I crossed a milestone this year: I now have 10 years of experience as a "professional". I graduated from my university in December 2013 and started my first "real" work (albeit temporary, contract work) in March of 2014. I got my first full-time role later that year.
Work is different from what I imagined. I initially thought I'd get a job and work at the same place forever, slowly rising through the ranks while largely doing the same thing until I retire.
I quickly learned that I was wrong and that my imagination of work was super boring: There is a lot of movement in the workplace, and it can be fun (at least sometimes and in the right environment) if you do it well.
Here are the top ten things I learned in my experiences over the past ten years. Some of these lessons came the hard way—through mistakes, while others came a bit more naturally.
1. See the Big Picture
In the corporate landscape, it's all too easy to become a territorial monarch, defending a small patch of organizational ground. Every manager dreams of building their empire, with employees eagerly constructing miniature fiefdoms within the larger corporate kingdom.
The real good stuff happens when you find good people around the company to deliver a goal, not in worrying about swim lanes or who should get credit for each milestone.
Just as companies seek to establish moats to protect themselves from competitors, many teams inadvertently create internal barriers that ultimately weaken the entire organization. These defensive strategies—protecting roles, justifying existence, and looking inward—become a self-defeating cycle. What begins as a survival mechanism transforms into a strategic blindness that undermines the very purpose of the business.
When teams become more focused on defending their territory than serving the customer, they lose sight of the fundamental mission. It's a trap of organizational politics: each department becomes an isolated city-state, more concerned with internal power dynamics than collective success. Politics begets more politics, creating a labyrinth of bureaucracy that strangles innovation and collaboration.
The most effective teams don't build walls—they build bridges. They understand that their value isn't measured by how well they can protect their turf, but by how effectively they can connect with other teams to deliver exceptional value to customers.
This is especially critical for support functions that don't directly interface with customers. Your ability to see the big picture, to understand how your work fits into the broader organizational mission, becomes your greatest strategic advantage.
Imagine your role and your work not as a fortress to be defended, but as a junction in a larger network. Your success isn't about protecting your ownership of a small slice of land, but how what you do with that land contributes to the company's ability to function. When you shift from a defensive to a collaborative mindset, you transform from a territorial guardian to a strategic connector.
This approach requires curiosity, humility, and a genuine interest in understanding the broader context of your work. Ask questions. Seek to understand how other teams operate. Look for opportunities to create value beyond your immediate responsibilities. This helps you understand how these disparate pieces fit together and help you understand how each part of the company plays a role in its mission. Learn this and communicate it.
Knowing how your work contributes to serving the customer and how you can partner with other teams is not just a nice-to-have—it's critical to your professional growth and organizational impact.
Companies may build moats, but the most successful professionals build networks, connections, and collaborative pathways that transcend departmental boundaries. Knowing the big picture lets you escape the trap of protecting your realm, instead seeing the entire company as a shared realm with all of the teams and departments you work with.
Let go of fear and don't cling onto the slice of land you own: focus on doing what's good for business, and good things will flow your way. You'll miss the big picture if you don't.
2. Job as a Craft, Not just a Job
My initial impression of work was that it'd be my 9-5, I'd do no more than what was asked of me, and be totally fine until retirement. Truly excellent employees typically: 1) work more, 2) deliver superior work, and 3) frequently stretch beyond their job description to get things done.
A reframe that's helped me over the years is looking at my work like a craft that I improve day by day. The job isn't just a way to pay the bills, but a means of helping me get better.
I always ask: What skill will I get from this? Where can I flex to squeeze some learning out of this project?
It can make the low periods more bearable and help you make progress.
In short, work is more rewarding when you see it as a marathon of gradual self-improvement rather than tasks to be done for a wage. Maybe I'm idealistic about this.
3. If You Can Be Anything, Be Reliable
I enjoy playing sports, with basketball being my go-to pickup game. I'm not particularly good at it—my ball-handling is awkward, I can't drive to the rim effectively, and I'm too skinny to be effective in the post. In every aspect of my game, I can get bullied by others who are faster or bigger than me.
