Don’t let that smile fool you.

When I first joined Jumpcut in the summer of 2015, I was a walking tin can of anxiety.

Imagine an environment where there are nearly two dozen people surrounding you from their own work stations. Some of them are from ivy league schools. Some of them are self-made millionaires. All of them are extremely gifted.

This was the team I’d just convinced to bring me on. So who was I?

I was a former Uber driver. Before that, a Starbucks barista. Before that, I was ringing the cash wrap at Express.

These were some of my trades after graduating college…

I was fortunate to collaborate on relatively gratifying projects with some notable teams between all this. But overall, I’d say I wasn’t too seasoned professionally.

This lack of experience put me in a pretty rough corner for my first 3 months.

“What’s a sprint?.. OKR’s?.. SCRUM?.. I’m the project owner of that?.. What in the f*** is ‘managing up?!..’ Minimum what product?..”

I was so green that when the internship period was nearing an end, I was told it was not leading to a job.

It was over. Definitely over. I was so sure it was over, I made a longform post about it on Facebook.

But on Sunday evening right before my last week was to start, the CEO phoned me up to offer me a full-time position.

Ever since then, I’ve successfully been able to hold my own in a family of world class engineers, marketers, and content creators.

How did I change their minds about me? And how do I manage to stay relevant as our company continues to grow?

Here are three of my secrets…

1. Be a sentinel.

An unwritten rule for working in a startup is you’re expected to step up and provide solutions on things you weren’t assigned. In order to do this, you have to know there are problems to solve in the first place.

Unless you’re in a culture of complainers (and if this is true, you should start seeking a new job), the easiest way to find out about problems to solve is to be attentive.

While I sometimes struggle with attention issues, there have been numerous instances where just paying attention to conversations and incidents around me have given me the opportunity to address problems I just happened to know how to solve.

Be on the lookout for issues. And if you see something broken, fix it. People will greatly appreciate this.

2. Don’t treat anything you’re asked to do as below you.

It doesn’t matter if you graduated Harvard, you’re a master engineer, or you have five hundred thousand followers on Instagram. Everyone in a startup is expected to roll up their sleeves and get their hands dirty.

If you’re given a project, no matter what it is, you accept that project as a privilege.

You might find yourself changing the garbage bins when you want to be spearheading a launch. If you’re a junior developer, you might be performing brainless coding when you want to be strategizing bigger picture plans for the product. But in the way that really matters, all these projects are the same. You’re making people’s lives easier.

If you can keep that in mind with gratitude, you’ll be able to endure the times where you would normally have a strong desire to walk away.

3. Form an association in people’s minds between you and positivity.

There are many situations where it’s natural to experience negative feelings.

• Your contributions were deemed average in your personal eval.
• The leadership takes an idea you had ages ago seriously when it comes from someone else.
• You make it clear you want your trajectory to go a certain way, and you’re told that can’t happen right now.

For me personally, I’m often tempted to feel petty when the founders get on my case or let me know how I need to improve.

But then I remember, there are hundreds of thousands of guys who would pay money to be mentored by my employers. I get paid to get their feedback. I’m extremely lucky.

It’s so easy to fall into the negativity trap. But if you can choose to feel good about it instead, and you exhibit that positivity, people will feel extremely comfortable with you. And it’s only when they feel deeply relaxed with you that they will start to trust you with high level responsibilities.

In Conclusion…

Learn to do everything you do on your own terms.

You don’t need permission to provide value. When the opportunities come, step up and take them.

And when you do… do it because that’s your natural inclination.

Do it because you take great joy from your team and your customers benefitting from conditions you set up.

Approach your commitments with this attitude, and it won’t matter if you’re the dumbest person in the room. You will thrive.