My 15 Tips for Young(er/ish) "Professionals"

I am often asked* what tips I would give young (or less young?) professionals. Here are the 15 top ones that come to mind, based on may experience(s) of about 20+ years of working life and life full stop at the UN, academia, NGO sector, startups, in close to 40 countries, 5 continents, and dozens of failures and scars. These are quite personal so you may not agree, but that’s life:?

1.?????Be punctual; always. Actually, be 2 mns early. Whether it is to join an interview or a Zoom call, when someone I don’t know joins 1mn late, I can’t help thinking it is a bad start. If you have a reason for being late, say so.?It's happened to all of us. (Also, don't set meetings on Teams if at all humanly possible.)

2.?????Be truthful; never lie. Ever. If you missed a meeting because you overslept, say so. It’s happened to everyone. If you didn’t do a task, say so and explain why. I am not religious at all, but lying is a sin. Oversleeping or slacking once or twice isn’t.?

3.?????Be gentle and kind. As one of the best The Smith’s songs says “It’s so easy to laugh it’s so easy to hate, it takes guts to be gentle and kind”. It does. Ask people how they are doing; offer help. Treat people the way you would like to be treated, and like your mother told you to treat people. Don’t be a jerk. Don’t be a frat boy. Don’t be a moron. We all have scars, visible and invisible. Treat people with genuine respect, always. Be gentle and kind to your friends and family too—we tend to treat them more harshly because there are fewer social boundaries. If you have children, give them and tell them all your love. If you need to be there for them, skip that meeting and explain why.?

4.?????Pick a job / activity that matters and helps. Something will be proud of telling your grand-kids and grand-parents (wherever you think they are) about. You can make mountains of money in many industries and activities, probably not in the ones that matter. You will be told about “win-win” BS; “you can have your cake and eat it”; that should be taken with more grains of salt there are in the Dead Sea and a dozen oysters combined. Very few very well-paid activities are worth your life—except t if you are a genius artist, for one. Don’t work for McKinsey: if you have the brains to work there, you can do better. Try to leave a trace, not a heritance. No one will admire you because you sold a startup that helps better target marketing campaigns to sell expensive watches to the visually-impaired for $500m.?

5.?????Don’t relish nor be blinded by the power of money and the money of power. Money and power are like alcohol, sugar, smoking, gambling and loving Elon Musk; addictive and destructive. A person’s worth goes far beyond his/her financial assets and fancy titles. Don’t do anything only for either or both, because what you will get will be lost in self-esteem—unless you have already lost all of it, which seems pretty common. Take into account your environmental footprint. Don’t buy expensive watches or big cars; they look stupid.?

6.?????Act honourably and aim to be proud of yourself and of your work. Do something that matters, and do it well. Do the work. Read, think, be demanding of yourself. Don’t write half-baked papers or letters of motivation. Put your heart and soul into them. Don’t plagiarize. Don’t cheat on exams or on people. If you have an interview, prepare for it. Read about the organization and the people you will talk to. Do you work and homework well. Have an ego—not an overloaded testosterone-laden one, but one that will avoid embarrassing yourself.?Do try and be a "social justice warrior" everyday. With humility and humour.

7.?????Embrace and give feedback, constructively, kindly. Feedbacks are how we learn and grow. Give it kindly and gently—not the sandwich type but truthfully. Give unsolicited positive feedback too. If the feedback is negative, of course it feels and is personal. That’s a good thing. That’s how you progress as a person. If you don’t agree, understand, think it’s not fair, say so—with anyone—and explain why. That is giving feedback.?

8.?????Build and nurture a network of trustworthy, interesting, fun, kind people. This network is perhaps the strongest resource you will have. It takes time to feel whom to trust; and trust grows through interactions. Interact with your network. Recognize people in your network as people, not assets. Don’t use them; consider them as nodes in a system that aims to be collectively better. Reciprocate. Respect them. Give credit. Respond to their emails and take a train or pick up the phone if they need. If you don’t, people will know and remember. If someone has helped you, remember it forever. If you find a mentor, and you think s/he is trustworthy, learn from him/her. Don’t consider them as half-god(s) and be ready to be disappointed by them—it happens. If so, cut them loose. You are better than that.?

9.?????Learn to recognize and stay away / cut off toxic and/or self-bloated people. You will meet them. They are often easy to unmask. Trust your instinct. They will make you uneasy; they are mean to others if not to you. They often talk in very specific lingua derived from the tech and consulting worlds. They want to know how to monetize and / or scale about anything. Do not engage with them; whoever they are. If it crosses a line, call them out. Don’t cave to power or money. Signals you may be dealing with a toxic jerk is the frequent use of “yep”, “nope”, “agreed”, and of course the absence of capital letters in messages.?

10.??Speak up if you see or hear something that offends you; and you will. How and when is context specific, but the default is that we all embody humanity. It’s easy to say that this is none of your business. Don’t overdo it to the point of self-aggrandizement, though.?

11.??Value and nurture circumspection and discussions on tough topics, and do respect reasonable differences of views. Stick to your guns in some or most occasions, but understand and accept the world is a big complex place. Don’t be sanctimonious by default. Some people will have a hard time supporting LGBT+ rights for religious reasons (I don’t). Hear them; say you disagree, but don’t rule them out as bigots right away. Understand that some women wearing headscarves do consider themselves feminists. Do not strip them of that right because you think feminism rhymes with bikinis (it doesn’t). Find and enforce your lines; but set them slightly farther away from your comfort zones. Remember life is short and you are 1 in about 120 billion humans to have ever lived.?

12.??Have and practice humility, humor, and (genuine) self-deprecation. There are hardly traits that are more unbearable than pretention, self-aggrandizement, constant self-promotion (on LinkedIn and elsewhere), false humility. Please don’t write how many followers you have on social media in your profile--that just looks childish and /or you need professional help. Make fun of people and of yourself, kindly. Don’t write you are “humbled” to be in the 100 people under 100 in some ranking; you clearly are not and people see through that.?Don't ever call yourself or anyone for that matter a "leader", a "serial whatever", or any such foolish term.

13.?Learn and speak languages and the world. I mostly interact with and hire people who speak 3 languages at least; most speak 4, 5. Speaking a language helps communicate but also think differently. Travel. Environmental concerns put legitimate restrictions on travel, but still; do travel. You cannot expect to work in development if you haven’t traveled to several countries and regions—I would say 15 and 3, respectively.?

14.??Do fun, unusual, stimulating things outside of class and work. Try DJ-ing; movie making, Play rugby, crickets, do crochet, play the piano, dance, sing. Read, go to the movies. Take on lithography class. Go to museums. Exercise. That will help you grow, keep you sane and colleagues and employers will want to know about it. Do it as well as you can. One question I almost always ask in interviews is “what is your favorite book ever and why?”. Few people have a good answer.??

15.??Don’t act “professionally” ever. In too many instances, calls to behave “professionally” are traps and tricks to get you to behave in ways that are unethical, unkind, disrespectful, mean, petty, and/or moronic. You will notice this is often used to get you to do something you despise doing. When summoned to act professionally, think twice or three times about the ethics of the situation. Instead act honorably, ethically, as a reasonable adult.?

*Of course I am never asked that; it is a common trick used by people in 9.?