6 Show up as a professional

In addition to the razor-sharp technology skills you’ve built up to this point in your career, you need to bring something else to work every day: professionalism. We all work in a business environment, or in a businesslike environment. In this environment, certain behaviors help move your career forward; others hold you back.

6.1 Be your word

I’ve long followed three simple rules that I believe have contributed greatly to my success in business and in life. These rules may, in fact, be the Big Three that tell you everything you need to know to be successful.

First, a prediction: you might read these rules and think, “Well, duh.” But they’re not common-sense, “of course” rules. They’re demonstrably not common sense because they’re not that common. In fact, following these rules has enabled me, and past business partners of mine, to rise above the crowd simply because, as simple as these rules are, almost nobody follows them.

6.1.1 Never promise what you cannot deliver

It’s a simple rule but hard to follow. Here’s why: Most people don’t want to be the bearer of bad news. If someone asks you to do something, and you say no, they will want to know why. So now you may feel that you are in a confrontation. Most people hate confrontation, so they’ll say yes instead just to avoid one. People will say “yes” even knowing full well that they cannot deliver what they’ve promised.

So the first step toward being your word is getting better at saying no without creating a confrontation. I suggest adding a short, polite explanation to your answer to deter the other person from pursuing the request. Try saying, “No, because I’m already completely committed. If I take on something else, I’ll need to drop something I’ve already committed to do” or “No, I’m focused elsewhere right now, unless you can help me understand why I should shift my focus.” Whatever the reason, don’t say yes unless you will actually, for sure, definitely be able to deliver. Don’t say yes thinking, “Well, I can probably cram this in someplace.” Say yes only if you have a definite, workable, practical, realistic plan for making it happen.

This rule can be hard to follow at work, especially if your boss assigns you a task. You didn’t really get a say in that, right? But you need to look at everything on your plate, go back to your boss, and be honest about what you can do. Let them know that taking on that task means you might have to drop another task (“I can get this extra coding done this week, like you asked, but it means I’ll have to set aside the unit tests I was writing. Is that still okay?”). You might even show them the list and ask them which one you can postpone; this may help them empathize with your situation and see exactly how loaded your plate is. Unfortunately, in some organizations bosses try to load more on you and don’t acknowledge that you can’t do everything. If you find yourself in such an organization, maybe ask yourself why you’re staying there.

6.1.2 Always deliver what you promise

This rule is the companion of the first rule. If you did promise something, no matter what was going through your head at the time, you have to deliver it. Period.

I’ve worked with colleagues who used the “My dog ate my PowerPoints that were on a USB drive” excuse. As you might guess, excuses like that diminished the amount of respect they received from their co-workers, managers, and bosses. People do not respect excuses, especially when those excuses are not credible. When people lose respect for you, your reputation—your brand—suffers, and the damage goes beyond you. Not delivering on a promise can have tangible, negative effects on colleagues, who might have to pick up the slack, and on achieving project goals and internal or external deadlines. If someone commits to do something for you, you want them to do it. Therefore, you have to do the same thing.

Delivering what you promise often depends on a key life skill: knowing what you can do. If I asked you to sit down and write a 10-page paper on a random topic, how long would it take you? Do you know? Do you know for sure? Many people simply don’t pay attention to how long it takes them to accomplish things or make guesses instead of verifying. This leads them to not understanding what a commitment will actually involve, which leads them to overcommitting, which leads them to telling excuses and damaging their professional brand.

6.1.3 Be easy to work with

If you commit to doing something, make it as turnkey as possible for whomever you’re doing it for. Nobody should have to bug you. Nobody should have to nag. Nobody should have to remind you. Nobody should get it half-baked from you, get into a fight with you about it, and make you redo it.

Easy, right? Sure. Except ask yourself how many times you’ve violated any one of these three rules. Be honest with yourself. Be brutally honest. If you can’t admit your faults to yourself, you can’t truly succeed at anything. So take a hard look in the mirror and ask whether these three rules are ones you truly live by in every aspect of your life.

Be your word. Nearly all my success has come from these three simple rules.

6.2 Be detailed and precise

Most successful people are pretty good at paying attention to details. But our brains often work against us when it comes to details, and losing the ability to focus on details can affect our ability to show up as professionals on the job.

