“All returns in life, including in relationships, are from compound interest.”

You want to rise, early in your career, to a senior position because that position will accrue more compound interest over the 30+ years of your life than if you take your time getting there.

“Some of the most successful people that I've seen in Silicon Valley had breakouts very early in their careers,” Naval says. “They got promoted up to VP or Director or CXO or CEO, or started a company that did well, fairly early. If you're not getting promoted up through the ranks, it gets a lot harder to catch up later in life. It's good to be in a smaller company early because...there's less of an infrastructure to prevent early promotion.”

Similarly, you want a strong alumni group to begin forming at or before your first job. If you remain close, your relationship can provide compounding value for the rest of your career. As Naval says, “If you're working with the same person 20 years from now, the trust you build up with them is so great, that the things you can do with them are incredible. You can start companies with them, or you can invest in their company on a handshake, and you'll never have to worry about... (things like) whether they work hard enough.”
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I believe you should look at your career as a portfolio of jobs/roles/opportunities. Each job that you take, each role that you choose to fill, each opportunity you pursue, will have a certain potential return -- the benefits you can get from taking it, whether those benefits come in the form of income, skill development, experience, geographic location, or something else. Each job will also have a certain risk profile -- the things that could go wrong, from getting fired for not being able to handle the job's demands, to having to move somewhere you don't want to, to the company going bankrupt, to the opportunity cost of not pursuing some other attractive opportunity.

Once you start thinking this way, you can think strategically about your career over its likely 50+ year timespan.

For example, when you are just out of school and have a low burn rate and geographic flexibility, you can take jobs with a certain return/risk profile. If you get married and have kids, you will take jobs with a different return/risk profile. Later, when your kids grow up and you are once again free to move about and you don't have to worry about tuition payments and a mortgage on a big house in a great school district, but you now have far more experience than you did when you were first starting out, you can take jobs with a third return/risk profile.

Most people do not think this way. They might occasionally think this way, but they don't do it systematically. So when an opportunity pops up, they evaluate it on a standalone basis -- "boy, it looks risky, I'm not sure I should do it". What you should automatically do instead is put it in context with all of the other risks you are likely to take throughout your entire career and decide whether this new opportunity fits strategically into your portfolio.
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Compounding is magic. Look for it everywhere. Exponential curves are the key to wealth generation.

You also want to be an exponential curve yourself—you should aim for your life to follow an ever-increasing up-and-to-the-right trajectory. It’s important to move towards a career that has a compounding effect—most careers progress fairly linearly.

You don't want to be in a career where people who have been doing it for two years can be as effective as people who have been doing it for twenty—your rate of learning should always be high. As your career progresses, each unit of work you do should generate more and more results. There are many ways to get this leverage, such as capital, technology, brand, network effects, and managing people.

I am willing to take as much time as needed between projects to find my next thing. But I always want it to be a project that, if successful, will make the rest of my career look like a footnote.

Most people get bogged down in linear opportunities. Be willing to let small opportunities go to focus on potential step changes.
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"The mistake that most people make is they too often try to move to the immediate things. Like, 'Hey, what job should I go take?' You have to back up to the things that lead to it. Think of it as a kind of a two-step strategic process: the first is, 'Well, what are the things that I could do or people I could talk to that might lead me to a really interesting job opportunity?' Then the second thing is, 'Well, what are the kinds of things could I do that would get me noticed?'"

"A key thing about networking that most of the people who call themselves 'networkers' miss is that giving is more important than taking for establishing the relationship."
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Modeling in psychology has many applications, but using it to achieve your peak state – whether in business or in life [or careers] – is one of the most powerful. To be successful, select a person you admire [or has achieved the results you want], study the methodology behind their success and create a similar path for yourself. Copy what they do and you will achieve the same results.

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Break the cycle of needing experience to get a job, and needing a job to gain experience.

In terms of gaining experience, one of the best things you can do is find a startup or nonprofit to work for part-time in your area of desired expertise. This helps you gain a foothold and gives you something to talk about to future employers. For example, a friend of mine did social media for a startup for three months on nights and weekends when she was trying to make a jump into a full-time social media role. She was recruited for her dream position shortly thereafter.
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Figure out what you're good at and start helping other people with it - give it away. Pay it forward. Karma works because people are very consistent. On a long enough timescale, you will attract what you project. But don't measure; your patience will run out if you are counting.
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Lori has a great metaphor for careers. She says, “They’re not a ladder; they’re a jungle gym”.

As you start your career, look for opportunities, look for growth, look for impact, look for mission. Move sideways, move down, move on, move off. Build your skills, not your resume. Evaluate what you can do, not the title they’re going to give you. Do real work. Take a sales quota, a line role, an ops job, don’t plan too much, and don’t expect a direct climb. If I had mapped out my career when I was sitting where you are, I would have missed my career.
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There is a supreme moment of destiny calling on your life. Your job is to feel that, to hear that, to know that. And sometimes when you’re not listening, you get taken off track. You get in the wrong marriage, the wrong relationship, you take the wrong job, but it’s all leading to the same path. There are no wrong paths. There are none. There is no such thing as failure really, because failure is just that thing trying to move you in another direction. So you get as much from your losses as you do from your victories, because the losses are there to wake you up.

When you understand that, you don't allow yourself to get thrown by one bad experience or a circumstance. Because your life is bigger than any one experience.

Because even if you're on a detour right now, that's how you know! When you are not at ease with yourself, that is the cue that you need to be moving in another direction.

When you are feeling off-course that's the key.

How do I turn around? The way through the challenge is to get still and ask yourself what is the next right move.

Not think about, "Uhhh.." I got all of this to do.

Instead, ask "What is the next right move?"

And then from that space make the next right move and the next right move and not to be overwhelmed by it because you know your life this bigger than that one moment.
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The happiest employees make their work deeply meaningful by doing what she calls "job crafting."

That's when employees find ways to add meaningful tasks into their workday on their own.

Instead of waiting for a boss to assign new projects or for a promotion, they ask themselves "What can I do to the job right now to make that work more meaningful?" she says.

It might be something like finding a part of your day when you are helping people, or it might be finding tasks that let you use your best, favorite skills. The point is, you just do these these things and make them a part of your job.
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"If I had to pick one habit that has really changed everything for me, I would have to say it is this: being able to reverse-engineer the finish line of my career in real time."

He adds, "When I say reverse-engineer, I'm talking going back, step by step, from that big dream you have to this very moment in time. Figure out what the steps are."

And he says, you can't simply mimic what someone else has done. "You can only do what is right for you."
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I’m often asked what advice I would give to my younger self if I had the chance. My answer? I wish I could go back and tell myself: “Arianna, your performance will actually improve if you can commit to not only working hard, but also unplugging, recharging and renewing yourself.” That would have saved me a lot of unnecessary stress, burnout and exhaustion.”
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