The Canvas Strategy
Advance your career by making everyone around you look good first.
Instead of seeking credit and recognition for yourself, deliberately find ways to help the people above you succeed. Clear the path for others, do the grunt work nobody wants, connect people, generate ideas and hand them off. The person who clears the path ultimately controls its direction. This strategy trades short-term ego gratification for long-term compounding returns in relationships, skills, and influence.
- Making the people above you successful is often a faster path to influence than competing with them for visibility.
- The person who clears the path and handles the unglamorous work earns trust and insight that purely self-promotional behavior cannot buy.
- Trading short-term ego gratification for long-term relationship compounding is almost always the better deal.
- Generosity with credit early in a career creates obligations that tend to be repaid at compounding rates over time.
- Controlling the direction of a path is often easier when you are the one maintaining it, not the one walking at the front.
- Audit your environment for unmet needsIdentify the grunt work, inefficiencies, and unglamorous tasks that the people above you or around you are neglecting or struggling with. Look for leaks to patch, introductions to make, and ideas to develop that would benefit someone else's agenda.
- Execute without seeking attributionTake on these tasks and complete them thoroughly. Hand ideas to your boss. Introduce collaborators to each other. Produce more than everyone else and give your insights away. The key is to do this genuinely, not as a transaction, and to be glad when others get the credit.
- Compound your investments over timeTrack the relationships you've built, the skills you've gained, and the reputation you're developing through service. As your bank of goodwill and competence grows, opportunities will begin flowing to you naturally. Let the strategy become permanent rather than a temporary tactic.
Belichick's first job in the NFL was volunteering to analyze game film for the Baltimore Colts without pay. He disappeared into rooms to do the grunt work other coaches thought they were too good for, and his insights were attributed to more senior coaches. His father taught him to deliver feedback to superiors privately and self-effacingly.
Instead of seeking credit and recognition for yourself, deliberately find ways to help the people above you succeed. Clear the path for others, do the grunt work nobody wants, connect people, generate ideas and hand them off. The person who clears the path ultimately controls its direction. This strategy trades short-term ego gratification for long-term compounding returns in relationships, skills, and influence.