Career advice from Craig Federighi
- Focus on doing what you love. If you're worried about where you're going, where it'll take you, if you're too focused on the destination, you'll miss the journey.
- Doing what you love is like cheating. Your recreational time turns into time that helps you develop your career.
- Work with people whose work you admire. Be drawn to the people that can do incredible work, work that you appreciate and can learn from.
- Pay attention. You are surrounded with different opportunities to learn. Not just in your field but all those in the peripheral of what you're studying.
- Constantly write down the things that you find interesting. Make use of your time to really understand them. Be curious.
- Never stop acting like the new one on the team. Always be the person that asks the stupid questions. It's okay if you don't know everything.
- Your questions can sometimes be the questions that the team should probably have been asking themselves in the first place. Asking questions might also get some answers that everyone needs to hear.
- When asking questions, you give yourself the permission to learn.
- Don't satisfy yourself in a narrow and secure little area. Explore every adjacency. The way to broaden yourself and learn is by allowing yourself to ask the questions along the way.
- The team is more important than the self. When joining projects, whatever the team's mission is and whatever they're trying to accomplish, be part of making that happen. Do everything that can be done to make that happen.
- There are plenty of opportunities to help and learn when you decide to become part of the team and adopt its mission.
- Commit to a period of time. Look at your career as: you're going to spend four or five years doing it, you're not going to wake up each morning and ask if you're doing the right thing. Instead, decide on what you're going to do and focus on immersing yourself in it.
- Assess the situation, make the choice (however imperfect it may be), and commit for awhile. Give yourself the opportunity to really experience it, and then set yourself a deadline, in a year or four years from now, and then assess what you want to do next. This can be important to your sanity and ability to really commit in a way that will allow you to learn and do good work.
- Follow your heart. Once you feel it, there is probably something wise or intuitive about what can draw you to the right decision. Listen to yourself in those moments.
- Be very, very lucky.