When Someone Offers You a Seat On a Rocket Ship, You Get On

In her book, Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg shares one of the best pieces of career advice she’s ever received.

When debating her next career move, Sandberg made a spreadsheet comparing the roles and responsibilities that would come with each position and company she was considering. Google was on her list (a relatively unknown company in 2001), and ranked lower than all of the other options in categories like security, salary and responsibilities, but when Sandberg presented her dilemma to Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO at the time, he managed to change her mind with this simple piece of advice:

“[Eric] covered my spreadsheet with his hand and told me not to be an idiot (also a great piece of advice). Then he explained that only one criterion mattered when picking a job—fast growth. When companies grow quickly, there are more things to do than there are people to do them. When companies grow more slowly or stop growing, there is less to do and too many people to be doing them. Politics and stagnation set in, and everyone falters. He told me, “If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, you don’t ask what seat. You just get on.”

Sandberg made up her mind that instant and joined Google, which as we all know was one of the fastest flying rocket ships ever created.

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The 2 Epiphanies That Made Me a Better Negotiator

For most of my life, I was a terrible negotiator. I accepted lowball offers, I never demanded the raises I deserved, and I overpaid for everything. I knew that you needed to “drive a hard bargain” and “be willing to walk away from the table” if you wanted to get the best possible deal. I just never seemed to be able to do it, ever.

It reached the point that my husband actually forbid me from speaking whenever we were negotiating the price of a car, a home, or even a used toaster at the flea market. And while I wouldn’t usually take too kindly to being silenced, I had to admit that I saw his point. In a negotiation, I was the weakest link.

Two programs of research helped me to see what I was doing wrong – specifically, how I was thinking about negotiations the wrong way.

Epiphany #1

When people are about to enter a negotiation, they see it as either a threat or a challenge. Studies show that people who see negotiation as a threat experience greater stress, and they make less advantageous deals. They behave more passively, and are less likely to use tough tactics aimed at gaining leverage, compared to the hard-ballers who feel negotiation to be more of a challenge than a threat.

This makes so much sense to me. My husband absolutely sees negotiating as a challenge. He looks forward to a good haggle. I do not. Reading about these studies, I realized that I have always seen negotiations as threatening, and just wanted them over with as quickly as possible, no matter what it cost me. Why prolong a stressful, threatening situation, when you can throw in the towel and move on?

But why do I see them as threats, and not challenges? To answer that, I needed…

Epiphany #2

There is more than one way to look at any goal. Some of us think about our goals as achievements or opportunities to advance – having what psychologists call a promotion focus. Others see their goals as opportunities to keep things running smoothly, to avoid loss, to do what you ought to do – this is called a prevention focus.

Promotion and prevention-focused people work differently to reach the same goal. When we are promotion-focused, we are creative, embrace risk, work quickly, and are fueled by optimism. When we are prevention-focused, we are more thorough and deliberate, more analytical, and better fueled by defensive pessimism (i.e., thinking things might go wrong if you don’t do something to prevent it.)

When it comes to negotiating, having a promotion focus will give you the clear upper-hand. The promotion-focused (like my husband) see negotiation as an opportunity to gain something, and studies show that this helps them to stay focused on their (ideal) price or pay targets. The prevention-minded (like myself) see negotiation as an opportunity to lose something – they worry too much about a negotiation failure or impasse, leaving them more susceptible to less advantageous agreements.

When it comes to getting what you want, it pays to focus on what you have to gain, rather than what you might lose, so that you can see it as a challenge (rather than a threat), and be better able keep your eyes on the prize.

Now, when I enter any negotiation, I make a deliberate effort to refocus myself beforehand. I stop and reflect on what I have to gain by getting a great deal, or by fighting for better compensation – the opportunities for happiness and growth they will afford me.

You wouldn’t believe the deal I got on our last toaster.

