5 Golden Nuggets of Advice You Can Take Anywhere
I recently heard James Clear, the bestselling author of Atomic Habits talk about how ill-fated advice is from the start. He described how advice is often tethered to the specific circumstances of the moment, and thus when cast from one experience to the next, the advice rarely holds. Instead, he offers (and I, for the most part, agree): advise yourself and that way the circumstances will always fit.
And still, it’s hard to argue with the fact that there is simply a lot of helpful advice out there. Golden nuggets from people who have traveled before you. When given, and taken, in the abstract, it can stay with you forever: portable, applicable, adaptable. So when I heard Adam Grant ask Indra Nooyi what advice she would share from her tremendous career, I was all ears.
Here are the five golden nuggets she shared:
Raise your hand for the most difficult assignments. Nobody remembers you for doing and maintaining an easy assignment.
Focus on the job at hand. Don't keep thinking about the next job and the next job. If you go into a company and say, I want to be a CEO in 15 years, guaranteed, and you’re not going to be CEO in 15 years because you're so obsessed with your career track, you forget the job you're doing.
Every company has politics. Understand the politics do not play in the politics “because the worst thing that can happen is you're labeled as political, which is a death knell.”
For the women out there, form a sisterhood and support each other.
Think hard about time. We have so little time in this world and how you spend that time, how you balance the time, how you work your life around that time is going to be one of the most critical things that you do going forward.
You can listen to the whole interview here, or read it here. It’s worth some of your precious time she mentions in #5.