I’ve never met an ambitious person who has felt that they’re exactly where they need to be in their career, or that they’re ahead in their careers. Every one of them feels that they should be one or two levels above where they currently were, they deserve to be in better companies, that they could be working on better projects, or they could be doing more. That’s how everyone feels! I ran a 400 person skip circles program at Meta for IC4s, IC5s and IC6s. Every one of those people felt that either their promotion was way overdue, they came in under leveled, that they were not well positioned for a promotion or that they had missed opportunities. That was the common theme.

The reality is that all of us want the same few higher level opportunities. There are more people who want the high demand opportunities than the number of available opportunities. And as a result of that, everyone feels that they are behind in their careers.

When people hold on to this nagging negative sensation that they’re not where they’re supposed to be, they have this chip on their shoulder and they make unforced errors that cost them more time. They push their manager for promotions when they are not ready and hurt their most important ally. They damage cross functional relationships in the pursuit of “faster” results, thereby losing the trust of the team. They are impatient with leadership with product decisions and lost the trust to lead a product area.

Once you understand that everyone feels behind in their careers, you can switch over to a different mindset. I can be ambitious. I have to focus on doing good work, but I need to be patient with when I see the returns of it. That it is alright for the returns to come in a year or two years later that what we think is ideal. That mindset shift changes everything.

When people get into that state of mind that:

• I just want to get myself into good opportunities.

• I want to help customers and the business.

• I want to actually work hard at it.

• I want to enjoy the work that I’m doing.

It starts to reflect in the relationships that you build and in the output that you’re producing. It sets you up for the kind of career growth that you’re actually looking for.

In summary, everyone feels that they’re behind in their careers. The way to productively deal with it is to “Focus on doing good work, Be patient with career growth.” By doing that you avoid unforced career limiting moves and automatically set yourself up for the type of growth you are looking for.

Lesson 5: Everyone feels behind in their careers.

• In school your rating is the AVERAGE grade of ALL your courses.

• At work your rating is the MAX impact among all your projects.

Adult work is more like Venture Capital. The only thing that matters are the outsized winners. In Venture Capital the portfolio is a large set of companies. At work the portfolio is a large set of ideas.

In order to have massive success at work then, you need more shots of goal. You need to develop clear hypotheses, place small investments on each idea, keep building conviction fast & cheaply, write off failures and double down on the winners. That ability to view work as investment portfolio management across a wide set of ideas differentiates the successful people from others.

When we look at the successful people we see only the few ideas that had outsized success. What you don’t see is that large number of ideas that did not work out. They let go of the ideas that did not work and focus on the ones that work.

The people who are not successful usually try to come up with the best ideas, they put all their eggs in one basket, take failure as career threatening and go on negative spirals.

I watched Effi operate this way at Yelp and was mind blown.

• Every day he would have new ideas and lunch time was idea testing with other PMs. He would get feedback and let people tell him the gaps in them.

• He would then take the better ideas and pull people who he trusted to have good judgement into a conference room and pitch the ideas. Ask how to make it work or better.

• He would then take it to different parts of the organization: biz ops, growth, sales, etc to pressure test the ideas and gauge organizational support.

• Then he would have a short pitch deck and share with the head of product.

• Then they would work together to pitch to the CEO.

He ran this on a loop every day for the first year he was at Yelp. He had 100s of failed ideas that dropped off with very low cost along the way. Some days I thought Effi’s ideas were stupid. But that didn’t matter because out of this process, came the few ideas that were outsized winners and led to his success.

People didn’t have time to focus on his failed ideas because he had a few ideas that were massive outsized company impacting winners. By the end of the year he went from being an IC PM to leading a large portfolio of products at Yelp.

He did this in addition to his core day job leading the Request a Quote product. 🙂

He went on to do a lot more bigger things. Effi has a lot of super powers but I think this was one of his most incredible ones. And one I sorely lacked at that point, so it stood out much more glaringly.

Now as I run my own business, I apply this all the time.

So Lesson 4: Your failures don’t matter, Only your successes do!

But I spent a majority of my time (A) Beating myself up for my mistakes and (B) Being bitter about other people’s actions and unfair situations.

In order to grow, I needed to develop self compassion and radically accept that life is unfair.

Until I developed self compassion, no matter how much I tired, my mind would keep drifting back to “why did you make that mistake”, “how dumb were you”, “you are too old to make that mistake”, “How could you repeat that” and on and on.

Similarly, by not having radical acceptance, I was constantly blaming other people’s actions and the situation. “If only that other person didn’t make that asshole move”, “if only my manager had my back”, “If only I had more time”, “If only I had more resources”, “If only I didnt have a 104 degree fever that day”, and on and on.

There were a few things that helped me develop self compassion and radical acceptance:

1. Love Myself: Kamal Ravikant (Naval’s brother) wrote a book called “Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends on it”. In it he talks about how his was in the hospital after his startup died. And the way he recovered was to start to love himself again. From that book, I picked up the practice of mentally chanting “I love myself”. It was the most powerful thing. Self compassion starts from a place of love, love towards yourself.

2. Manage My Inner Judge: Yes you need to develop great judgement and it needs to apply to evaluating yourself as well. But how much time you spend in Judge mode and what tone you take when sharing your evaluation determines your personal growth outcomes.

   1. Spending a short amount of time once right after a mistake to identify your mistakes, the lessons, the skills you need to grow is great. But repeatedly judging yourself for months on end serves no purpose. It just sends you on a negative spiral.

   2. Similarly the evaluation. you want from your judge needs to lead to specific skills growth and changes you need to make. When you do that your judge is doing its job. But when your judge is name calling you and is judging your whole person & life, it has crossed a line. And needs to be toned down.