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New Rule for Meetings: Always Be Capturing

Hubspot’s Joshua Porter and his team paid a visit to Google Ventures for some design work and were inspired to change their approach to meetings:

“Always be capturing” is about the habit of continuously recording the value from your conversation. For example: If you’re talking about a new concept, you should be sketching it as you talk so your team has a shared understanding and an artifact of the conversation.

His post has a handful of rules for making sure you get maximum value out of your meetings, including my favorite: “If you can’t capture it, stop talking.” Porter says that capturing all conversations has some added benefits:

By the end of the sprint we generated an enormous collection of shared artifacts that we could all access, and that we had all seen before. Reviewing that collection afterward shows us how much work we actually did — and it’s an invaluable foundation for future design work that the sprint kick-started.

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Why I Carry a Paper Notebook

“Everything is an idea for something, something that touches the imagination, a fact that seems relevant or maybe just a statement I find interesting — either because it resonates or because I disagree. All of it is fodder for continued work or thinking on the topics. It’s also important to me to record the ideas that my instincts tell me are bad.”

—Elizabeth Spiers

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Talent Isn’t Fixed and Other Mindsets That Lead to Greatness

In the creative world, we spend a lot of time talking about “talent.” It’s that special sauce—a certain style, a certain perspective, a certain aesthetic. If you’ve got it, you’ve got it. And if you don’t, well… it can’t really be taught, right?

Not exactly.

According the Stanford researcher Carol Dweck, the psychologist behind the much-praised book Mindset: The New Psychology for Success , the attitude that we bring to our creative work—and to mentoring our juniors—can play a huge role in shaping just how much of our inborn talents we realize.

If we believe that someone’s talent is fixed—including our own—we are effectively writing off any options for growth. But if we believe that talent, or intelligence, or any other ability, evolves as a result of how much effort we put in, the opportunities are endless.

I chatted with Dweck to learn more about how a “growth mindset” can impact creative achievement on a personal and a professional level.

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When we’re children, we think we can do anything. Especially in terms of creativity, we don’t think about our skill set as being limited. Why does that stop at a certain age?

It can actually stop as soon as we become conscious of ourselves. We start thinking that our mistakes are failures—and that these failures tell us and other people that we are not competent, that we are not worthy. This process can happen quite young.

Fast-forwarding into adulthood and being out in the working world, how does being afraid of failure impact people’s ability to be creative?

It makes you afraid of being judged. Now, what innovation or creativity requires is that you do things that haven’t been done before. And that you stick to them until you succeed. If you have a “fixed mindset,” which is this idea that you have a certain amount of limited ability, you are afraid to choose hard tasks. You think: “What if I don’t succeed? People will think I’m not as smart as I want to be, as I want them to think I am.”

When we give adults the choice to go back to something they’ve already done well, or something they haven’t done as well at, the ones with the fixed mindset go back to things they already know. In that scenario, you are not stretching forward, or stepping out of your comfort zones. You are really just concerned with looking smart all the time.

Adults in a fixed mindset also think that great effort, great struggle, means that you are not smart. It’s the notion that: “If I were smart, if I were talented, it would just come to me.” But people in a “growth mindset” enjoy the effort, welcome the struggle. They understand that innovation requires it.

Carol Dweck. Photo courtesy of Standford University.

How do these two mindsets play out when we’re dealing with setbacks? When we don’t succeed right away?

In a growth mindset, you don’t always welcome the setback, you were hoping to move forward, but you understand that it’s information on how to move forward better next time. It is a challenge that you are determined to surmount. In a fixed mindset, a setback calls your ability into question.

Everything is about: “Am I smart? Am I not smart?” But if you’re always managing your image to look smart, you’re not taking on the hardest tasks, you’re not thinking about them in the most innovative ways, and you’re not sticking to things that don’t work right away.

How can we bring a “growth mindset” to giving people feedback on creative projects?

