Keep your plate clean, to get more food

Hey there!

A short article to help you grow and get more impactful work in your career.

Many junior engineers keep saying that they are not getting good quality work to work on. They want to work on something meaningful, critical and yet, enjoyable work but what they always get is fixing less impactful bugs, or tasks which require very less attention or documents to read.

There could be many reasons to not get what you want but one thing is for sure, if you keep your work log clean and crisp, then you have more chances to get more meaningful, yet impactful work.

Let me put one restaurant analogy to explain.

Three friends go to a restaurant for a nice dinner.

• Person 'X' is a slow eater and is very choosy towards the food they like. They eat very less, don't finish the whole food and waste some food.
• Person 'Y' is a fast eater and whatever is available on the plate, they just finish it within seconds without even completely chewing.
• Person 'Z' is a healthy eater and they like to enjoy food. They take enough time to finish the food and don't like to waste it. They keep their plate clean and explore more food options.

The waiter comes to them, provides a table to sit and supplies a food menu to order.

They place the order and in a short time, waiter brings the food to the table and starts serving into their plates.

While they are eating and enjoying the nice food, the waiter keeps looking at their table, or more precisely at their plates, periodically.

The waiter keeps checking whether their plates are empty or full.

• Person 'X''s plate is already full with some food, hence the waiter hesitates to ask them whether they need more food or not.
• Person 'Y' keeps ordering more food and finishes them very fast. Person 'B''s stomach gets upset and they start vomiting. The waiter stops asking them for more food and offers lemon-ade. No more food.
• Person 'Z' is enjoying their food and finishing up their food one by one neat and clean. The waiter offers them to explore more exotic or special dishes and they keep enjoying them without wasting.

So, at the end -

• Who is enjoying the food?
• Who has more chances to explore exotic or special dishes?
• Who keeps their health maintain while not wasting any food?

That's person 'Z' !!!

So, which kind of person are you?

If you want to become a person 'Z' to grow yourself, get more work, make a good impact & visibility in your team, then try to -

• Keep your plate (work log) clean.
• Take enough time to finish what you have been assigned to work on.
• Don't over-work or burn yourself out.
• Win the trust of your waiter by finishing and enjoying the existing food on the plate.
• Provide good feedback on food so that restaurant can improve the experience for next customer.
• Ask for more in a healthy way.

Thanks for reading this far. :)

P.S. - It's just one analogy which is true in many cases and can be related to your growth.

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