Human brains have a good and bad little feature called filtering. This feature is deeply embedded; first and foremost, it helped ensure our primitive ancestors’ survival in the wild. When you have the potential to become someone else’s lunch, your brain has to decide quickly what in your immediate environment is important and what isn’t. It needs to discard the unimportant things (”Ooo, pretty tree”) and focus sharply on the important things (”Something is stalking me”). This can’t be done as part of conscious thought, which would take too long; it has to happen automatically, constantly, and almost instantly.

Imagine yourself walking down a busy street in a city like New York or London. For the most part, your brain operates in macro mode, focusing on the big picture and the major threats: getting hit by a car, running into another person, tripping over a bad section of sidewalk. The details of the moment get filtered out: what other people are wearing, the sign on the side of the bus that just passed, the specials advertised in the shop window. But your brain has time for those details. After all, during that walk you’re probably also listening to a podcast, texting on your phone, or engaging in some other activity. You’re letting your brain filter remove the input that’s considered unnecessary for the macro task of surviving the walk.

So recognize this: you can’t shut off the filtering system any more than you can shut off your own heartbeat. The trick is to consciously focus the filtering on the details you want and need pay attention to.

I’m not suggesting that you stop listening to your podcast and instead pay attention to the fashion choices of everyone on your walk. I’m simply pointing out that your brain does this filtering whether you ask it to or not. Your subconscious is choosing what to focus on, and it does this all the time, in every task you perform every moment of the day. It does it during meetings, while you’re working, and while you’re engaging with your family at home. It’s filtering out details that you’ll never even realize were filtered because it’s on autopilot.

But just as you can control your heartbeat, you can also exercise control over the filtering feature. Calm, deep breathing can help you slow and steady your heart rate, and physical training can help you moderate your heart rate and help your heart respond more appropriately to a given situation. The same is true of the filter. With some active training, you can help your brain do a better job of deciding what’s important and prevent the filter from trapping information that it should be letting through.

Here’s why we need to learn to turn down our filtering instinct: we’re not primitive hunter-gatherers focused on basic survival anymore. We have time to focus on the details. In fact, we must focus on the details to do our jobs. We must focus on which connection ports are we using, for example, or on the precise syntax in a line of code or commands, or on the time when a meeting will take place.

When I meet someone who asks how I like my iWatch, I immediately start to distrust them. “It’s an Apple Watch, not an iWatch,” I say to myself—and sometimes to them. Now, you may reasonably be thinking, “Don’s kind of being a jerk, here. I mean, who cares?” You’d perhaps be right. But I care, and I’ll tell you why: To me, this detail is indeed minor, so why not get it right? Exactly how much extra brainpower would be required to remember the correct product name? None at all. And given that no extra brainpower or smarts is required, all I can imagine is that this person isn’t good at paying attention to details. Then I wonder what else they consistently get wrong. They don’t have control of their filter, so what else about themselves can’t they control?

This example is a good illustration of where your personal brand comes into play. If you create the public impression that you’re poor at paying attention to details, that impression will become part of your brand, and that particular aspect of your brand won’t help you in your professional life.

First (and second, and third) impressions are important, and there are myriad ways that you can put off other people. Many people have an instinctive distrust of someone who seems sloppy, for example, and that can extend to attention to detail. If you can’t get the little things right, they may assume you’re likely to not get the big things right either.

As you move through life, know that perhaps the most important bit of self-ownership you can have is over that brain filter of yours. Train it to obey you. Teach it not to filter out small details. Let those details flow over you, and actively decide what you need to pay attention to. Don’t let some caveman decide what you’re going to pay attention to.

How? Slow down. Our brain filters are designed to assess fast-moving situations quickly. They’re designed to keep us alive during the hunt. Our modern world being so much more full of potential distractions, it’s easy for our brain filters to shut them all out. Consider airports, one of the most frenetic and distraction-rich environments you can imagine. The overhead public address systems are always announcing something, you’re rushing to your plane, people are everywhere and you’re trying to dodge them, and your brain filters go into high gear. You start ignoring anything that isn’t an immediate threat or obstacle. Admit it—you could be dashing to your flight, and someone could announce the recipe for curing cancer over the PA system, and you’d miss it. Slow down.

