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Today marks 78 years since the Nakba, when 750,000 Palestinians were driven out of their homes.

Ireland will always stand with Palestine.
❞

~ Orfhlaith Begley MP ~
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All rights and credits are reserved to the respective owner(s).

My views are personal and don’t represent any organization that I’m affiliated with.
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Being an IC is becoming the new career flex. I call it Hi-C (High-impact IC). And I’m so here for it (and testing it myself).

The traditional career path has always been kind of dumb: Get really good at your craft so you can earn a promotion into... no longer doing your craft.

Instead, you become a professional meeting attender, a full-time cross-functional coordinator, all while routing info up and down the chain.

But now AI gives you the abilities of an average marketer, designer, PM, engineer, analyst, etc. Combined with actual domain expertise, one person can now do work that used to require entire teams. Increasing your impact no longer means you need a team to get things done.

I became an IC at Lovable few months back and I love it. I think I was always a mediocre manager anyway. (Side note - it does mess with your head a bit because we’ve all been brainwashed into thinking it’s a demotion)

But in today’s environment, it’s a career upgrade.

You get to spend your time doing what you’re actually good at. And what you love.

Plus I really don’t think “middle management + cross-functional coordination” is the most desirable and defensible career skill set going forward anyway.

Let's get back to building!

Wrote more about this here: https://lnkd.in/e9BPZYYr

#HIC

Me: "Maybe if I keep making fun of vague homepages, software companies will stop making them."
Software companies:

If you’re not willing to invest in yourself, why should anyone else invest in you? Put skin in the game.

In sales, the more senior you are, the easier it is to hit quota.
Account Executives: 41.9% hit quota.
First Line Manager: 51%
Director of Sales: 63%
VP of Sales: 66%

Every rung up the ladder, the odds improve. By the time you're a VP, you're nearly twice as likely to hit your number as the AEs on your team.

There are real reasons for this. Senior leaders have more influence over how quotas get set. They control territory design, headcount, and forecast methodology.

And of course the buffer play that orgs deploy (add the direct reports quota up and give it a haircut of 10 to 20%, etc etc).

But if you're an AE wondering why it always feels hard, the data has an answer: attainment gets easier the further from the quota-carrying frontline you get.

The best sales orgs are starting to ask whether that's by design and whether it should be.

New management data dropped this week (salaries for various management levels, plus check salaries for roles at 15,000 companies): https://lnkd.in/eGzQtVyH

✌️

Burnout isn't a badge of honour. It almost broke me.

I was waking up at 3am, heart racing, grabbing my phone in the dark to write to-do lists, just to stop the noise in my head.

I built Digital Ethos from nothing. 100% growth every year for five years straight. From the outside, that's a success story.

It was.

But success at that pace has a cost.

What I didn't recognise at the time was that I wasn't working hard because I was ambitious.

I was working hard because I was scared.

Scared that if I stopped, everything would fall apart.

Scared someone would look closely enough and see I didn't deserve any of it.

The late nights weren't disciplined. They were avoidant.

There's a difference, and it matters:
Discipline is chosen.

It includes the boundaries, the meetings you decline, the work you turn down. 
It expands you.

This is Mental Health Awareness Week, and I think the most useful thing I can do is be honest.

Mental health doesn't always look like a breakdown.

Sometimes it looks like a 14 hour day.

Sometimes it looks like the most successful person in the room.

One time, it looked like me.

Harvard tracked 1,000s of founder-CEOs.

Half were out of the role by year 3.

What made the difference for the other half?

They grew themselves as fast as the business grew.

It's not easy.
I've had to level-up myself many times.

And founders pay me $100,000+ for 1:1 coaching through these transformations.

7 things we focus on (steal this for your own growth):

1. Stop being the smartest person on your team.
↳ If you're the smartest in the company, your team can't grow.
↳ Ask more questions than you answer.
↳ Make them solve it before you do.

2. Audit what only you can do.
↳ Write down everything you did this week.
↳ Mark the things only you can do.
↳ Hand off the rest.
↳ Most of it isn't your work anymore.

3. Eliminate first. Delegate second.
↳ Before you push it to someone else, ask if it needs to happen at all.
↳ Some of your list can be cut entirely.

4. Build your Ideal Week.
↳ Plan the week ahead.
↳ Block out big-picture work first.
↳ Tactics will fill the rest.

5. Build a team that can run without you.
↳ Branson built 8 huge companies. He ran none as CEO.
↳ Every 18 months, hire someone who can take pieces of your job.
↳ Make yourself replaceable in operations.
↳ The goal: a leadership team that runs the company without you in it.

6. End every meeting with who-does-what-by-when.
↳ Write it down.
↳ Send it out.
↳ If you skip this, it was just talk.

7. Decide what you want to be doing in year 3.
↳ Three years from now, where do you want to spend your days?
↳ Write it down.
↳ Build toward it.
↳ Every move this year should bring you closer.

Your business will only grow as fast as you do.

Outgrow the founder you were last year.
Outgrow the founder you are today.

That's how you make it past year 3.

♻️ Repost to help a CEO in your network.
Follow Eric Partaker for more scaling insights.

P.S. I give away 100+ cheat sheets and leadership resources with my free newsletter: https://lnkd.in/eZwpMS59

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📢 Want to achieve even more success as a CEO?

I'm hosting a free masterclass:

8 Qualities That Predict CEO Success
(Score Yourself Live)

Thursday, May 21st
1:00 P.M. Eastern | 6:00 P.M. UK

https://lnkd.in/eWpGd_T3

Most people screw their life up trying to build a business.

They end up with a worse job (and life) than they had when they worked corporate.

Because when you run a business without taking your life into consideration, you get trapped.

You spend all day hiring, firing, emailing, dealing with internal politics, missing your family, etc.

These are the people on podcasts talking about "freedom" while they have none.

Figure out what you want your days and weeks to look like first.

How much money will you need?

Then go out and build a business that fits your life. Not a life that fits your business.

Even a small audience built around one low-cost offer can be a dream life. I did it.

But everyone else is reading $100M Leads.

How about $100 first, OK?

When you move slow and steady, and get slightly better over time, you build something for the long term.

And you end up like the happiest folks I know.

Running small, profitable businesses, with less anxiety, and calendars full of things you love doing.

I write a short essay every Saturday on *exactly* how to do that.

5 minutes. No marketing spam. Read by 180,000+ people.

Get Saturday's essay: https://buff.ly/fmdmQ8T

And remember to ask yourself this:

What is the point of building a business if your life sucks?