Bet on Yourself

1. Foundation Building: Hard Work and Big Dreams

The secret to happiness is learning to find joy in the process of doing hard things.

Exponential Power. The combination of hard work and big dreams yields exponential results. This principle, modeled in early childhood, emphasizes that no life is too small and no dream too big to be worthy of investment. Even if your current job isn't your dream, it's an opportunity to create a map for recognizing and seizing moments for advancement.

Family History. The author's family history is full of stories of people who took very limited resources and, with a lot of hard work and creative allocation, created lives of joy and meaning. Her father's journey from a potato farm to becoming a fighter pilot exemplifies boldness, purpose, and bravery. Her mother's resilience in creating enriching environments in Alaska taught her to create extraordinary things from the ordinary.

Incremental Growth. The author's early experiences, like working at a start-up, taught her the importance of understanding how her work fit into the larger mission of the company. She learned to think on her feet, understand the importance of tasks, and represent the values of the company. This foundation prepared her for life-changing opportunities to come.

2. Creating Career Opportunities: Intelligence, Grit, and Passion

Both Amazon and Google consistently prioritize hiring for intelligence, grit, and passion rather than only a specific skill set.

Prioritize Learning. The author's career trajectory makes more sense when looking at the values and methods tech companies use to evaluate candidates. Both Amazon and Google prioritize hiring for intelligence, grit, and passion rather than only a specific skill set. Their philosophy is that they can teach a smart person to do anything.

Irreplicable Opportunities. The author emphasizes the importance of seeking out and jumping deep into irreplicable opportunities. For her, this has consistently come in the form of being willing to be an early employee and embracing all the chaos that comes with that, in order to work directly for a leader she greatly admires and hopes to emulate. She also consistently prioritized roles that required her to learn an expertise or skill that was key to her career progression both in depth and very quickly.

Meaningful Impact. The author has looked for opportunities to have a meaningful impact in the world through her work. Passion alignment has carried her further and faster toward progression and happiness than isolated financial gain or fancy job titles ever could have. Some of the most important moments she has chosen to bet on herself have been when pursuing a new role.

3. Increasing Your Impact: Resilience Through Failure

Resilience is a natural result of being aligned with a mission greater than yourself.

Building Resilience. Resilience is the single greatest skill needed to survive in innovative and competitive environments. The author's CEO managers taught her that resilience is a natural result of being aligned with a mission greater than yourself. This fuels your ability to make mistakes over and over again as you inch your way closer to your ideal.

Accelerated Learning. The author once almost killed Jeff Bezos in a helicopter crash. This experience taught her how much failure can accelerate your learning. Had that helicopter not crashed, she thinks it would have taken her years to learn everything she did on that single day about trusting her instincts, managing a crisis, delegating, communicating with people very senior to her, and leading without official authority.

Mastering the Pivot. The author learned to make quick pivots after failure. This is what makes the difference between earning trust and being overlooked for projects and promotions. This is why Google emphasizes “failing early and often,” because this kind of growth is only possible when you fully embrace this learning cycle and apply the lessons immediately.

4. Career Advancement: Learning by Doing

The only way you can create your unique mark on the world is to create a ripple effect that extends far beyond your own self and circle of direct influence.

Common Goal. The most consistent way the author has seen her and other's careers progress is when they are all moving toward a common goal. One of the tricks she learned early on is that the surest way to choose new projects that will advance your visibility and promotability is to identify key projects that simultaneously solve problems for your managers and that move them closer to accomplishing their most strategic objectives.

Amazon Prime. The author shares the story of Amazon Prime's creation, highlighting the team's dedication and Jeff Bezos's long-term vision. Despite initial skepticism from the board, Bezos's focus on customer loyalty and willingness to negotiate hard with shippers led to a revolutionary program that transformed e-commerce.

Google Transit Maps. The author recounts the launch of Google Transit Maps, emphasizing the vision and effort required to collect data and create a seamless user experience. This project, like Amazon Prime, demonstrates the power of a team working towards a shared goal and the importance of leadership in driving innovation.

5. Getting a Seat at the Table: Overcoming Imposter Syndrome

I have spent most of my career in rooms with some of the most powerful people in the world.

