How to Become an A-Player
How to Become an A-Player
This essay is a companion piece to my livestream on InfoQ’s Daka Shuo series.
Yet I have no interest in repeating what I said on that livestream. If that’s what you’re after, you would do better to rewatch it.
I want to lay out my thinking from a somewhat more macro perspective.
Let’s start with the career itself. From the capping ceremony at twenty to the age at which one “knows heaven’s mandate” at fifty, a person’s working life runs more than forty years. Those forty-odd years deserve careful deliberation. I am grateful for the two years since I left to start a company; they have been the greatest turning point of my life — not because I grew “wealthier,” gained more connections, opened more future opportunities, or acquired material for boasting to my future grandchildren, but because they gradually gave me a clear understanding of my own career going forward.
When we found a company, we rack our brains to define its vision, mission, values, goals, and strategy, along with the KPIs (or OKRs, whatever) that track execution; we spend enormous energy optimizing the org structure, doing product development, marketing, and business development; week after week we track every number — burn rate, run rate, WoW growth — and try to find, in every correlated signal, the reason a number met or missed expectations, so we can optimize in the next cycle. We deploy every method at our disposal, from the several-steps-of-product-development frameworks, to the build-measure-learn loop of the lean startup, to the psychology and classical Chinese philosophy that illuminate human nature and the ways of the world. For our company, there is nothing we will not try. And yet when it comes to running our own careers, we are astonishingly casual: no long-term plan, often no effective thinking — sometimes not even effective learning — and at times we simply blur the relationship and the boundary between a job and a career. A job is provided by an employer; a career must be built by yourself. Good employers do plan careers for their people, but an employer-planned career has two big problems: 1) Where you sit determines how you think, and the two parties are not necessarily sitting on the same chair; 2) it is not tailored to you — the difference between the two is the difference between a package tour and an independent one.
If we look at a job from the standpoint of an employee, we are offering a monthly or annual transaction. Transactional relationships are fragile, which is why we need contracts and codes of conduct to bind both sides. Of course, for the sake of our reputation we work diligently and carefully maintain our image; to command a higher price in the next transaction we push ourselves and keep improving. But these are tactical matters, and they cannot make up for the strategic loss of positioning yourself as an employee. As employees we often feel a numbed helplessness, the institutionalized condition (from The Shawshank Redemption) — in our minds we are Yue Fei, “feasting on the flesh of the barbarians in our hunger, drinking their blood in our laughter,” while in the real world we sit numbly at a desk typing away every day. So when problems surface, we either never see them, or look right past them, or see them and quietly hope that “those who eat meat will plan for it.”
If we look at a job from the standpoint of our own career, the relationship with our employer looks more like a partnership. A partnership is mutual selection: we choose the work we want, and the work chooses the partner it can work with. What both sides seek then is opportunity, not contractual constraint; when a problem arrives or looms, we meet it head-on instead of passively waiting for a savior. This is roughly what many companies mean when they preach “ownership” in their culture. But preaching ownership from one side alone is pointless: those who already define themselves as partners do not need to be told — they have it; and certain employees who haggle over every penny will never acquire it no matter how you train them. In Thursday’s talk I already gave several chestnuts — sorry, examples — of my own sense of ownership, such as hunting for opportunities to make the team more efficient (the automated test system). Here, let me offer another fruit.
On this business trip I asked my boss what the travel budget was. He probably had no feel for what a trip to China entails, so he pulled a guide for government employees posted abroad from the U.S. State Department website, which prominently stated a per-diem of $220-plus a night — enough for me to stay at a Hilton or something even fancier. I chose a $70–100 Holiday Inn instead. Not out of any nobility on my part: once comfort and convenience are assured, this is the natural choice for a partner — the savings over a few days are enough to upgrade an engineer to a maxed-out MacBook Pro. The purpose of this trip was to build a team, and I could have done that leisurely and without much effort. Instead I exhausted every resource I could reach, doing PR for my company adRise and our product TubiTV at every private event I attended; I ran to several places a day, meeting wave after wave of people, spending all my primordial strength — all for potential partnership opportunities that were never mine to worry about. Switching from easy mode to hard mode at the drop of a hat is a natural choice for a partner.
Of course, being a partner carries risk. You may be full of ardor while the other side feels nothing; all your heartfelt devotion may be answered with a page of heartbreak. This happens all the time. But we must not give up eating for fear of choking. Kennedy said: ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. Most of the time, salary, equity, and bonus are trailing factors: you must contribute first, and only then discuss the return. To give up is to gain — that is the meaning of 舍得 (shedding and getting). Contribution does not guarantee near-term reward, but it always comes back, in one form or another.
That is enough on careers. Are you willing to run your career the way you would run a company? Are you willing to treat your employer as a partner? These are the questions any aspiring A-player must ask of themselves, at the strategic level.
Thursday’s livestream covered a good deal at the tactical level:
- Do well what must be done: maintaining a legacy system
- Seize what you want to do: hosting Ishiguro, founder of ZebOS
- Step up and take responsibility: building the automated test system
- Do what others will not: writing documentation for ScreenOS
I also spent a lot of time on learning. I take learning seriously: I treat every conversation with another person and every task I take on as an opportunity to learn. Learning has several levels:
-
Teaching yourself, or learning from others. This is the most traditional and the primary mode: read a book, watch a video, take a course — systematically or not — and accumulate more knowledge and capability.
-
Learning from a ‘role model.’ Everyone has one. They may be historical or living figures — Mao Zedong, Chiang Kai-shek, Zeng Wenzheng, Liang Qichao, Fu Lei, Haruki Murakami, Napoleon, Elizabeth II — or characters from fiction: Jean-Christophe, the Count of Monte Cristo, Julien Sorel. Good or bad, righteous or wicked. Perhaps you merely read a biography of Li Hongzhang, learned that his daily routine was precise to the minute, and so cultivated a similar habit. If the first level is about learning knowledge and skill, this level is more about learning from and emulating a way of seeing the big picture, a way of engaging with — or withdrawing from — the world.
-
Making those better than you, more experienced than you, your mentors, and learning from them. The essential difference between 3) and 2) is that you often cannot reach your role model, so you can only imitate; a mentor can be with you — to discuss, to resolve your confusion, to plan together. The ideal mentor is someone who has been through enough grinding that they hold sufficiently complete and distinctive views on problems. They either draw out the essence of a problem by asking questions, or offer valuable answers through their own case histories. A good mentor may spare you years of detours. Why do the children of outstanding entrepreneurs have far better business judgment than most? Because their parents — and their parents’ friends — are, in a sense, excellent mentors in that domain. Many things, if you rely on your own awakening, demand a long inner journey and a great deal of hardship; a mentor can compress that journey enormously through retrospective review and pointed guidance.
Learning is a lifelong affair. Read the same book at different ages and you will have different awakenings; meet the same person at different times and you will form different opinions. An A-player should be like a sponge, tirelessly absorbing every bit of knowledge and experience; then, like a plodding ox, slowly digest and ruminate; then, through practice, solidify what was learned (learning by practicing) — and in that solidifying you learn what you thought you had learned but had not; finally, by teaching others, sublimate what was learned (learning by teaching) — and in that sublimation you learn what you did not know you had not learned. Walk through the whole process and you will find that it is itself a process of learning — one more iteration of build-measure-learn.
