4 Shortcuts You Can’t Afford To Take In Your Career
Lessons from Woj & CJ
One of the things I love about the game of basketball is how many applications it has both in everyday life and business. I recently listened to one of my favorite podcasts “The Pull Up” an award-winning basketball podcast hosted by CJ McCollum of the Portland Trailblazers, in which he interviews Adrian Wojnarowski (Woj), the most prominent and successful NBA insider from ESPN on how he broke through in his career.
In the podcast, Woj reiterated that his success did not come from 1 event but doing the right things over and over and especially not taking shortcuts throughout his career. His podcast really affected me and has been a game-changer in how I approach my job. If you’re looking to up your game in your career, here are 4 shortcuts from Woj, that you can’t afford to take:
1. Accept every part of your job
For just a minute think about your current job, what about it do you dislike? What type of things do you procrastinate or avoid? Those may be the things you need to embrace to get to your next level. Woj commented that for him it’s hard being on the phone all the time but by being willing to take calls when it’s not convenient it helps his get ahead:
“You have to accept every part of your job. You have to be able to, you know, work at the things that you don’t love as much but you have to always work at it and not short cut things…and being on the phone is one of them.”
Like Woj, every job has bleak spots but your ability to get through them and stay positive, be productive and perform will help your value shine. Being able to be resilient in hard times and also have the discipline to keep working through some work you don’t enjoy will help you get ahead.
In the product world, Marty Cagan in his book Inspired taught that in order to truly build an inspired product everyone has to be involved and everyone has to care. In essence, everyone has to accept every part of his/her job; “It’s important that a product team has responsibility for all the work — all the projects, features, bug fixes, performance work, optimizations, and content changes — everything and everything for their product.”
2. Avoid “the sinking feeling”
In the NBA there is a time period after the season is over and the new season is ramping up called “Free Agency,” where professionals who have expiring contracts can choose where they want to play. In the sports broadcasting industry, this is the busiest time. Woj explained that in order to be ready for this intense time it takes the whole year preparing for it:
“It’s a conversation you're having with people 365 days a year, and if you're not working at it almost every single day, it’s hard. It’s easier if you’ve prepared, when you’ve put the time in, you know it going in, you know when you are ready. And that doesn’t mean it's going to go the way you want but you’ve given yourself the opportunity.
And deep down it’s like any other profession you know when you haven’t quite prepared and there is like a pit in your stomach where you say “I’m in trouble today” and you feel that in anything you do, and you have to approach this the same way, there are no shortcuts, it doesn’t matter how long you’ve been doing it or who you think you are, if you don’t prepare as hard as you did the year before you will get your ass kicked.”
Woj presents an interesting concept; if you take “a day off” or “check out” while you are at work then your job actually will be harder because you won’t be prepared in circumstances that you could have been.
Making a dedicated effort to prepare for your job and perform daily is hard but not as hard as all the work you will have to do to try to recover if you don’t.
3. Cultivate relationships and build trust
Cultivate Relationships
If you want to do go places in your career — get better at talking with people. You can’t shortcut the need for relationships. Woj describes that it’s not enough to just have conversations with people but you need to build relationships if you want to be successful:
“Learn how to talk to people face to face, be able to learn to get people comfortable with you, to help them to trust, to be able to get information and build a relationship. In today’s day and age, it’s harder but the young people that can continue to learn those fundamentals are going to do really well.”
Build Trust
A vital part of building relationships is establishing trust which includes having empathy for those you work with and helping them feel respected. Nate Walkinshaw, a product leader from Pluralshight commented; “With so many tensions in an early-stage company, respect and empathy are part of creating a space where the team can be productive and supportive. Nurturing a team that is respectful of team members' needs and challenges goes a long way to getting a product out the door.” (Product Leadership, p 37.)”
The key insight here is the fact that how you treat people on your team, and your ability to help teamates feel safe, is actually directly correlated to building better products.
A question that is easily overlooked or shortcutted is “how am I doing at helping members on my team feel safe? Do I build teammates up or tear them down? If you’re having a hard time on your team it may actually be that your shortcutting trust.
4. Fight for “the thing”
Each of us has a different dream or a dream destination. It doesn’t matter if you're in line for your dream job or just got it, Woj emphasizes that you can’t lose focus of “your thing” especially when it gets hard.
“There is a line down the street and around the corner, and rightfully so you’ve got to fight for the thing, you’ve got to fight for it every day and you’ve got to respect the fact that no matter what you’ve accomplished, you are not owed anything, you’ve got to work for it every day.”
Work for it everyday my friends. Don’t take shortcuts. Fight for your thing. 💪