Whether we are praising or criticizing, my work suggests that you focus on the process not on the person. So if there is a success, even a great success, you don’t say, “You’re a genius! You really have talent!” because it puts people into a fixed mindset.

If you’re always managing your image to look smart, you’re not taking on the hardest tasks.

And then it makes them afraid of doing hard things or of making mistakes, which will dampen future creativity or innovation. If you are giving negative feedback, it should be about the process rather than the person. So you can praise what was good about the process, but then you can also analyze what was wrong about the process and what the person can do in order to increase the likelihood of succeeding next time.

Could you give me an example of how that language would actually play out if I were giving someone feedback?

A fixed mindset approach would be saying something like: “This project turned out amazing. You’re a genius. I knew you had the talent. This is proof of it.” As opposed to a growth mindset approach of, “Wow, this project turned out fantastically well. I loved the way you mobilized the team, the way you kept everyone focused, the way you brought it to fruition, the way you made everybody feel the ownership.” These are things you can replicate and that you should replicate the next time. Whereas, when I say, “You’re a genius!”…how do you reproduce that over and over?

And what about when you need to give someone criticism? Or point out an area that needs work?

As I mentioned, when you are giving criticism, you need to carefully critique the process someone engaged in and discuss what skills they need to learn and improve.

But I’ve also fallen in love with a new word—“yet.” You can say to someone who fell short: “You don’t seem to have this,” but then add the word “yet.” As in, “You don’t seem to have these skills…yet.” By doing that, we give people a time perspective. It creates the idea of learning over time. It puts the other person on that learning curve and says, “Well, maybe you’re not at the finish line but you’re on that learning curve and let’s go further.” It’s such a growth mindset word.

In the creative world, the notion of talent (as opposed to effort) is emphasized constantly. How can we break out of that cycle?

First, there is some great research on changing managers’ mindsets by Peter Heslin. In one workshop, managers were asked to think of examples from their own lives that illustrated a growth mindset—like “What are some things you thought you could never do, and then you did them?” Or writing a letter to someone who had been doing well but was now hitting a period of struggle, and mentoring that person in terms of a growth mindset.

The researchers then followed these managers for at least six weeks and compared them to managers who did not have the growth mindset training. The first thing they noticed was that the managers who had the growth mindset training were now much more open to feedback from their employees. They were also less likely to make snap judgments about who has talent, and who doesn’t.

They also found that the managers became much more willing to mentor. Because if you’re in a fixed mindset and you believe that some people have it and some people don’t, you think, well “I will just wait and see who has it and who doesn’t. Cream rises to the top.” But if you have a growth mindset, you understand that “Hey, I’m in the business of growing talent, helping it develop, not just sitting back and judging it.”

And how can an individual start to change his or her own mindset?

One thing I tell people is, just as a first step, start listening to the fixed mindset voice in your head. It’s always there, telling you: “Oh, are you sure you want to do this? You might make mistakes and, you know, people will find you out. You’re not going to look like the genius you want to look like.” Or if you start struggling, the fixed mindset says, “Oh, I told you so, but it’s not too late, you can still get out and save face.” For a while just do that, just start listening to the fixed mindset voice keeping score. And then over time: Start talking back.

If you’re with someone who is tremendously able and successful. Think: “What can I learn from this person? Yes, maybe I feel a little intimidated but this person could be a great mentor. I could learn a lot. Maybe I could get to know them, maybe they could take me under their wing. Maybe I want to know more about getting from where I am to where they are. What are their secrets?”

Start talking back and seeing all these things—challenges, setbacks, role models—as learning opportunities. Do it most of all if you still feel threatened, because we all have a little part of ourselves that is a little shy, a little threatened. Do it anyway! And see how well it works.

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Don’t Panic. Just Get to Work.

Your ambition has very little to do with your work ethic. You can still sit down and get everything done in the day without having a panic attack.

-Roger Hobbs. The 24-year old author sold his first book on a 50-page manuscript straight out of college. Read the Wall Street Journal’s interview with him here.

