My professional insights

I have noted down some insights I've come to acknowledge after 15 years of professional and life experience.

My thoughts around these might change and I may add to them as I accumulate more grey hairs. These opinions are not novel to me and have certainly been documented by others. I'm just corroborating them from my own experience.

Let me know your thoughts on these, or feel free to share insights you've gained yourself.

1. Almost everything in life compounds.

If you steadily invest in improving your mental, physical, financial etc. health, you will reap larger benefits in later years.

2. Related to the previous point, play the long game.

All meaningful significant rewards in life take time to come to fruition. Plan and execute with this in mind.

3. Reputation matters, especially in the professional world.

If you build up a reputation of an approachable person who's easy to work with, you will open yourself to potentially being approached for good work/project opportunities. If you build up an opposite reputation, those good work/project opportunities will certainly stay away from you.

4. Sleep on critical decisions.

I personally prefer and try to make decisions quickly to reduce my mental load as much as possible and enable a steady work pace. However, taking time to deliberate on important decisions, and especially considering them first thing in the morning after getting a good nights rest brings significant mental clarity to the decision making.

5. Again, related to decision making, I have heard and read both sides being advocated:

a) if after much thought you're still unsure about taking a certain decision, start actioning it and you will learn from feedback if you should continue; or

b) only go for a decision if your gut instinct is 100% in favor

Personally, taking path a) has led me down what turned out to be some wonderful initiatives and projects.

6. First principles thinking, famous proponents of which are Warren Buffet and Elon Musk, is useful for tackling most issues and especially if you are being introduced to a system/process/issue for the first time.

In other words, start by asking “why do we need this to exist?” or “what’s the smallest starting unit here?” and then build up reasoning/process flow from there onwards.

7. In the professional world, and especially where office jobs are concerned, speed trumps accuracy almost every time.

I used to be a perfectionist, sometimes procrastinating on and prolonging my tasks. I quickly found, and have been noticing ever since I started working, that meeting deadlines and responding to/sharing work rapidly benefits one's career and reputation. Accurate and meticulous work that may delay deliverables will not be appreciated.

8. Barack Obama's recent advice in a LinkedIn interview resonated with me - Just learn how to get stuff done. As he expands in the conversation, in most growth-oriented organizations, 'doers' are rewarded rather than 'talkers'. The latter are usually found in much greater numbers. The former are who actually move the needle towards business performance excellence.