From excellence to altruism: evolution of my career

Thrive by excellence

After WWII, poverty was much more common than before the war. It’s one of the rare times in human history when rentiers from inheritance are squeezed to become working class and education has a big impact in one’s financial life. (More often than not, marriage is the only practical hope for the poor). Born in the 80s in China, my talents in Math is an incredible leg up in China’s meritocratic education system. Kids talented in Math will easily do very well in that system and thus enjoy far better education resources than those less so.

Moreover, in that education system, until college:

• Students who do well in exams are widely respected and loved everywhere across the board. This makes it easy for them to develop a big ego at such a young age.
• The exams are dominated by Math related tests. Tests that are not math-centric tend to be easy if one decides to work hard. But the math-centric ones are essentially testing the raw talents and were able to distinguish top 0.1% from 1%.
• Elite students need almost zero collaboration from peers and teachers to do well in exams. In fact, the most effective way I’ve discovered for developing the core exam skills is to do more exercise by myself and avoid disturbance from others.

Thus come the self excellence strategy for my generation of math-talented, ambitious students from poor families:

Strive to develop self excellence at all costs and the world will reward me with success. Anything else is secondary.

With strategic adjustment depending on given situations, this strategy actually worked fairly well for me way after graduation. I managed to join whichever company and performed very well if I wanted to. However, I began to feel very strong headwinds since I’ve reached senior levels. While I’m in the Internet/software industry, I believe what I’ve experienced is typical in the business world.

The curse of solo performers

Looking back, I think the fast growth in the first several years of my career came from the mastery of technical skills. They constantly enabled me to make impacts that weren’t possible. However, like all skills development, the progress per unit of time quickly diminished after a while. It’s like powerlifting. In the first year, you can linearly increase the weight, but you can’t keep doing that otherwise you will soon be as powerful as Superman!

After the first 7~8 years of my career, not only I can’t advance in job level any more, when given the opportunities to make a bigger impact, I struggled very badly. That’s because the level beyond senior position means the ability to scale impact by team work. Very few people can sustainably deliver comparable impact to a team by oneself. The higher the job level, the harder it becomes exponentially. As Andrew Grove put it, ‘the work of a business, of a government bureaucracy, of most forms of human activity, is something pursued not by individuals but by teams.’

It took me many years to realize I am not an exception to the above law. Maybe it’s because the positive feedback loop from developing self excellence has worked for me for so long.

Two sides of same coin: my feedbacks

Knowing that I’m in plateau and had been painfully outgrown by two jobs, I’ve spent a very long time reading and thinking about how to break my glass ceiling. Then two feedback from my manager finally inspired me to solve the puzzle:

1. I stretched myself too thin. I tend to over promise and under deliver.
2. I shouldn’t worry about losing credit if another team solved the problem I discovered.

After thinking carefully, 1) and 2) actually talks about the same thing. 1) says I don’t delegate enough. 2) answers why I don’t. I took ownership of many projects because I have the most context. However, being the expert doesn’t mean I should do everything by myself. By delegating properly, those projects won’t be under delivered and team output will be maximized. This is the meaning of the multiplier role of leaders.

Since then, I applied delegation radically. It enabled me to focus on the most important tasks at my role and carry the team ahead using not only my technical skill and domain knowledge, but also my communication and human skills. This change of work style made my job both dramatically easier and of higher impact.

Since then, I was able to develop my behavioral styles fastly. It turned out that delegation, while being a game changer at one time, is only the appetizer.

The generalized delegation: leadership

Delegation naturally generalizes to a work style that scaling out one’s output by influencing others. Influencing is a distinct game from the archiving game. It’s very close to leadership in my mind. A high performance archiver and strong leader think and behave differently at work. I’ve dedicated one post about the detailed differences of the two styles, so I won’t repeat here.

The transition from playing the high achiever game to the leadership game is my most effective counter attack to career plateau. This strategic shift perfectly capitalized the insight that business is a pursuit by teams.

I’ve been training myself to be a better leader ever since. Practicing the principles and skills I’ve learned has felt natural to me. Engraved in our gene, people-centric and collaborative skills are likely gifts for all Homo sapiens, (unlike Math). Those talents are meant to be utilized everyday and be the foundation of all human greatness.

For so many years, I brainwashed myself that I have to be the smartest to be liked by anyone in this world, self excellence is my thing, it’s the only way. It’s an awakening realization that my true talent is in leadership and helping others. This realization changed my life profoundly in every possible way.

The behavior shift led to such huge leaps in my life that I feel as if I can dodge bullets. Later on, I discovered the ultimate mindset of leadership. With that, I don’t even need to dodge.

Mastery of leadership

Leadership is like an art. Everyone thinks they know something about it. When asked about what leadership consists of, they tend to produce somewhat lengthy descriptions with abstract words. I always strive to find straightforward and intuitive answers for important and seemingly complex questions. So I replayed all the biographies and stories from the greatest leaders in history, the heroes in fiction, also friends and co-workers I admire most in life, trying to find a simple answer.

What’s at the core of strong leadership? I found a common pattern that perfectly described the behaviors of all legendary leaders, from Abraham Lincoln to Bill Campbell, from Du Yuesheng to Don Corleone. That is altruism. Whatever they do, their motives are dominated by helping others, including friends, coworkers, strangers and even enemies. If you read their stories, their otherish dominance speaks loud and clear on every page! By and large, altruism is sufficient and necessary for strong leadership. While there are leaders struggling with other abilities, like domain knowledge or strategy, I find the biggest gap for the most is the realization of the otherish nature of leadership.

The power of intelligent altruism is illustrated in detail in the bestseller give and take. With deep reflections and behavior pattern recognitions from my life experience, I went on to discover that the most efficient selfish strategy is actually very close to altruism! I was astonished by this insight and reached my inner peace from it.

The path from selfishness to altruism

Why is altruism the highest ROI strategy even if we started from a selfish point of view? I think that’s because Homo sapiens arrange the society as a network of people. If you think about it, our reward is never determined by some objective metrics or contribution, but by how they are recognized by the network. Great work has zero return unless it’s well adopted and has influenced the others. Over the years, the network’s recognition for us is very close to our true contribution to the network. It’s like the stock market is a weighing machine in the long run.

So the best way to harvest long term success is by maximizing our long term contribution to the world. Don’t forget that we are part of the world too. So how should we balance our own interest with the altruistic principle?

I breakdown network reward into two parts when I evaluate each choice.

R(network) = R(me) + R(others)

Each time, I try to find the decision that maximizes R(network) and radically disregard the net effect on R(me) and R(others). I believe the best way to balance our strategy and avoid being exploited by selfish people. Evaluated this way, the best choice is often quite different from the one that maximizes R(m) but often close to the one that maximizes R(others).

Those ignorant selfish people maximize R(me) and often make decisions that have a negative impact on R(rest) and R(network). In this model they will statistically be punished by their poor or negative contribution to the network. In practice, the punishment comes from retaliation from people hurt by their selfish behavior or by law. Warren Buffett believes lifelong earnings from selfish people are a good choice to short against(please read the first paragraphs from full speech to understand the context).

It’s a matter of choice

Lastly, I asked myself, am I born to be altruistic or a selfish excellence pursuer? I don’t really know. What I do know is that after switching my behavior from self excellence pursuer to altruistic leader, my work becomes easier by orders of magnitude and I become so much happier at work and at life. At the end of the day, I would like to believe that this is a decision we can make, rather than some talents determined at our birth time. Like J.K. Rowling put it: “It’s our decision, far more than our abilities that show what we truly are.”