Don't Quit Your Day Job. Wendy Paris
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to connect and help out. These traits have helped me, and embracing them can help you, too.
People who look at my career from the outside and see me as super‐successful sometimes conclude that success must mean never failing. But this isn't true either. While I love helping build businesses, and am proud of my achievements, I've also had my share of missteps, including twice taking jobs that I quickly regretted and left in less than a year. I've been laid off; once my department was dissolved, and I had to let go of my whole team, and then leave myself.
Success doesn't require an early, clear‐cut vision, nor does it come from never having setbacks. Rather, it grows from working hard and adopting some crucial mindsets or mindshifts — attitudes you can learn, and put into practice.
Over the past 40 years, I've come to identify six essential mindshifts made by those who succeed; six powerful attitudes and actions that underpin organisational success. I have watched people thrive using these mindsets. I've also seen other very smart, talented people fail to flourish because they didn't embrace them. These are the mindsets I want to share with you in this book.
Success means something different to different people, of course. For you, it might mean achieving a certain lifestyle, or rising to a desired position or reputation within an industry. It could mean fame and fortune, influence, making a difference, helping others, or supporting a family comfortably. In my own life, success has meant having the lifestyle I want, achieving financial comfort sufficient for my family and some charitable giving, and rising to reasonably high positions, though not CEO. But I do also have a universal view of success, which includes having some sense of control over your life; feeling of agency in your career; and liking, for the most part, how you spend your time, who you spend it with, and how much you're earning. This is the view of success that this book can help you achieve.
I've also had a not‐so‐secret sideline occupation as a ‘mentor maven’, an unofficial (unpaid) career coach and supporter for hundreds of people at all stages of their working lives. Over the decades, I have listened to, and advised, people negotiating promotions and setbacks, struggling to rise and preserve time with their families, hoping to move overseas or return home, deciding whether to accept an offer or keep looking, and strategising about how to fight back when wronged.
The stories of some of these mentees are in this book, too. Helping other people develop has been the most fulfilling activity of my life, besides raising my own kids. Maybe having lacked the coordination (or popularity) required to be a cheerleader in high school left me with a desire to cheer on people in the career arena. Mentoring and advising people has brought me tremendous pride, and enabled me to gain more pleasure from working. If I didn't work, I wouldn't be able to help these people or forge these connections.
Sometimes people reach out for advice because I've long been one of the few female sales executives in the hardscrabble tech business. Others seek input because I'm older and have survived. Or because I'm more approachable than Tony Robbins or a celebrity CEO. People want to know how to find time to raise children and travel regularly for work, how to manage setbacks without letting them sap confidence and derail goals. This is another reason I'm writing this book: to take this mentoring to more people, to share with you what those I've mentored have learned.
After so many years in tech, I now see my career as a series of software upgrades. Aliza 1.0 was consulting and financial services; 2.0 was tech. What you're holding in your hands now is part of Aliza 3.0, the third iteration of my working life. I'm still experimenting with what I want to do, and this book is part of this third phase. It's a way to continue my greatest work passion: sharing lessons learned from decades of leading US companies across new frontiers while building and maintaining strong connections between teams around the world. In a world where ‘remote workforce’ defines more of us than ever before, this background allows me to offer insight and wisdom as a leader who has been in charge of far‐flung workforces for years.
In many ways, now is the best time ever to be looking for a job or seeking a better one. It seems like you can't read the news without seeing an article about how much work is changing, both the structure within offices, and what people want and expect from their jobs. We are in a moment of real dynamism at work. Companies that once required everyone to be physically present at headquarters or in one of their offices around the globe are going remote or adopting hybrid models. Employees who never had the flexibility to work from home are now considering it, or even making it a condition of employment.
COVID‐19 has forced, or allowed, people to re‐evaluate their careers and values, their trajectory and even what a career path means for them. Nobel prize winner and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman summed up the general sentiment, ‘It seems quite possible that the pandemic, by upending many Americans’ lives, also caused some of them to reconsider their life choices.’3
In many fields, employers are scrambling to fill roles. The demand for workers affects everything from salary and bonuses to in‐office perks, flexible work arrangements and even time off. This gives would‐be employees leverage that didn't exist for most of my time at work.
Additionally, corporations, non‐profits, government agencies and universities are investing resources in expanding the diversity of job candidates, employees and leaders, and rightly so. This opens exciting opportunities for many people who may have felt shut out of top jobs in the past, and is leading to an improved workplace.
Diversity also boosts the bottom line, an undeniable motivator for firms. Take gender diversity, as one example: a Peterson Institute for International Economics survey of nearly 20 000 firms operating in 91 countries found a repeated, demonstrable correlation between women at the C‐suite level and higher profitability:
… and the magnitude of the estimated effects is not small. For example, a profitable firm at which 30 percent of leaders are women could expect to add more than 1 percentage point to its net margin compared with an otherwise similar firm with no female leaders.4
Even if, in your own life, you've experienced the push for diversity as more talk than action, a more diverse workforce is absolutely the direction of the future.
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Career success increasingly depends on working well with others within an organisation. For me, this book could also be called, How to Succeed in Business by Being Your Best Self. It describes a way of rising in your career that hinges on exhibiting the attributes we ascribe to being a good person, colleague and friend: being reliable and trustworthy, encouraging of others and making time for yourself.
This advice comes not only from my work experience, but also from my deep belief in the value of caring about others while also advocating for yourself; of seeing the world as full of opportunities, not a zero‐sum‐game; the options plentiful, not scarce. You can thrive in your career without adopting a narrow‐eyed, cutthroat, winner‐take‐all approach. Yes, work is highly competitive, and you can't expect anyone else to look out for you, but you. A career is not a family; your boss doesn't love you like a good parent, and may not even like you. Your boss doesn't have to be your friend, but they do need to value the work you're doing and respect your contribution.
There certainly are people who are jerks and succeed. They have personal goals and they go after them; if they step on a few people along the way, that doesn't deter them. Nasty people can do well in business. As much as I'd like to believe that the people who climb on others are miserable at home, they may not be. Some may even be happy with their lives. But this overly self‐focused approach to success is not mine, and not the vision of this book. (It is, however, one reason you need stamina, which I cover in chapter 2. Part of thriving is surviving, including being able to process unfairness and refocus on your own path.)
The strategy in this book is not about using others to get ahead. This is not Sun Tzu's The Art of War, nor Machiavelli's The Prince. It's an approach that involves being open and enthusiastic