career advice /kəˈrɪər ədˈvaɪs/
noun
Guidance intended to help someone make decisions about their work, professional growth, or career.
Everyone has career advice to share.
It’s practically the starter pack for starting a career podcast, writing a LinkedIn post, or becoming the person at dinner who tells everyone how to succeed professionally.
There’s certainly no shortage of it. Over the years, I’ve subconsciously started keeping an inventory: advice that seems obvious to me, advice I’ve heard peddled one too many times, and advice that sounded perfectly reasonable when I received it but turned out to be entirely wrong for the kind of career I wanted to build.
The thing about career advice is that it’s rarely completely wrong. More often, it’s right in a particular context, for a particular person, with a particular definition of success.
Here are a few pieces of career advice I wish I’d questioned earlier. They sounded good at the time. I just eventually realized they weren’t how I wanted to build my career.
If you work hard, your work will speak for itself.
We often hear that if you work hard enough, your work will speak for itself. But great work only creates opportunities when people can see it, understand it, and remember it, making your work visible, testable, and understandable to the right people.
Part of working hard, then, is working hard to communicate your work. Writing about what you’ve learned, sharing projects, explaining your ideas, or documenting your thinking forces you to retrieve what you know, make sense of it, and expose it to feedback. The process doesn’t just make your work more visible—it makes you better at the work itself.
That’s why I believe every professional should have an outlet for sampling their work. Obviously, not everything needs to be polished or public. The value is in creating a record of your ideas, experiments, lessons, and progress—and using the response to refine how you think and work.
It also gives you the chance to build a professional identity that reflects your thinking, rather than simply the perspective of your team or company.
So, yes, work hard. But don’t assume your work will speak for itself. Make it visible. Make it testable. And learn to speak of and for it.
Always raise the bar of excellence.
I used to believe that if you saw a better way of doing things, you had a responsibility to keep pushing and influencing until everyone else saw it too.
I don’t believe that anymore.
Your standard of excellence can be higher than your organization’s—and that doesn’t automatically mean the organization is wrong or that you need to keep fighting until it changes. Every organization has a tolerance for complexity, rigour, and quality. Occasionally, your bar is higher than what the environment requires.
I learned this the hard way — I cared deeply about proper product discovery: understanding the problem before jumping to solutions, having a clear rationale for prioritization, and making decisions grounded in evidence. Meanwhile, my manager would regularly come up with product ideas without much of that process.
I kept asking myself: Why wouldn’t we do this properly? And if we didn’t know how, why not trust the people who did?
Eventually, I realized the harder truth: the organization was working exactly as it was designed to work. I could keep pushing, but my personal bar of excellence wasn’t enough to make the organization want a different one.
That realization was a gift.
A high bar is valuable, but where you apply it matters just as much as how high it is. Before trying to raise the surrounding standard, understand whether the organization actually wants the standard you’re advocating for.
Occasionally, you should raise the bar. Occasionally, you should meet the bar. Occasionally, you should leave their bar altogether and find where you fit. The issue isn’t that your bar is too high. It’s that you’re standing in the wrong place.
Optimize for the brand name.
My first job out of school was at a tiny startup—I was around employee #4. Eventually, I moved to a ‘brand-name’ company because I had started to believe that smaller “no-name” companies lacked the structure, credibility, and compensation I wanted. For a while, I made getting into increasingly recognizable companies the goal.
A few experiences changed my perspective. My first conversation with someone at a ‘brand-name’ company made me question whether I wanted the lifestyle that came with the brand. Watching friends become almost desperate to get into these companies made me question why the company name carried so much weight. And then I met someone who couldn’t stop talking about how much work he had to do.
Taken together, these experiences made me genuinely ask:
Do I want to be a big fish in a small pond or a small fish in a big one?
I realized I had been subconsciously treating company prestige as a proxy for career success. But what I actually cared about was different: doing work I enjoyed, working with people I respected, having a life outside of work, and being well compensated.
But company reputation is a proxy, not the goal.
Once I stopped optimizing for the biggest name or the highest possible payout, I could evaluate opportunities based on what actually mattered to me: the people, the work, the learning, the ownership, and the life the job allowed me to have.
I’d rather choose a company where I genuinely enjoy the work than chase a brand because it looks impressive to other people.“Do you know that my daughter works in a ‘brand-name’ company?” is not a principle I want to build my life around.
Never burn bridges.
We tend to give professional relationships a strange kind of immunity. Because a relationship started at work, we convince ourselves that nothing that happens between colleagues is really that deep. It’s just work, after all.
But people don’t stop being people because they’re colleagues. You can be hurt, offended, disappointed, or betrayed by someone at work. And every so often, those experiences fundamentally change how you see that person.
Of course, this isn’t true of most colleagues. Some become friends. Some become valuable connections. Some you’ll happily bump into years later and pick up right where you left off.
But let’s be honest: some colleagues are a pain in the butt. Some people consistently bring drama, drain your energy, undermine you, or create problems wherever they go. And I don’t think every old colleague needs to be kept in contact simply because you once worked together.
There are some people you’re perfectly happy to leave in the past—people you might even think twice about saying hi to if you ran into them years later. Some, frankly, you’d be thrilled to forget altogether.
And that’s where the real skill comes in: knowing which bridges are worth burning, and how to burn them without setting the whole village on fire.
A good employee makes their manager look good
I’ve heard some version of this advice throughout my career, and there’s some truth to it. If you’re doing good work, your manager benefits from having you on the team.
But there are two things I wish I’d understood earlier.
First, your manager can appreciate you, rely on you, and think you’re excellent at your job without necessarily being the person who gets you promoted, gives you the biggest opportunities, or advocates for you when you’re not in the room. Your relationship with your manager matters, but you can’t outsource your career to them.
Second, don’t obsess over making your manager look good. Your manager’s success is about much more than you. It’s the work of the entire team, their ability to lead, the decisions they make, and plenty of things that have nothing to do with you. So relax.
Do good work because that’s what you do. Make your contribution because you care about doing a good job, not because you’ve decided it’s your responsibility to make your manager successful at theirs.
If your work makes your manager look good along the way, great. That’s a nice side effect. But it shouldn’t be the reason you do it.