In my experience, when your body is no longer in a mad rush, your brain filters will relax. When your body doesn’t feel like it’s in a fight-or-flight situation, the survival filters aren’t as necessary, so they’ll settle down. Your tunnel vision will expand to include more of the world, and your brain will become more observant. You’re going to have to actively allow yourself to slow down. Leave 10 minutes earlier for that appointment. Get to the airport half an hour earlier, and allow for a longer connection. Don’t rush. Over time, your brain filters will become less hair-triggered, and that will help you be more detail-oriented at work too.

Take a coding example. I’ve worked with junior programmers who had an error in their code and asked for my help. I looked at their code, and with my greater experience, I was able to spot the problem fairly quickly. I told them that there was indeed a problem and asked them to look more closely. But with me hovering over their shoulder, they were in an even bigger panic. Their filters kicked in, and they started rapidly scrolling through their code, looking for the error. They were in macro mode, trying to focus on the big survival picture, and their filters were trying to remove the details so that they could focus on the big picture—but that got in the way of their finding the problems. So I let that go on for a minute. Then I directed them to the region where the error was and asked them to walk me through the code. Almost invariably, they spotted the error when they come to it. They just needed to slow down and take in the details.

This example is very much like what brains did to keep cavemen alive, and it works against us in the modern, caveless world. Our brains are designed to look at a scene and remove the details: the blades of grass, the individual leaves on the trees, the sound of the breeze. Filtering out the details let our brains see the big threats, like the predator about to eat us.

But details are survival now, as we have ever-more-detailed and critical interactions with each other, with technology, and with our environments. So care about the details. A lack of attention to detail is what makes phishing email scams work. It’s what makes nearly every scam possible, in fact. It’s what causes car accidents. It’s what makes you miss your train. It’s what makes you miss that important meeting or overlook that crucial line in the output that shows where the problem lies. Nearly everything that can go wrong in your personal and professional lives can be traced to a lack of attention to detail. Train yourself to read the fine print of life all the time. If you find yourself skimming, stop, go back, and read it again more slowly. Focus on absorbing details instead of letting your brain do whatever it wants.

6.3 Cut your losses when the time is right

True professionals don’t doggedly work the same problem forever. They realize that the outcome of whatever they’re working on is most important, and they seek ways to get to that outcome as efficiently as possible. Sometimes, that actually means giving up.

Our brains don’t like us to quit. Nobody likes to feel like a failure, and we often resist that feeling more powerfully than we would pursue a feeling of success. This way of thinking holds most people back in their lives. Rather than risk the feeling of failure, we content ourselves with a lack of success.

Knowing when to quit can apply to almost anything in a technology career. Maybe you’re working on a block of code that will not work. At what point do you erase it and start over fresh? Or maybe you’re trying to fix a server that keeps stubbornly rebooting for no obvious reason. When do you give up, reinstall the operating system, and start over? It can be frustrating to give up, but if doing so will get you to a solution faster, you’re actually winning.

You’ve probably heard Facebook’s catchphrase “Move fast and break things.” That’s a corollary to the idea of “Cut your losses.” It means that you try something, but you’re not going to keep trying it past the point of viability. Look at the major investments companies like Google have made and subsequently walked away from, such as Google Wave (whatever that was) and Google+ (more or less). You can emulate this approach. Try something, and if you can’t make it work, move on.

Yes, cutting and running is a kind of failure. Be okay with that. It’s not bad to fail. Failing is how we learn. It’s also not bad to fail and lose, if you’ve come to the point where winning is not going to be practical. Businesses do it all the time, and although bankruptcy can be scary, sometimes it’s the legitimate thing to do. Cut your losses, reorganize, and try again.

6.4 Let Blue Sky mode happen

Don’t be a “no” person. Be a “how can we” person. Don’t kill ideas because the first iteration doesn’t seem workable. Be an engineer, not a roadblock. A negative vibe holds you back but nobody else.

Disney goes through a process for dreaming up new attractions for its amusement parks. This process is called Blue Sky, and it means that the clear blue sky is the limit. During Blue Sky discussions, employees are not allowed to say no to something or to start laying out how it won’t work. They dream. They say, “What if we . . .” and engage in pure speculation and invention. You don’t worry about the logistics in this phase. You don’t express your own likes or dislikes. You let the ideas come, and everyone in the discussion riffs to evolve ideas and express new ones.