What I can do, despite my lack of skill, is hustle. I can put effort into grinding down opponents on defense, run quickly to break up plays, and generally put pressure on others to force mistakes or create opportunities for the more talented people on my team to do their jobs well.
This doesn't really show up in traditional success metrics, but it's generally made me good enough that people will let me play.
At work, I often feel similarly. I'm rarely the deepest expert on anything I work on. I usually have enough context to contribute and advise, but rarely am I the best person on any team.
What I can do is be reliable. I can keep pace with people who have flashier resumes or deeper technical expertise because I'm dependable, deliver quality work, and am a good person to work with. This helps me build my reputation and has given me more opportunities. Whenever something is at risk of slipping, I can step in to get things over the line. Even if I'm not shooting the buzzer beater, I can at least help set up the play and draw away a defender to let my teammate take the winning shot.
Not everyone can be the most talented person in the room, but anyone can be dependable. Show up on time, do what you say you'll do, and handle changes smoothly. Being someone others can count on is worth more than you might think.
4. Think Like a Product Manager
Product Managers often need to think long-term: What is our vision and strategy? What are the incremental steps and priorities to get there? How do we measure this effectively?
They build a roadmap and align the team on the long-term march towards a goal, creating milestones along the way, taking time to reflect and learn, and pivoting as needed.
Working in a "service" type of role internally, it's easy to fall into the trap of reacting solely to requests and operating like an "order taker" versus building a "product" your stakeholders interact with to get what they want.
Elevate the work you do and approach it like a Product Manager. This will help establish you as an expert partner versus support—a big difference in how you're perceived and how you can operate.
Thinking like a PM is one way to make your work better and get you off the hamster wheel of responding to requests without clarity on why you're doing what's needed.
5. Don't Take Feedback Personally
My lowest points at work have been when I took feedback to heart and let it paralyze me. When you're just starting out or learning something new, missing the mark on what you deliver is part of the process. When I received negative feedback, I'd get defensive, thinking that they simply misunderstood what I was trying to do or worse, were doubting my ability to get things done.
This had two problems: 1) I would spiral into self-doubt and 2) it made me pretty awful to work with. If you're perceived as too sensitive to give feedback to, people will work around you as much as they can. Fragile egos are not good at the workplace.
I eventually learned (after many mistakes and soured relationships) that people giving feedback are doing so because they care about the work and want to help me deliver it better.
It wasn't about me—it was about making sure I had a good story to tell about what I was doing and making it easier to get buy-in and excitement for the proposals, work, or whatever it was.
This helped me ask more questions and get into deeper conversations with feedback providers, who were happy to share direct advice. They expressed relief they didn't have to focus on softening the message to spare my ego of bruises. They could focus on doing what was best or sharing what wasn't what I wanted to hear, because I'd learned to not take it as a personal slight: it's about the work.
Being able to look at the work more objectively and less as a judgment on my personhood was huge in enabling me to deliver better and have more candid conversations with my team on how to do the best work possible.
6. Done is Better Than Perfect
Waiting for everything to be perfect means you'll never finish anything. Create a good first version, then improve it. Progress matters more than perfection.
I generally like the rule that getting from 0 to 80 is the easy part, but 80 to 100 is the hard, grueling part. Ask yourself when an 80 is good enough to progress. Once you launch and get feedback, you can iterate based on the learnings and ensure the effort into getting something close to 100 will land.
An undelivered project that could be perfect is often worse than a delivered project that isn't.
7. The Truth Cannot Hide For Long
When I worked at startups, we made a lot of mis-hires. High-performing individual contributors who worked with these folks directly could see from miles away that these people weren't going to work out or were actively making things worse. Usually these are the types of people who have good on-paper experience and are most adept at wooing management. They're great at saying things that sound right and taking credit, without actually producing much of anything themselves.