Action Plan. The author shares her experience of being in rooms with some of the most powerful people in the world. She realized early that she needed an action plan if she was going to not only survive but thrive in this space. She needed to quickly learn how to get over imposter syndrome, streamline systems, and claim a place at an already full table.

Building Your Squad. The most effective way the author found to battle her natural imposter syndrome was to surround herself with the right people. Before she could ever be ready for an inspirational mentor, she needed a squad of people who were simply a step or two ahead of her in her journey. That has been her most consistent tool for being effective rather than intimidated.

Dream Team. The author shares how she built a dream team. She wanted to bring people on board who had a diversity of experiences, backgrounds, talents, and interests. She didn’t want to hire anyone that she wouldn’t categorize as more talented than her. She needed the bar to be incredibly high to meet the goals Eric and she had set.

6. Getting Things Done: Growing Your Influence

I have always aimed to be the person that needs to be held back, not pushed forward.

The Shadow. Jeff Bezos had a radically impactful program for growing executive talent and injecting his values and methodology throughout the company. In the author's first year at Amazon, Jeff created a role called “the Shadow.” The role of the Shadow, or more formally, Technical Advisor, was to be filled by a promising junior manager who would spend a year and a half at Jeff’s side.

Managing Up. There is an art to managing-up to someone very senior to you. Most importantly, you need to lay a groundwork of trust. You need to first prove your abilities, your loyalty, and your courage in small, daily tasks. Most of the time, this part feels invisible, and it may be.

Calm in the Storm. The author shares a story of Hillary Clinton and how she handled a problem. This is a simple illustration of the author's philosophy and her secret for success in her job as chief of staff. She never presented anything to Eric without having first researched all of the issues thoroughly, gathered the essential data, and prepared several suggestions for actions to take.

7. Purposeful Risk-Taking: The Moonshot Process

The greatest predictor of future success is one’s willingness to learn, experiment, fail, and repeat until one can produce the desired effect predictably.

Google X. The author shares her experience of working with the Google X team. She learned how they stomach not only the daily ambiguity of trying to create something that doesn’t yet exist, but also the required constant cycle of failure that informs their next steps.

Infinite Learner. Jeff Bezos was a daily example to the author of the importance of being purposeful and aware of your mindset and making sure that it isn’t fixed. He prioritized opportunities to learn as much as he could from every task and person around him.

Uncomfortably Excited. The author shares that Larry Page is famous for describing the emotion of passion-driven risk-taking as being “uncomfortably excited.” This philosophy has given her guidance in every phase of her career and life since. In her early years at Google, while she was working on the Product team, this translated into helping her navigate the constantly pivoting priorities of the company.

8. Pivot Points and Reinvention: Managing Life Changes

Pivots are part of every life and career—whether intentional or not.

Proactive Strategy. Having a strategy in place before moments of disruption arrive gives you a competitive advantage and preemptively reduces some of the inevitable stress. Some of the pivots in the author's life have been wonderfully empowering, and some were simply gut-wrenching, but each taught her valuable lessons that she doubt she could have learned any other way.

Managing Growth. While at Amazon in the early 2000s, the author watched Jeff Bezos build pivots into the culture and core fiber of the company from day one. Very few companies have this wisdom and foresight early on, and this is often the differentiator between those that scale and dominate and those that fail to convert.

Claiming Your Power. In the process of her personal reinvention, the author realized that California might no longer be her correct stage either. There was too much of her old life and her former self represented there. She sold or donated nearly everything she owned and moved to London without a clear plan for what would happen next.

9. Know Your Value: Repackaging Your Skills

Resilience, it turns out, isn’t a skill you learn once and are done.

Entrepreneurial Journey. The author's transition into being an entrepreneur and founding her own company is the most extreme daily exercise she’s experienced so far in her career. This is how you discover what you understand only in theory and what you know how to do in actual practice.

Repackaging Skills. As the author started to share with colleagues that she was planning to leave Google after twelve years at the company, some of them reached out to her with opportunities that she wouldn’t have even dared apply for normally, which was very encouraging.

Personal Business Plan. The author had a failure moment that made her realize that she needed to do a reset. She was working at her past Google pace but without the same clear compass of what she was trying to deliver, who she wanted to do that for, and what she was going to learn from each opportunity.

Last updated: March 20, 2025