Blue Sky mode rarely happens in the normal world. Sit in a conference room at almost any company and suggest a new product, and you’ll likely get immediate pushback—reasons why it can’t work, possible issues, roadblocks, and hurdles.

Don’t be that person. Don’t suppress other people and discourage them from contributing. Instead, let Blue Sky mode happen. Be the person who says, “Oh, it’d be hard, but maybe we could do [whatever] to make it work.” Be an engineer of solutions, not an engineer of roadblocks. Your idea for a solution might not be workable, but it’s still Blue Sky mode: let someone else take your nascent idea and pivot it to something that will work.

Normally, someone brings up an idea, and a bunch of other people crush it before it’s had a chance to live. Sometimes, they see the idea creating more work for them, and they don’t want to do it. Be honest with yourself if that’s how you feel. Tossing in reasons why not isn’t helpful, though, and it makes you the problem. It makes other people not want to engage with you. It puts you on the outside. Don’t worry too much about logistics when an idea is getting going. Instead, see where the idea goes. At the appropriate juncture, if an idea is getting solidified enough, start offering solutions (“You know, that would normally take more people than we usually can commit to it—but how about this. What if we [idea]? It might mean doing [alternative detail] instead—would that still hit the intent?”).

Push other people to let Blue sky mode happen too. If you’re the one bringing up the pie-in-the-sky idea, and someone else moves to crush it, take a moment to stop, examine that behavior, and advocate for the value of supporting new ideas rather than immediately destroying them. “Hey, we’re looking for creative new ideas,” you might say. “Let’s take some time to work through them. Someone’s first idea might not work, but if we all work on it a bit, maybe a fourth or fifth idea will be the right one. But we’ll never know if we crush it out of the gate.”

Bringing a solution (indeed, being the person who is a solution) in Blue Sky mode isn’t useful only in work situations. It doesn’t just win you supporters and friends. It’s also a way to make your brain start to think about doing instead of not doing. Most people’s brains are instinctively conservative; when we’re confronted with something new, we often push back before we’ve even really thought about it. That’s why most people are so resistant to change. The true innovators in our society don’t say no. They say, “Hmm” and start thinking of a way to say yes. You have to be on the lookout for “I don’t like new things” pushback that comes from the dark recesses of your brain. Recognize it for what it is, and set it aside. Deal with situations rationally, not emotionally or unconsciously.

Be a person who tries to find the yes. But if you can’t, above all, don’t be the person who tries to squash ideas. Let Blue Sky mode happen.

6.5 Draw a yellow line

Here’s another Disney story. In this case, I love that Disney recognizes that familiarity breeds contempt.

What Disney sells, in its theme parks, is entertainment. It’s not just about rides; it’s also about an environment. Disney calls it a show, and shows, like all forms of fiction, require the willing suspension of disbelief. You know that the princess is really some college kid, but you choose to participate in the show and treat her like Cinderella or Minnie Mouse. A maxim of fiction is that for the audience to maintain their willing suspension of disbelief, you have to avoid chucking anything out-of-story at them. At Disney parks, you can’t have an angry janitor who got dumped by her boyfriend the night before and who doesn’t want to be at work scraping gum off the asphalt this afternoon.

All of us have worked in an environment where one or more of our co-workers got too comfortable and brought all their baggage or negative feelings to work. They marched in, plunked down at their desk, and made it clear that they weren’t happy to be there.

Every time you set foot out of your home, you’re engaging in a public performance, and everything you do affects everyone around you. That always-grumpy person isn’t going to be first in line for a promotion because, honestly, everyone wishes they’d quit and go do something else. A surly middle-school teacher isn’t going to be as effective as one who’s in a better mood and who remembers why they’re in that classroom in the first place. You need to present your best self every day, even if that’s not how you really feel. Every time you drop the performance and let people see through the facade, you’re breaking the story. You’re hurting everyone else’s ability to continue suspending disbelief. You’re damaging your product.

