As I prepared to sign off from work one afternoon in April 2024, I noticed a mass email from my company’s general counsel. “If any reporters contact you to comment on the article,” he wrote, “our corporate policy is that you do not talk to reporters.”
“Article?” I thought. “What article?”
Searching the internet, I learned about a rumor that my employer of 10 years was going to be acquired.
I immediately began to panic. As a back-office worker, I knew that, if the acquisition succeeded, my job would be at risk. If I lost my job, I knew it would take me a long time to find another one, based on friends’ recent experiences in the job market.
Over the next few days I descended into a mental doom loop: I envisioned myself unemployed for years, burning through our family savings, not being able to pay the mortgage, and eventually losing our house. During the day, I felt weighed down by fear. At night, I had trouble sleeping.
Up to that point, I hadn’t invested heavily in my professional skills outside of work for many years. Instead, I prioritized learning about the world, getting my life together, and starting a family.
Upon learning about the acquisition rumors, however, I immediately viewed investing in my professional skills to be the top priority.
After the initial panic of my doom loop wore off, I pulled myself together. I began to consider how to prepare for a scenario where I suddenly became unemployed. I asked myself, “What’s the best defense against the doom loop of my imagination?” My response was, “A good offense.”
Thus, I concluded that I need to set myself on a permanent offensive footing.
Shortly thereafter, I met up with my friend Henry who provided good counsel on my situation. He advised that I would have 18 months before anything would happen to my job. The acquisition, if it succeeded, would take 12 months to close. And the acquirer would not want to make any major changes for at least 6 months after that. “Great,” I thought, “I have a clear timeline to work with. And it gives me a long runway to prepare.” So I began my preparations.
The following week, news emerged that the acquisition fell through.
I breathed a sigh of relief. However, the incident awoke something inside of me. I realized that nobody’s job is ever secure. Employees of small companies are at risk of their companies going under, or of their companies being acquired then having their jobs eliminated as the acquirer realizes “cost synergies.” Employees of large companies are at risk of losing their jobs during cost savings initiatives, as hundreds of thousands of employees of Big Tech had during the 2023 “Year of Efficiency.”
Salaried workers live under the illusion that they have a stable income, argues Nassim Taleb in Antifragile. He likens us to a turkey being fed by a farmer. The turkey is happy to see the farmer each morning because it assumes that the farmer will feed it. These predictions prove true … until Thanksgiving morning when the farmer wrings the turkey’s neck. The past, as the turkey story illustrates, has limited value in predicting the future. Salaried workers, like the turkey, are usually caught unprepared when we lose our jobs.
As I explored what being on a permanent offensive footing means, I concluded that I could do a few things.
First, I invested in my network. Henry recommended that I begin reaching out to my network well before I needed help. Reflecting on Henry’s advice, I realized I had neglected my network since 2020. I quickly read the book Your Invisible Network, suggested by my executive coach, which changed how I thought about networking. It lays out an effective networking mindset and provides actionable, non-invasive tactics. One immediately useful idea is the author’s 30/50/20 ratio: expect 30% of conversations to be great beyond expectation, 50% to be interesting as expected, and 20% to be not so useful. A not so useful conversation is just par for course, not a condemnation of our ability to network.
In planning my approach to networking, I remembered what Henry told me about his experience: “The first 15 conversations will be awkward, so you just need to push through them to get your rhythm.” That gave me my first objective. I began reaching out to close friends to see if they were willing to chat about their work and careers for 30 minutes. Then I began reaching out to connect with less close friends and former colleagues. After 15 discussions, I found my rhythm, which encouraged me to keep going. Since then, I’ve also begun connecting with various leaders at my workplace.
Despite the negative connotations associated with “networking,” I found that I enjoyed every conversation and learned so much from them. I realized that I neglected asking my friends and colleagues about their career experiences and insights up to this point. And I was also surprised at how much value I could add by sharing my thoughts and experiences.
Second, I strengthened my skills and knowledge by refocusing my morning reading time. Instead of reading about abstruse history, I began reading business books. I found business books to be faster and easier to read. And I could instantly apply what I learned at work. I learned about leadership, operations research, statistical analysis, negotiations, power in organizations, and many other topics. By year’s end, I finished 30 books and 20 audiobooks. These fresh ideas helped me approach familiar problems in powerful new ways.
Third, I began taking an 80/20 approach for everything. Upon refocusing my reading, I immediately read The 80/20 Principle. Though I was familiar with the concept from my time working as a management consultant, I thought it would be worthwhile to read it as a refresher since author Tim Ferriss recommended it highly.
When I began reading it, I felt shocked. Despite being familiar with the concept for so many years, I realized that I barely apply the 80/20 principle at all in my life!
The core idea of the 80/20 principle is that 80% of the results come from 20% of the inputs. Some factors are much more impactful than others in terms of producing a given result. “The reason that the 80/20 Principle is so valuable,” Koch writes, “is that it is counterintuitive. We tend to expect that all causes will have roughly the same significance … That all problems have a large number of causes, so that it is not worth isolating a few key causes. That all opportunities are of roughly equal value, so that we treat them all equally.” That is not so. According to this principle, for instance, 20% of customers will account for 80% of a business’s profits, and 20% of employees will produce 80% of results.
