes are only made with the right guard rails in place. Mistakes in the right scenarios are learning opportunities, mistakes in the wrong scenarios are liabilities. Thankfully, I have coworkers who are great at creating the kinds of scenarios where learning can happen. This leads us right into the next category, environment.
#3 Environment
I strongly believe that my environment has had a very strong influence on who I am today. Not only that, but I also believe that the correct environment is essential before the final two categories can blossom.
I’ve had amazing family, friends, teachers, employers, coaches, and mentors, all of whom shaped who I am today. More than that, I am lucky to have had opportunities laid before me, some of which were only presented based on large decisions that I had made previously in life without any knowledge that opportunities would be coming. I am very fortunate in this regard.
While a young professional may not have control over their environment, they can make a conscious effort to put themselves in situations which improve their chances. When they do find themselves presented with an opportunity, they must take the plunge and latch on to that opportunity with every ounce of effort they have in spare.
I am blessed to have found the right environment for me at Atsign. At Atsign, the founders have created a “flat organization.” This is a type of culture where there are no managers involved. Instead of having rigid departments and teams, we complete all work by forming teams naturally through cross-functional engagement. When the founders decided to hire for the company, they wanted to hire the best of all the people they’ve worked with in the past, and bring them together with young minds who could learn from them. In order to accomplish this goal, Atsign is fully remote and the team has brought on members spanning across six different continents.
To expand on my experience with remote work, I want to address the ‘fine for senior folk, terrible for early career’ opinion on it. In my experience, the first half of the statement is true. Anybody that’s joined our team with considerable experience has done well in our environment. However, when it comes to early career, I think there are a number of other factors at play which also determine whether you will thrive or not. As mentioned earlier, we don’t have managers at Atsign. Our work is primarily self-driven: team members may ask each other for help, but nobody is telling each other what to do. We set our primary goals as a team, and work together on them. The early-career individuals that have succeeded the most in this environment were the ones already possessing the aforementioned “efficiency” and “learning” qualities. These qualities, combined with self-motivation, is what we at Atsign call “the twinkle in the eye.” The twinkle in the eye makes up the portion of skills which in my experience are High Potential Person (HiPo) indicators.
As mentioned previously, mistakes in the right scenarios are learning opportunities; they are experiments. Atsign is founded on an idea which turned into a decade long experiment before the founding of the company. It is a new technology, a platform, with countless potential use-cases. As put in my colleague Chris Swan’s words: “Atsign engenders (psychological) safety, which then allows for experiments (and failure) without negative consequences.” This is absolutely important to both the individual’s and the team’s learning. Team members are able to fearlessly explore new ideas, allowing the successful ones to become new opportunities.
In general, having the right environment is something I think we all strive for. However, it is especially necessary for the next category to shine. I believe that psychological safety is mandatory in order for one to fully embrace the challenge quality.
#4 Challenge
Not challenge in the sense that a young professional needs to be faced with challenge, although that’s equally important; challenge in the sense of they need to “challenge the status quo”.
The quintessential skill in this category is critical thinking. I recently read the first half of “The Art of Critical Thinking: How to Build the Sharpest Reasoning Possible For Yourself” by Christopher Hayes. The book is broken up into three major sections, laying the groundwork, examples by profession, and examples of applying critical thinking in real life. I’m currently part way through the second section; while I was reading the entire first section, I resonated with nearly all of it. The value in continuing to read this book for me is adding the ability to take those ideas and be able to verbalize them.
For myself, critical thinking has always been an important part of my learning process, so much so, that it’s become a subconscious skill. I think there is great value in internalizing the skill to the point where it becomes natural thought. However, sometimes it can also be a downfall, it’s important to recognize when a quick decision yields greater value than a slow, thoughtful decision. When faced with these situations, it’s important to concede on overly applying critical thinking, and save that time and energy for more important applications. Furthermore, whether a decision is easily reversible or not also matters. If the decision can easily be revised later, then that’s all the more reason to make it quickly, learn from it, and revise it if and when needed.
Once critical thinking has become a skill added to the toolbox, it begins to add value to the individual’s work. With the addition of courage and honesty, it can add value to the entire team. The fear of speaking up, or telling the team your real opinion on a matter can be quite strong, especially as someone with less experience. It is extremely important that one finds the right environment that allows them to overcome this fear so that their practice of critical thinking begins to add value to the team.