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Schedule your tasks

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The First 90 Days: Your Road Map For Success at a New Job

Transitioning to a new job is not easy; it can be overwhelming to learn your role, create new relationships, assimilate into the culture, and impress your boss all at once. Onboarding programs are tasked with making sure you do one thing: quickly create value for the company.

In the definitive book on the topic The First 90 Days, Michael Watkins outlines a specific plan to ease transitions for leaders at all levels. It’s good reading for anyone beginning a new job (and anyone who leads teams).

Think of it as your battle against misunderstanding. According to a study conducted by the International Data Corporation: “U.S. and U.K. employees cost businesses an estimated $37 billion every year because they do not fully understand their jobs.” By assimilating into a culture and gaining an initial sense of purpose, you’re actively minimizing your own frustrations and showing your worth right off the bat.

But what, specifically in creative professions, is important to look out for when starting a new role? What should you pay attention to?

1. Assess the business case for your hire. You were hired for a reason. Is it to generate ideas? To train others? To add design or technical skills that were lacking? To deftly oversee client projects? Learning where you fit within the overall business strategy is something that may seem obvious but is often overlooked. Figure this out early.


2. Show your work. After a rigorous interview process, it can feel like you described your skills and experiences ad nauseum, so now that you’re hired you can get work. The thing is, most people in the company don’t know who you are, why you were hired, or what specifically you bring to the table. Make sure your team knows your resume and has viewed your portfolio. It gives people around you context, a view into your style, and an idea of how you complement or challenge them.


3. Learn the communication patterns. Cracking the code of company culture often comes down to simply learning how people communicate with one another. Does your boss expect you to keep her informed on the details, or come to her with only the big problems? Does your team need constant validation or complete autonomy? It is not only a matter of imposing your own communication preferences on the organization, but assimilating into the patterns that already exist.


4. Establish expectations with your boss. According to Watkins, one of the keys to success in a new role is to secure early wins: “Early wins excite and energize people, build your credibility, and quickly create value for your organization.” But it is important to define what a win is in your boss’s eyes. What does she expect you to learn and accomplish? How quickly does she expect to see results? The more clarity you build around these issues, the easier your transition will be.


5. Don’t try to do too much. You may feel the need to validate yourself by proving your creative genius. Instead, feel confident that you’re there, and at least initially, listen carefully rather than talk. Find ways to highlight the strengths of others. As for your own genius, there will be plenty of time for that.

Navigating the transition period in a new job can feel a bit like juggling swords. But if you take the time to find your place in the organization and focus on new relationships, you’ll be off to a great start.

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Over to you:


What do you try to do when transition into a new role?

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Quentin Tarantino: “Risk Failure Every Time Out of the Gate”

“I remember reading a review that Pauline Kael wrote about some director’s big epic, and she said: Now, look, it might seem unfair to judge a talented man more harshly when he tries to do something big than a less talented person who’s doing something easier. But when you try big things, you take big risks, and if you’re trying to do something that is maybe above you and you can’t quite pull off, then whereas before we only saw your gifts, now we see your failings.

I’ve always been pushing that envelope. I want to risk hitting my head on the ceiling of my talent. I want to really test it out and say: O.K., you’re not that good. You just reached the level here. I don’t ever want to fail, but I want to risk failure every time out of the gate.”

—Quentin Tarantino

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The First 90 Days: Your Road Map For Success at a New Job

How to establish rock-solid relationships and catapult yourself to success when you're the newest team member.

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Turn Your Wandering Career Path Into a Secret Weapon

Because the modern workplace demands us to be flexible and always on our toes, your varied resume can be an asset - if you position it correctly.

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Start Projects With Phase Zero

Find the problem your clients' client is facing and innovation will follow.

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The Key to Being a Creative Leader? Job Security.

When we feel secure in our new position, it can free us to take bolder, more innovative action.

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