That’s why Disney theme parks have yellow lines. At any possible place where an employee can come from backstage and into the sight of paying customers, there’s a line on the ground in yellow traffic paint. It’s a hard visual reminder to Disney employees to leave their problems at that point. Maybe you had a bad night last night. Maybe you got dumped. Maybe your cat died. Maybe you’re having trouble paying the rent. These experiences are bad, and it’s fine to feel badly about them. Leave it all at the line, and it’ll be there waiting for you when your shift is done, because when you cross the line, the performance is on. You smile, you briefly remember what you are being paid to do, you straighten up, and you go do it. “Past this line,” you’ve been told, “you put on the performance, and you don’t break character. When you come back to the line, you can go back to being whoever you really are.”

Character. What an important word. In public, at work, we are all characters. We are playing a role. What does that role need to deliver? It doesn’t need to be who we really are; we can be ourselves at home with friends and family. I’m a sarcastic, hard-to-get-along-with individual at home. I don’t let that come through in my work character. Instead, my work character is the person my employer hired, and (I hope) a professional all of my colleagues—with their varied backgrounds and personalities—can work and get along with.

What most of us lack in life is that yellow line. After going to the same office and the same job with the same co-workers day after day after day after day, we get complacent. We lose our respect for the role we have at work. We forget who we are supposed to be at work, and we break character and drop our performance. That’s when you damage Brand You. That’s when your paying customer—your employer—gets to see behind the curtain. That’s the precise moment when you take whatever seeds of success you’ve managed to plant, and you crush those tender little shoots under your foot. That’s when your career declines into a mere job and you stop investing in your future. It’s where you damage your chances of success.

In your mind, paint a yellow line. Perhaps it’s inside the front door of your home. Perhaps it’s outside the front door of your office. Wherever you paint it, mark it well. I’m serious: stand at that location and visualize a line, painted in thick yellow reflective traffic paint. Notice the scuff marks on it where people have walked over it time and time again. Notice the little nicks along one edge where the UPS guy wheels his hand truck every day. Make it so real in your mind that you can’t not see it every time you walk past that spot. Ask yourself how much longer it’ll last before you need to touch it up. Make it real. Then respect it.

Every time you approach that line, think about what it means. Think about why you’re at this job and what you hope to achieve from it. How is this job helping your career? How is this job helping you achieve your own success? How is this job enabling you to help others, either now or someday in the future? What is the point of it all? You don’t need to be happy to be there—but you need to remember why you are there. Examine every bit of baggage you’ve got with you right then. Enumerate every negative thing plaguing you: cat died, got dumped, kid needs braces, car door got dinged. See the baggage, pause at the yellow line, and set down the baggage. Nobody will touch it. It’ll all be waiting for you when you come back out, but it has no place on the other side of the line. Your performance is about to begin. Review your lines. Put a smile on your face. Raise the curtain, step onstage, and deliver.

6.6 Action items

For this chapter, I’d like you to focus on some of the professionalism rules I’ve covered in this chapter:

  • Where would you paint your yellow line? What sorts of things would you expect to leave behind it? Make a list of those things. As you get started with the yellow line concept, having that list handy—on your phone, perhaps—lets you review it each day, making a conscious activity of crossing the line.

  • Have you ever overcommitted and been unable to be your word about something? Try making a list of all the current commitments you have—to work and to your personal life—and evaluate your ability to meet each of them. Is now a time to renegotiate any that you might be at risk of missing? Can you use such a list to start getting a better idea of what you can do so that you can avoid overcommitting in the future?

I often keep a list of current work commitments in a note on my laptop. That way, when someone asks me to commit to something new, I can instantly pull up my list and ask, “Which of these can we drop?”

  • Get yourself an antitrigger that forces you to slow down and pay attention to details. For me, it’s a little fidget button I bought at a dollar store. It’s a steel button that makes a soft click when I squeeze it. As I go through my day, I try to notice when I’m letting details slide by: the names of the stores I’m walking past, the traffic sign I passed, and so on. I click my button and deliberately slow down and look at those things as I do so. Over time, it’s helped my brain stop filtering information. Now, when I need to concentrate on something, I can softly click the button, and it helps tell my brain to slow down and stop filtering. Details become clearer, and I’m often able to solve problems faster as a result.

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