#5 Awareness
The final category is awareness, awareness has many parts to it. The part that needs to be in balance with the challenge category is self-awareness. Confidence without humility is arrogance, and as a younger person who has spent over a decade trying to be the best at what he does, it can be very difficult to find the line between confidence and arrogance at times. When you lack the experience that most with your level of skills have, it can be extremely hard to benchmark where you are at in your career. Thus, it is quite meaningless to compare yourself to others at all. I find it much more useful to “calibrate my level” against my own growth. I find it more useful to consider the questions: “what have I improved on recently,” and “what can I improve on next?”
I know myself well enough to know what I am currently capable of, and what I am capable of learning quickly enough to tackle. A big part of being able to do this ties back to learning. Exploring breadth of topics in volume before depth of topics is essential in “knowing what you don’t know.” Following that, comes the ability to learn quickly, by knowing enough in breadth to be able to know where to start learning a topic in depth. This self-awareness of capabilities, combined with the art of critical thinking, creates a very agile ability for growth.
When projects come along that are outside of the normal domain of skills for our team, I am usually one of the first people to jump on board. Quickly learning and iterating on those projects is key to achieving high quality code from almost no skills in that domain. In addition, I actively chose to take courses in school which I expected to have no immediate value at Atsign - I was already working with them part time while I completed school. By actively choosing these courses, it gave me the breadth I needed to be able to grow faster during my time here; Upon the introduction of new topics or discussions, it now takes me far less time before I’m able to speak from an informed viewpoint.
The second side to self-awareness is capacity. Awareness of your own time, and how you use it is a subliminal theme of this whole post. The core to it all is understanding your own time-management and prioritization strategy. In many prioritization strategies, there are two major dimensions: importance and urgency, however, in my system there is a third: impact versus cost (i.e. opportunity cost).
Opportunity cost is super important to how I evaluate the value of a particular task. Note that I’m working in a high paced environment, where I almost always have more on my plate than I have time for; this is where I think this third metric has merit. For example, let’s say I have a high urgency task, with low importance and a low urgency task with high importance. Most would assume that high urgency tasks always come first, however I don’t believe this is always the case. The questions that I ask myself are “what is the cost of not completing this high urgency task,” and I weigh it against “what is the impact of completing this high importance task.” Sometimes, we may give up something of smaller value in the short term for something of even greater value in the mid to long term. Of course, if formal commitments have been made, then that overrules the opportunity cost evaluation.
Finally, awareness without action doesn’t do much, it’s only when we apply what we’ve learned from our awareness that we become adaptable to situations. This is why awareness is the last quality on this list, we must first gain a foundation to iterate upon.
Balancing these Qualities
Many of these qualities interact with each other, and can cause conflicts. For example, spending too much time learning can affect our capacity for output, potentially reducing efficiency. Likewise, spending too much time over-analyzing, or trying to find the perfect environment may result in stagnation. Focus is key to developing these skills, and gradually finding the right balance of applying them will help.
The advantage of being young is that time is on your side. Time is an asset available to the young professional. Thus I think it is totally worth taking short-term losses for long-term gains. Time is not something that any of us can control, but how we choose to use it is. Improving efficiency and knowledge earlier rather than later will yield long-term gains.
Likewise, trading short-term gains for long-term loss is something to avoid early on in your career. As you progress further in your career, this will gradually become less true, but early on, make an effort to avoid taking short-term gains, it will cost you in the long run.
The greatest example of this today is the use of AI. Sometimes, when working on trivial matters, it may be worth it to just take the win and get something done. However, when it comes to more complex tasks, there is both an opportunity cost to potential learning, as well as the development of the task long term. If your job is to create something, then giving an LLM all of the context that you hold in your mind is nearly impossible. If you have any sort of long-term vision for what you’re creating, it is very difficult to capture that in the resulting work produced by AI. Thus, if you want to grow faster, make an effort to avoid hurting your own development by over-using it.
There may be a day where all jobs are replaced by AI, but the reality is, if it ever does happen, it’s very unlikely it will happen over night. If you develop you, then you make yourself that much more unlikely to be replaced early on. The less capable you are, the easier it will be for AI to take your job. So, work hard, learn as much as you can, and enjoy life.