I spent many work happy hours commiserating with colleagues about people who were struggling or actively harming the workplace, but their concerns were unheard by management. Being part of the HR side, you see the other side of this, too.
Good organizations are constantly evaluating their talent and recognize when people aren't working out. Eventually, they'll give employees every chance to succeed, since hiring and training is already a significant investment. Cutting losses typically occurs only when the situation becomes truly untenable.
If you haven't been in management or worked in HR, you probably know there are problems with a peer but feel ignored because immediate action isn't taken.
However, in any good company, the truth cannot hide forever. Even if a smooth-talking grifter seems to be winning for now, eventually they will be exposed, and order will be restored. The strength of the company lies in how quickly they can identify this and how they mitigate the fallout. Many of those happy hour lamentations were usually harbingers of the future: Rarely did anyone who was a poor performer in the eyes of people doing the work last long, and they were usually removed from their roles one way or another.
If your company's immune system is working well, it should be good at self-correcting here. Give it time and learn to identify the signs if you don't think things will get better. But recognize that these things will sort themselves out one way or another.
Do what you can to deliver.
8. Deliver, then Ask
No one can read your mind. If you want something—a project, a raise, a new opportunity—ask for it. But do this after you've proven your value. Build a track record first, then make your case.
In my roles, I try to build credibility by doing my core tasks really well.
Once I do this, it gives me leeway to ask for more scope or a change: I proved I can operate effectively in this environment and can make a case I can move to a new area.
I did this to make my move from recruiting into training, and again in another job going from building training courses into managing training program strategy. But I wouldn't get this without first delivering, then asking.
So often I hear peers lamenting that promotions and opportunities don't fall into their lap.
I usually ask: 1) Have you done your current job well? and 2) Have you asked?
9. Don't Be Transactional
Transactional relationships might meet immediate needs but ultimately limit professional growth. Reputation in business matters tremendously, and investing in relationships will not only get you what you want down the road but will also be much more fulfilling.
At the large company I worked at, I'd often encounter employees who were "mercenary". They moved from job to job, rigorously focused on collecting wins to put down for their annual review, and would wear you down for not doing exactly what they needed with little regard for finding mutually beneficial ways to partner. Their playbook was to send pointed requests and calendar invites, then immediately cc your manager when you said "no" or "this isn't a priority for me". This leads to a lot of wasted time, false urgency, and frustration.
These people are everywhere and they rarely build good working relationships. Their names elicit eye rolls from stakeholders, who see them as pushy and inflexible.
I'm fortunate that I am naturally interested in other people and want to understand their work, what they do, and what they know. My innate sense of curiosity in how things fit together helps me better understand where there's opportunity to collaborate.
When I need something done, I need to think through and articulate why they should care. I also need to understand their goals and how my work helps them do their work.
It's amazing how few people do this well. Maybe it'll take me longer to get exactly what I want, and sometimes you need to escalate to make progress, but generally I try to build good working relationships with people, not only to help me now but in the future as well.
10. Every Job is an Internship
In the day-to-day throes of the job, it can be easy to feel like you're trudging through monotonous work with no end in sight, doomed to do the same thing over and over again for perpetuity, dealing with a boss you don't like or a project you hate.
I try to remind myself that there is something to learn from every job, and that this, like all things, is temporary. Yes, there are low points and sometimes we need to leave our jobs for greener pastures. That's part of the process. Nothing gold can stay, but neither can anything that's truly awful. It's always ebbing and flowing.
I try to treat every job like an internship: A set time where I work and learn before moving onto the next thing. This helps me: 1) recognize that I won't be stuck here forever and 2) understand that there is something I can get out of this that will help me for the next thing.
This reframe makes the low points much more palatable and helps me remember what I'm actually getting out of what I'm doing—even if that lesson is "what not to do".
Putting This All Together
Some of this may seem obvious to you. If so, good! But I hope that these reflections which helped me, and will continue to do so, are also useful for you as you navigate your career.