Friends of Dave #207: iloveyou chocolate
Forget your ego and just get on the damn rocket.
There's a quote that Sheryl Sandberg once gave in a Harvard Class Day speech that I found myself invoking on a few separate occasions this week. It says:
If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, don’t ask what seat. Just get on.
It's actually not an original quote from her -- she took it from a conversation she once had with Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google who was counseling her earlier in her career about taking a role at the company.
Think about it -- if you were interested in going to the moon or Mars and someone said to you they could offer you a seat, would you ask them if it was a window, middle or aisle?
Hell no!
If you really wanted to go, you might pose a few inquiries to help you understand the risks, ensure your safety and be certain what you were about to board was actually a rocket, but where the seat was wouldn't matter.
You are going to OUTER SPACE after all -- there will be plenty to see and do along the way and when you get there.
Yet, when it comes to their professional lives and careers, particularly in the early stages, I find that people usually tend to take the opposite approach.
They get hung up on things like title, job responsibilities, visibility within an organization and reporting structure, or even how it will look to others on LinkedIn.
Money is of course important too, but sometimes it turns into an internal struggle about how much one feels they rightfully deserve versus how much the position is valued by the employer.
As I have written here before, all signs usually point to one common culprit in these cases: ego.
It's our ego that needs to know what seat we are being offered on the rocketship. And if we listen too hard to it, we might just miss out on that trip to outer space we wanted to take.
That's what Sheryl Sandberg was trying to say to those HBS grads that day.
In the big scheme of things, titles mean very little Who you report to means very little. Visibility means very little. Holding out for those few extra dollars you feel you deserve today means very little.
By all means, if you are offered that seat, put your ego aside and just get on the damn rocket.
Then, stay in your lane, do your job, help the team and, if you need to, stop yourself from thinking about how things could be or should be. Get out of your own way, and just move forward.
You are on a rocketship to space, for god's sake! Anything can happen along the way, so it's best to just enjoy the journey!
Trust yourself, those around you and with a little luck you will make it to that destination -- and it will be better than you expected in the first place.
You know what other journey you should get on this week? The "checking out the stories below" journey. Each one is a good one. So check them out!
Have a great weekend.
XOXO
Dave
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