   3. Shirzad Chamine’s Positive Intelligence program helped me manage my inner judge through a few experiential exercises.

3. View Yourself as versions: Once you start loving yourself and have reigned in your inner judge, the next step is to recognize that every year, and every day there is a new version of you. Calling myself by version numbers: my 2025 version, my 2024 version made this very real. I could say: my 2025 version is much better at X, Y. Z than my 2022 version. And my 2026 version will be better at A, B, C because I am working on those skills now. The first time I heard about this was in Ami Vora’s talk and I use this all the time to remind myself to be self compassionate.

4. Take Radical Accountability: Radical acceptance for me started with Radical Accountability. The moment I started to say “Let me focus on what I could have done differently if I face the same situation and person again”, I started to see all the thing I could do differently if I had focused on what was in my control vs what was not in my control. Developing the muscle of focusing inwards vs outwards started to change how I thought. When there were so many more moves I had in the same situation with the same people, it was much more easier to just radically accept. Steven Covey talks about it in the 7 habits of highly effective people. I read the book but this didnt register it this context until much later.

5. Alien Chess: The other thing that helped me with radical acceptance was reading the post called “The Resilience of Alien Chess” by Mark Rabkin at Meta. Mark talks about the world as it is and not what you think it should be. That change happens every half and the people who get rewarded are the people who embrace the change a 100%. The people who are bitter about why things changed and the impact lose. I read this post a 100 times in my time at Meta. Every time there were reorgs I shared it with my teams. I became someone who embraced change. I leaned into change. Change created opportunities for me to have outsized impact.

6. Turn Emotions Into Actions: Finally we need to get out of our head and into the world taking actions in order to grow. And the only way to do it is to have a plan and start taking actions. Journaling is my tool to go from emotions to actions. I teach it in every one of my courses even Interview mindset. Every time I feel a lot of emotions and mental ambigity, I sit down and write: what am i feeling, what events/actions triggered them, what are the facts, what are my assumptions, what are my fears, what actions can i take to get the best outcome and what one action can i do right now. This shifts me from living in my head with emotions to let me go act on my plan.

I wasted years because I did not have self compassion and radical acceptance. It was only after I had true self compassion and radical acceptance that my personal growth sky rocketed.

I started to just focus on learning and skill growth.

But the reality as an adult is that “I get to choose how I measure my life”

I have a choice in what I value (goals), how I measure (metrics) and what is a successful outcome (numerical value of the metrics).

What I value (goals)

There are a large number of things I can choose to value:

• Working at specific companies

• Doing specific types of work

• Having a certain kind of impact

• Making different levels of money

• Having flexibility with work

• Pursuing different interests outside of work

• Spending time with family

• Taking care of your own health

• Being famous

• And many more

As an adult I get to choose what I value among these. And I get to choose different ones in different phases of my life.

• From 20-30, I valued working on computer vision and AI. The type of work was all that mattered. I made very little money and was very happy.

• From 30-35, I valued being a consumer PM at good product companies. I wanted to be treated fairly with compensation.

• After 35, I valued working at top tier companies with people at the top of their game and growing as a result. I valued money significantly more as I started to worry about saving for retirement.

• Now, I value working on problems that I care about with people I respect, while accumulating resources to take on larger problems. I value spending time with my family and taking care of my health, that I have neglected for years.

Someone else could have very different things they value.

How I measure (metrics)

I then get to choose How I will measure success.

I can measure

• Revenue

• Impact on customer

• Satisfaction with work

• Satisfaction outside work

• Health

I get to choose which of these matters more or less.

What I view as success (numerical values of metrics)

And finally I get to choose what is a successful outcome.

Suppose I choose revenue as the metric. I can set $x00,000K or $y00,000K as the numerical value for success.

Or

I can just compare myself with other people outcomes. For example CEO of Maven posted that top instructors on Maven made $5M / year.

I have 100% choice in What I value, How I measure, and What I view as successful outcomes. So lesson 2 is “I get to choose how I measure my life.”

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During grad school, my dream was to make the MIT Technology Review 35 Innovators Under 35 List. One December I turned 36 and I hadn’t made the list. I was devastated. It was the end of a dream. It was also a self judgement that I had failed in life and I hadn’t realized my potential.

It began a path of personal growth that led me to where I am today.

This December as I grow one more year wiser, I will share 35 lessons I learned after 35 that reshaped who I am as a human being, a spouse, a son and a leader.

Lesson 1: My best is yet to come!

After 35,

• I helped build successful consumer, business, ads, integrity, and AI-first products.

• I tackled increasingly challenging problems and delivered strong business impact.

• I built a reputation for running toward hard technical, product, and people problems.

• I became better at leading complex initiatives.

• I became a more sought-after hire for senior leaders.

• I mentored others and taught them different skills.

• My self-awareness improved.

• I became a better communicator.

• I became more emotionally intelligent.

• I became more resilient.

• I developed higher agency.

• I became a better negotiator.

• I made more money.

• I became a better leader.

• I became a better husband, sibling, and son.

Looking back at my 36th birthday, my best was yet to come. My 36 year old version of me would be incredibly proud of today’s version.

Yet as I watched “The Thinking Game”, the documentary about Demis Hassabis the founder of DeepMind and Nobel prize winner, I couldn’t help thinking what if I hadn’t given up on my AI research career in 2010, after 8 years of working on computer vision.

So I am reminding myself “My best is f***king yet to come!”

And this my friends is true for all of your “Your best is yet to come”. if you have any doubts ask the version of you that was 10 years younger.

I will be posting one lesson a day that I learned after 35 for the next 34 days. If you don’t want to miss them you can follow on LinkedIn or you can subscribe to this 35 day limited edition newsletter “My best is yet to come”.