The cause of this phenomenon, Koch argues, is that the world is “complex.” Complexity theory (or chaos theory as Koch refers to it) demonstrates that some inputs have a nonlinear effect on the outputs. To take an example, the Internet is a complex system that consists of billions of nodes, be they users, websites, or other connected devices. Despite independent actors behaving in an uncoordinated way, ~80% of web traffic ends up going to ~20% of websites. Google, YouTube, Facebook, Amazon, Reddit, and a few others receive much of this traffic, making them dominant hubs in the network. This result emerges without any coordinated plan due to feedback loops in search engine algorithms and user preferences. The actions taken by dominant hubs have nonlinear effects to increase their services’ popularity, as compared with the less effective actions of their non-hub competitors. (For a simple introduction to complex systems theory, I recommend Complexity: A Very Short Introduction from Oxford University Press)
To magnify one’s results, then, one must identify the high-impact factors in any given situation and maximize investment in those factors.
Thus, to become more effective, we ought to apply this principle more than we already do and we ought to apply it to all aspects of our lives. “The overriding message of this book is that our daily lives can be greatly improved by using the 80/20 Principle,” writes Koch. “Each individual can be more effective and happier. Each profit-seeking corporation can become very much more profitable. Each nonprofit organization can also deliver much more useful outputs. Every government can ensure that its citizens benefit much more from its existence. For everyone and every institution, it is possible to obtain much more that is of value and avoid what has negative value, with much less input of effort, expense, or investment.”
The key to the 80/20 principle is to push ourselves to constantly think about how we might spend our time differently and more effectively. “At the heart of this progress is a process of substitution,” writes Koch. “Resources that have weak effects in any particular use are not used, or are used sparingly. Resources that have powerful effects are used as much as possible. Every resource is ideally used where it has the greatest value. Wherever possible, weak resources are developed so that they can mimic the behavior of the stronger resources.”
In addition to the main point, I found one observation that Koch shares to be particularly interesting: as many executives rise in rank, they begin to primarily focus on doing projects. I had never thought about my work in this way, but I felt like my eyes were opened. At a high level, I think about all work as either projects and processes. I would define processes as the day-to-day operations of a business. Projects, on the other hand, are one-off pieces of work that modify processes. These projects constitute “deep work” – the greatest value-added work that one is cognitively able to deliver – as defined by Cal Newport in his book Deep Work. As a people manager, I could use projects to accomplish a few things. First, build my team’s bandwidth, output quality, and skill. Undertaking these projects would eventually allow me to delegate more to my team, in turn, freeing up my bandwidth to do more deep work. Second, projects can create ad hoc analyses that provide novel insights that impact decisions being made across the company. Third, projects can also turn those ad hoc analyses into repeatable processes and automated dashboards, the upkeep of which can be delegated to others.
The ideas discussed in The 80/20 Principle seemed so simple that they aroused suspicion in me. However, legendary investor Charlie Munger Munger advises, “Take a simple idea and take it seriously.” In Poor Charlie’s Almanack, he argues that he and Warren Buffett achieved their investing success by applying simple ideas consistently. He believes that many people hurt their own success by applying simple ideas inconsistently or seeking out complicated ideas that are harder to implement.
With Munger’s advice in mind, I committed myself to taking the 80/20 principle as seriously as I possibly could. I immediately asked myself whether I was delegating my tasks properly. I realized that I wasn’t. So I handed off several duties to junior colleagues who could learn and grow from taking on that work. And they did great with the new duties. (As an aside, I later realized after reading The Leadership Pipeline that by not delegating as much as I could have earlier, I slowed my own development, as well as the development of those reporting to me and my boss. I did nobody any favors by trying to shield my direct reports from struggle.)
Then, I reevaluated all of my projects at work and immediately stopped work on all low-value projects that I started on my own initiative.
Sitting and thinking with my newly freed up time, I felt a bit lost. This feeling suggested to me that I had become accustomed to making myself busy. I realized that if I had nothing else to do, I would begin taking on low-value tasks.
Finally, I asked myself what I should do now. I decided that I needed to focus on projects that (1) I had the capability to do, (2) that would add the highest possible value to my employer, and (3) that would give me the greatest learning. I began to take on these projects when nobody asked me to. I continued to protect my time through negotiation and delegation. These initially felt like calculated risks, but I soon saw that nobody complained.
While I’m still early in my 80/20 journey, I feel encouraged by my initial results. My team members did great with their new responsibilities and grew their capabilities. Leaders complimented my new projects. And I began to enjoy work more than I ever had before.
From a personal perspective, this pursuit of progressing my career has taken on several meanings for me. First, it helps to ensure my ability to provide for my family, and hopefully achieve financial independence sooner. Second, it is a step toward self development and thus self-actualization. Learning and pushing myself has been uncomfortable, but I sense the change in myself. Third, it is a taking on of the yoke of responsibility which is a key way to find meaning and pursue the adventure of one’s life, as psychologist Jordan Peterson advises.
This is only the beginning of this journey for me. I don’t know how it will end, but I’m excited to see where it leads.