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The two best pieces of career advice I ever got…
Long before Medium ever paid me $2.01 for my work here, I was a professional writer, of sorts. Specifically, I’m a technical writer.
I work at Google, now, in NYC. That’s more a matter of luck than anything else, but I’m not complaining. It’s a great gig. I have amazing managers, brilliant teammates, and I get to work on interesting stuff.
Just over 20 years ago, I was working all the way downtown at Johnson & Higgins, on their end user support desk, helping people with glitchy Window 3.1 workstations and wordprocessing problems.
I had a great manager there, too, but it was a different manager who opened my eyes to a couple of secrets that have served me well in my career.
The manager’s name was Joe Sisolak. I don’t even remember the context of the conversation, but Joe barked this at me one day (emphasis his):
“You know what I like about you, Festa?
If you don’t know something, you say so. And you listen.”
Talk about positive reinforcement. I’ve never forgotten this advice. I’m not saying that if you follow these two rules, you’ll end up at Google. If you don’t follow these rules, you probably won’t end up at someplace great, though.
Postscript: One of the things they always used to tell us at J&H was that it would never be sold. It was a private company, run by 40…